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LIBRARY
Michigan State This is to certify that the
University dissertation entitled

 

LIMINALITY AND EXILE LITERATURE OF LATIN
AMERICA’S SOUTHERN CONE

presented by

MICHELLE M. WILSON

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

 

PHD. degree in SPANISH

 

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LIMINALITY AND EXILE LITERATURE OF LATIN AMERICA‘S
SOUTHERN CONE

By

Michelle M. Wilson

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Spanish and Portuguese

2003

ABSTRACT

LIMINALITY AND EXILE LITERATURE OF LATIN AMERICA’S
SOUTHERN CONE

By

Michelle M. Wilson

This study explores the exile literature of Latin America‘s Southern Cone through
the novels of six political exiles written during the ruling military dictatorships of the
1970's and 1980's.

Exile prescribes an uprooting from the familiar to the unknown, from a space of
defined and respected boundaries to one of limitless possibility. One‘s concept of self. as
a consequence, undergoes changes, changes that I define here as examples of liminality -
a condition of potentially permanent “in-betweenness.” Borrowing the term from
anthropologist Victor Turner, as he describes it in The F ores! Q/‘Symbols and The Ritual
Process, I argue that it is a fitting description of exile, for the subject exists in
dichotomies, such as those with respect to geography (no longer members of the old
country and not natives of the new), time (living in between the preterite/ memories and
the present), language (mother tongue and second language/dialect). and even discursive
strategies of describing the world (historical and fictional).

The physical separation from one’s home initiates both the joumey into exile and
the exilic condition. I believe that the latter can be better appreciated by taking into
account different physical spaces and experiences within the adopted land as well as

others preceding the arrival to it. One symbolic space of encounter between the exiles

and the natives in the host land is revealed in Manuel Puig‘s Maldivian elerna a quiet-z lea
estas pdginas, where the protagonist experiences an institutionalized exile in the United
States as a patient of a nursing home, hospital and mental asylum. Exile may also be
developed in between the borders of the homeland and the host land as examined in
Daniel Moyano’s Libra de navios y borrascas. One of the first encounters with the
adopted country is explored in Marta Traba‘s En cualquier Iugur, where the exiles have
been intentionally separated by the government from the natives into an abandoned train
station. Antonio Skérmeta’s No pasé nada and Mario Benedetti‘s Primavera mm mm
esquina rota also delineate exile from the adopted land, but in milieus where the outsiders
and the insiders live side by side. One last symbolic space studied in this dissertation is
that experienced within the homeland, which is analyzed in He'ctor Tizén‘s La casa y el
viento.

With the physical and symbolic spaces I explore in this dissertation, liminality
will be seen to be fundamental in forming an exilic identity. In each space, the liminal
status of the exile allows the crossing of literal and figurative borders: linguistic. sexual.
racial, and cultural, as well as those between fiction and reality at the literary and extra-
literary levels. This dissertation shall explore in each of the works the modifications of
the political exile’s concept of self, the obstacles that they must overcome, as well as the
psychological techniques utilized to survive their unsolicited deraeination from all that

was familiar, comfortable and routine.

Copyright by
MICHELLE M. WILSON
2003

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people to whom I am indebted for the completion of this project.
First of all, I would like the thank my thesis advisor, Professor Maria Mudrovcic. for her
devoted guidance during the last three years, for the conversations we engaged in about
the dissertation that both inspired and challenged me, and especially for awakening within
me a passion for Latin American literature that occurred for the first time when I
matriculated in one of her graduate classes.

There are other members of the department whom I would especially like to
thank: Professor Snow for being a constant mentor and allowing me the privilege of
working with him; Professor Mansour for teaching me invaluable techniques to succeed
in the field of literary criticism; Professors Laurence Porter, Professor Ehsan Ahmed and
Professor Joseph Francese for reading drafts of the paper submitted to the College of Arts
and Letters from which I was awarded a Dissertation Completion Award, providing me
with much needed time to devote to this project.

I would also like to thank from my undergraduate years Professor Luis Lorenzo-
Rivero for setting me on the path of my current profession and for always believing in
me; and Professor Robert Helbling for being the kind intellectual I will always strive to
be.

Lastly, I want to thank my family for their unrelenting love and support. I am
grateful to my maternal grand-parents for teaching me their native language, Spanish, as

well as a love for Spanish cultures. To my parents, Maria Dolores Lucan and Lyle

Wilson, I want to thank them for making my education a priority in their lives, for
wanting the best for me and doing all they could to achieve it. Most of all, I would like to
thank my husband, Slaven Jabuka, for being my best friend through the ups and downs.
for his understanding and patience, for being my sofi place to fall and the one with whom

my moments of joy are most celebrated.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER ONE

INSTITUTIONALIZED EXILE: MANUEL PUIG’S MALDIQIQN E l ERNA A QUIEN
WAS ...................................................................................................... 17
Language Ownership ........................................................................................................... 22
Oral Communication ........................................................................................................... 28
The French Texts ................................................................................................................. 31
Psychoanalysis and the Exile Experience ........................................................................... 40
Conclusions ......................................................................................................................... 51
CHAPTER TWO

IN BETWEEN BORDERS: DANIEL MOYANO’S LIBRQ DE NAYIQS Y
BQRRASCAS ..................................................................................................................... 55
Musical Language ................................................................................................................. 61
The Mother Ship .................................................................................................................. 68
Questionable Identities ........................................................................................................ 70
Nieves/Sandra and the Barco Paralelo ................................................................................ 75
F ictionalizations ................................................................................................................... 79
CHAPTER THREE

THE ARRIVAL: MARTA TRABA’S W ................................... 88
Maintaining Nationality ....................................................................................................... 93
Us verus Them ...................................................................................................................... 98
Pseudo Dialogues ............................................................................................................... 103
Female Space .................................................................................................................... 106
Conclusions ....................................................................................................................... l 15
CHAPTER FOUR

PROCESSES OF (PSEUDO)INTEGRATION: ANTONIO SKARMETA‘S W
WA AND MARIO BENEDETI‘I’S W ..... 1 17
The New Land versus the Homeland .................................................................................. 122
Memories and Loyalties ..................................................................................................... 135
El Otro ................................................................................................................................ I 42
(Pseudo)1ntegration ............................................................................................................. 147
CHAPTER FIVE

LEAVING HOME: HECTOR TIZON’S W ............................... 150
Writing and Denouncing ..................................................................................................... 158

vii

The Other Within

The Conscious Realization of the ‘Other’s’ Existence ........................................... 166

The Unconscious and Unnamed Dictatorial ‘Other’ Within ................................. 171
Reading Dictatorship .......................................................................................................... 175
Translations ......................................................................................................................... 181
Conclusions ........................................................................................................................ 186
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................... I 88
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 193

viii

Introduction

From Ovid to Dante to Nabokov and Rushdie, back again through a kaleidoscope
of languages and countries, the voices of exiles have permeated the pages of literature
throughout the ages. In the twentieth century especially, the phenomenon of
displacement has been a global one, peoples from myriad backgrounds and continents
have abandoned their homelands or were coerced to do so for reasons varying from war.
repressive governments. economic immobility, cultural suppressions. or famine. many a
time never returning to their countries of origin.

Writers who question hegemonic structures, as is generally in the nature of their
profession to do so, often suffer more than others the purposeful banishment by their
governments from their native homelands. Latin America is no exception. During the
XIX Century some of its most renowned authors (many of whom were liberators during
Independence from Spain) were forced into exile, such as: Bello, Montalvo. Hostos.
Echevarria, Marti. and Sarmiento. In the XX Century the extensive list of exiled writers
from Latin America includes Nobel Laureates Miguel Angel Asturias and Neruda as well
as other legendary poets and novelists like Vallejo. Alfonso Reyes. Roa Bastos. Cabrera
lnfante, Onetti and Cortazar, to name just a few.

In the 1970's and 1980's the sanguine dictatorships of Latin America‘s Southern
Cone. as well as other political instabilities afflicting many Latin American countries
during these two violent decades (for example: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia. and
Venezuela) propelled massive movements of people across borders in search of safer

havens. In fact. in 1984 Julio Cortazar commented on the connection between exile and

the literature being produced by Latin American writers, “Hecho real y tema literario. el
exilio domina en la actualidad el escenario de la literatura latinoamericana" (16).

This dissertation approaches the vast subject of Latin America's exile literature by
concentrating on the geographical area of the Southern Cone because of its similar
political history during the late twentieth century. It has been estimated that during the
ruling military dictatorships of Argentina: 1976-1983, Uruguay: 1973-1985, and Chile:
1973-1989, approximately 1.5%, 20% and 2% of their respective populations went into
exile.l Around 50 of these exiles were established writers, the majority of them being
from Argentina (Cymerman 525). Those who did not flee faced the possibility of severe
repercussions- often imprisonment, torture, disappearance or overt assassination. 3 In
Argentina and Chile, 30,000 and 3,000 people were respectively detained by state
personnel to never be seen again, and in 1976 Amnesty International charged that torture

in Uruguay was routine. with 6,000 people in jail, it had more political prisoners per

 

' Estimates for determining the percentage of the population that went into exile
during the military dictatorships are difficult to come by, and may be slightly inaccurate.
For Argentina, the figure above 18 based on information obtained from lhe Dynamics of
ArgentineMjgration for which data 18 only available from 1970 to 1984.1 then used the
census population of 1982 as a base 1n order to determine the above estimate. For
Uruguay, I rely upon Carmen Galarce‘s citation in her book about Chilean exile. La
WM. With respect to the figures for Chile, I cite Thomas Wright in
his book Flight from Chile. The 200,000 or 2% of the population he refers to is an
estimate of only those who exiled for political reasons, this cannot be assumed in the
above figures for Argentina or Uruguay. Wright‘s explanation that the state of terror
unleashed by the military in Chile was able “to force some and induce others of the left to
leave the country and prohibit their return, presumably ridding itself of the enemy and
eliminating any challenge to its authority” (Wright 8-9), can be applied also with respect
to Argentina and Uruguay.

2 Rodolfo Walsh, Haroldo Conti and Paco Urondo were assassinated under these
dictatorships.

capita than any other country in the world (Davis 57). The dictatorships ofthe Southern
Cone also collaborated together in a program labeled “Operation Condor" in which they
would share each other’s blacklists in order to rid their countries of so-called subversives-
that is. anyone who ideologically opposed military rule. Therefore, in order to ensure
one’s absolute safety. exile would necessarily entail abandoning the Southern Cone
region altogether. 3

Of those authors who were able to write in exile, what they produced is generally
categorized under the general label of ‘exile literature.‘ However. this label implies a
double meaning: sensu stricto, those works that treat the theme of exile written mainly by
exiles, and sensu lato, all literature, whether it includes the theme of exile or not written
only by exiled writers. As indicated by Claude Cymerrnan these two differences may also
be denominated as exile literature, that which treats the exile and the literature ol'ext/e.
or that which is written in exile (523-24). The expression cultural exile, with respect to
literature, refers to that which concerns the milieu of the publishing process and reception
of literary works by any given author, which if unauspicious may lure the author to leave
his/her country in search of better prospects elsewhere, a decision which may or may not
be provoked by the dissatisfaction with the relevant political scene. Voluntary exile
denotes the uncoerced personal decision to leave one' s homeland. In the cases ofJose'
Donoso and Luisa Valenzuela for example, they lefi their respective countries of origin as

young adults. reasons for which were unrelated to the dictatorships that befell their

 

3 Although many decided to stay within Latin America. others crossed into the
United States or traversed the Atlantic to reside in Europe- primarily Spain and France.

3

homelands later on. Inner exile. as explained by Paul llie, does not necessarily require
territorial removal from the country of origin. It entails a perception of alienation felt by
the subject, due primarily to the effects of authoritarian political systems, from her/his
fellow citizens and country at large.4

The literature written by those writers who lived under a dictatorial system versus
that produced by those who left their homelands voluntarily or involuntarily can be
contrasted in significant ways. Not only does the factor of one‘s own volition to
immigrate/exile enter into the equation, but for those who continued to write under a
dictatorship they had to contend with the issue of censorship. The involuntary exiles who
picked up their pens in an adopted land overwhelmingly felt the “need for evidence of
having experienced . . .[exile]” (Ugarte 20), which they fulfill themselves through the
medium of the written and published word. The propensity for autobiographies and
testimonies among exiles can be better understood within this context for through them
the authors clearly voice their own experiences or that of others who underwent the same.
Other genres as well are exploited for the same purposes, and while the ‘evidence‘ may
then be wrapped within the fabric of a fictional product, historical reality frames it. In
fact, many fictional pieces written by exiles were censored or banned from
publication/distribution in their native homelands because they contested the “official“

version of historical events promulgated and enforced by the military dictatorships.

 

“ The idea of internal exile was developed in modern times by German
intellectuals who remained in their country during the Nazi period while opposing the
regime. The concept also existed in ancient times, as Lagos-Pope makes evident with a
quote from Cicero, who wrote, “exile can occur without ones being driven from a home”
(10).

Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan exile, elucidated that the dictatorships, “Se proponen
enmascarar realidades, borrar memorias, vaciar conciencias: desde el punto de vista de
este proyecto de castracion colectiva, las dictaduras tienen razén cuando envian a la
hoguera libros y periédicos que huelen a azufre y cuando condenan a sus autores al exilio.
la prision o la fosa. Hay literaturas incompatibles con la pedagogia militar de la amnesia
y la mentira (6). Although the ‘military pedagogy’ enforced a policy of non-
remembrance (conscious forgetting),5 the suppression of disparate views. and the
elimination of otherness, exiles wrote to claim memory to another story, to that which
they lefi behind, and to that which they were currently experiencing as a consequence.
And yet, as their stories about deraeination are rooted in the political histories of the
Southern Cone, they transcend their local geography to express a universal theme of
modernity, for as Edward Said explains, “we have become accustomed to thinking of the
modern period itself as spiritually orphaned and alienated” (49).

In Spanish, multiple terms exist to explain or attempt to explain the exilic
experience: exiliado, desterrado, transterrado, each striving and failing in part (hence the
existence of multiple terms) to explain the unsettling nature of exile. Whatever one‘s

semantic choice. exile is undeniably a forced separation between an individual and his/her

 

5 In a W, Marguerite Feitlowitz quotes Oscar Camilion, a
diplomat under the Argentine dictator Videla, who acknowledged the conscious and
voluntary forgetting that countries can engage in, “A nation creates itself not just with
what it remembers, but with what it forgets.” Marcel Proust, years earlier, distinguished
between “mémoire voluntaire” and “me’moire involuntaire” which is not really about
memory, since he believed this could never be erased, but rather the issue was more about
its recall, which can be open to access or blocked from it. The same. I believe. can be
said about forgetting, and it is the voluntary forgetting of the dictatorships that the exiles
were compelled to address.

natural environment, and regularly involves a traumatic experience of loss for all that
once was-- from the rhythms of one’s mother tongue to the contours of one‘s city. the
climate, festivals, funerals, and in particular one’s identity as hitherto known. In the
words of Edward Said, “exile is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being" (51): it
entails for Andre's Avellaneda a confusion of identities (84).

The disruption of one’s identity as a consequence of exile and experienced by

Latin American exiles in Europe (though applicable elsewhere) has been explored by Ana

 

Maria Araujo and Ana Vz'tsquez in their study. La m l icion de lises: Re ercusiones

 

sicole’ gieas del exilie. They describe three phases in the consciousness of the exile. 1 ) the
stage of trauma and sadness; the rejection/denial of any new models of social
organization and its symbols 2) the acceptance of one’s condition of exile, and 3) finally
the problem of one’s identity manifests itself. In another study by Leon and Rebecca
Grinberg entitled, Psyeheanelflie Berspeetives on Migration and Exile, phases with
respect to the same subject are also established, which happen to coincide with Gustavo
Pe'rez Firmat’s, an exile himself, who delineated his own phases of exile in Life-on-the—
11332me 1) denial of the displacement, 2) estrangement and disconnection. and 3)
acceptance of the exilic condition.

Phases two and three are reversed in the models above. which is telling for one
may not necessarily precede or proceed the other, rather, for the exile both may manifest
themselves concomitantly. That is, even if exiles accept their exilic condition their
identity can no longer be defined exclusively by that which defined or characterized them

in the native land. In exile the exile’s identity becomes newly associated with that of an-

other. This ‘other’ is not merely a sign of differentiation assigned by the adopted society
to its foreign inhabitants (separating ‘us‘ from ‘them’). It also implicates the
denomination of a foreign/other self within the individual that had remained dormant and
quite likely unacknowledged until its awakening through the physical and spiritual
dislodgment of exile. What occurs to the exiles’ identity can in part be explained by Julia
Kristeva’s argument in W that within all individuals a foreigner
exists (what this dissertation expresses as the ‘other‘) and “comes in when the
consciousness of my difference arises” (1). This “consciousness” of the ‘other‘ surfaces
as a consequence of the exilic experience itself and its manifestation shall be carefully
studied within this dissertation. Because the exilic experience prescribes an uprooting
from the familiar to the unknown, from a space of defined and respected boundaries to
one of limitless possibility, it is no surprise that the concept of self also undergoes
changes, changes that I define here as examples of liminality.

Others have also made this connection between liminality and exile.“ Michael
U garte‘s conclusion in Shjfljngfiteend makes reference to Gustavo Pe'rez Finnat's book
Litetetttre egg Liminelity, which suggests that liminality is essential to literature, for
“literature ofien finds itself on the threshold of something, in the middle ground between
two mutually exclusive entities... or on the margins of both” (227). Ugarte notes that
liminality “could very well serve as the essential link among the divergent pieces of exile

writing” (227). Mac G. Henderson in the introduction to Berders, Boundaries, and

 

6 Another synonym for liminality has been expressed by Gloria Anzaldua in her
elaboration of a border theory. She utilizes the term “nepantla,” from the Nahuatl
language meaning the “in-between space..., the liminal stage” (239 Interviews).

7

WWW mentions anthropologist Victor

Turner's model of liminality as a “handy conceptual model for the study of exile” (5).
The arguments of Henderson and Ugarte are compelling- I concur with them and use
liminality as a unifying element among the literary texts that will be studied in this
dissertation. Whereas these scholars do not explain any further the relationship between
exile and liminality, I hope to establish within this dissertation a firm connection between
the two as well as to demonstrate that liminality, as experienced within various physical
and symbolic spaces of exile can manifest itself in slightly different ways.

The term, limen, as utilized by Arnold van Gennep in I he Rites of Passage.
referred to the second stage of a tripartite structure categorizing puberty rites, the first
being, “separation” and the last “aggregation.” The adolescent subject is “separated”
from the society in which s/he lives, removed to another space where s/he undergoes
particular rites and rituals upon which having completed these s/he returns to society no
longer as a child but as an accepted adult. Victor Turner later expanded upon Van
Gennep‘s second stage. He modified liminality from a temporal, ephemeral state to a
potentially permanent condition. This condition is one in which “the state of the
individual becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all points of
classification” (Dramas 232). I believe this description is a fitting one to understand
better the exilic state, for not only do exiles no longer belong to the homeland nor are they
native members of the adopted society that has offered them refuge, but their identity also
- becomes questionable, as seen above. While in Van Gennep‘s model the subject

eventually returns to his/her society, exiles may never return home, (in spite of the hope

to) and thus, they may indefinitely exist existentially in a type of middle ground.

The fact that they “are no longer classified and not yet classified” (Forest 96)
propitiates the sense of ‘disconnection’ from one’s environment, but this ‘estrangement‘
curiously provides exiles with a unique position from which they can easily cross both
literal and figurative borders, including those of the linguistic, sexual, racial. cultural. as
well as those between fiction and reality at the literary and extra-literary levels.

In this sense exiles can experience a freedom of figurative movement generally
unattainable within the homeland.

Augusto Roa Bastos explains another positive element of exile, “El exilio tiene
sin embargo la ventaja que da al escritor, al artista, al intelectual, una eierta perspectiva
con respecto a su realidad” (Cymerman 525).7 This perspective is one that allows the
individual greater objectivity and distance. It is defined in this dissertation as the liminal
condition of exile. entailing the ability both to observe and reflect about that which the
rest of society normally accepts without question or ignores without deliberation.
precisely because exiles see and experience from at least two spaces if not more. 8

In addition liminality provides “the possibility. . .of standing aside not only from
one‘s own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially

unlimited series of alternative social arrangements” (Dramas 13). The alternatives

 

7 Of course amidst the advantages associated with exile, it must never be forgotten
that its challenges and vicissitudes are far greater. Cristina Peri Rossi reminds us of this,
“el exilio es una experiencia que siempre puede capitalizarse. Si uno no se vuelve loco."
(Corbatta 167).

8 In the words of Mempo Giardinelli, “todo es doble, condenadamente doble“

(41 ).

formulated with respect to the social arrangements of both their native and adopted lands,
are associated with the double, the embracing of the concept and tolerance of multiplicity.
and heterogeneity, where the borders and boundaries between cultures are lowered to
include those traditionally categorized as ‘other’ by dictatorship and democracy alike.
This is not to say that the works written by exiles are prescriptions for creating utopian
societies; these ‘altemative’ messages are usually options through which to change social
hierarchies into social equalities. irrespective of the political systems particular countries
may currently embrace.

Although liminality is to some degree characteristic of the diverse forms of exile.
for political exiles it is a condition of possible permanence, especially given that they
knew not when their respective military dictatorships of the Southern Cone would fall,
nor if they would ever be able to return to their homelands. Political exiles can also be
differentiated from other exiles by their resistance to integrate into the host land while at
the same time hoping that they will be accepted by the native population. The degree to
which this resistance occurs may vary depending on the age of the individual and the
amount of time spent away from home. In general, these exiles are not interested in
becoming permanent members of the adopted society, only temporary inhabitants of it
who patiently wait abroad for the fall of the dictatorships afflicting their countries. For
political exiles the act of waiting puts their lives indefinitely on hold, further accentuating
their state of in-betweenness.

In puberty rites. as in the case of exiles, “the passage from one social status to

another is often accompanied by a parallel passage in space, a geographical movement

10

from one place to another” (25). The physical separation from one‘s home however.
initiates both the journey into exile and the exilic condition. I believe that the latter can
be better appreciated by taking into account different physical spaces and experiences
within the adopted land (a total of three shall be examined: exile within an abandoned
train station, within public health institutions, and from one’s private home) as well as
others preceding the arrival to it (a total of two: exile within the homeland and during the
journey to the adopted country). No study of these exilic spaces to date has been
published, and while I do not assume that my study here can answer all of the questions
with respect to exile literature and the subject’s place in geographic space, I do hope to
offer some conclusions that can further expand our understanding of exile literature in

general and specifically that in the case of the Southern C one.9 The order of the chapters

 

° The majority of critical texts about Southern Cone exile literature concentrate
primarily on specific works and authors and are published as articles. Amy Kaminsky
nevertheless in her book,Af1et Exil e, does offer an excellent overview of the Southern
Cone case, where she includes both political and voluntary exiles. Carmen J. Galarce 5
WWW, devotes the first couple of chapters
to the history of exile literature within Latin America from colonial times to the present
and specifically details information pertaining to Chile. 1 am unaware of any equivalent
monograph about the cases in Argentina or Uruguay.

Specific studies about the exile literature of Spain that can be generalized to other
geographies include the aforementioned, Michael Ugarte‘s Shifting Ground, as well as
Paul Ilie‘s Inner Exile. Another general study of exile from 1800-19905 in Latin America
is that of Ingrid E. Fey and Karen Racine’s (eds) Strange Pilgrimages.

Outside of specific Hispanic literatures, Paul Tabori’s classic, The Anatomy of
Exile from 1972, represents one of the first works about the semantic and historical
causes of exile within the global arena, and the more recent books by Azade Seyhan,

Wri in t i N ti , and Andre' Aciman‘s Letters ef Trflsit examine culture.
memory and language in the exile literature of artists from several countries. Numerous
publications about general trends of the exilic condition must also be noted: Edward
Said’s article “The Mind of Winter,” Joseph Brodsky’s, “The Condition we Call Exile.”
Eduardo Galeano‘s “El exilio: entre la nostalgia y la creacion,” Andre's Avellaneda‘s
“Exilio y literatura latinoamericana,” Claudio Guillén’s “On the Literature of Exile and

11

does not follow a spatially sequential movement with respect to the exile‘s journey from
the homeland to the adopted land. This has been done in order to demonstrate that there
is no sequence of physical steps involved in becoming a political exile, nor is there any
purpose or ultimate goal associated with political exile- no matter the current physical
space he/she inhabits- other than that of escaping dictatorship. However, each of these
spaces represents a different manifestation of the exilic experience as it relates to
liminality.

In the present study a total offive physical and symbolic spaces will be considered
and analyzed separately through the novels of six politically exiled authors from the

Southern Cone: Manuel Puig’sM l ici' e ien es s a i as, Daniel

Moyano’s Libre de nevies y mrrasees, Marta Traba’s En cttalguier lugar, Antonio

Skarmeta’s Meade and Mario Benedetti’s Ptimevere cen une esguine rete, and

He'ctor Tizon’s La ease y el viente. Furthermore it will be shown at times that the
authors' experience overlaps with that of their characters, e.g.. in the case of Benedetti.
and establishes what I believe to be another example of liminality, for in these works the
fictional and the factual conflate in at least two ways: via the author‘s self reflection and
through the historical circumstances that brought about exile in the first place. Hence. in

addition to the substance of the works, the structure of the ‘novels’ also represents a

 

Counter-Exile,” Claude Cymerman’s “La literatura hispanoamericana y el exilio,” and
Mempo Giardinelli’s “Dictaduras y el artista en el exilio.” All of them in one way or
anther discuss the impact of the exiles’ forceful learning of two cultures, languages.
histories and geographies. Two anthologies about exile in comparative literature with
general introductions that have also been useful are, Exile in Litetature; Berders,
W.

12

liminal expression with respect to the traditional genre.

This dissertation shall explore in each of the works the liminality/modifications of
the political exile’s concept of self, the obstacles that they must overcome, the borders
that they cross, and the psychological techniques utilized to survive their unsolicited
deraeination from all that was familiar, comfortable and routine, including the moment of
departure from one’s home as well as that of residing side by side the natives in an

adopted land.

 

Chapter One explores Manuel Puig’s
in which the protagonist experiences an institutionalized exile in the United States as a
patient of a nursing home, hospital and mental asylum. In this chapter I propose that the
amnesic exile in conversations with an individual from the adopted land tries to
appropriate the native’s experiences for his own in an attempt to create an identity for
himself. The exchange between the two voices leads to the dissolution of identity
boundaries between the interlocutors, but contrary to our expectations of a victimized
exile living deraeinated from his home, Puig challenges us by offering an exile of
predatory nature. In addition, the chapter shows how Puig constructs a paradoxical
language situation through which the native seems foreign and the foreigner native. thus
forcing the reader to question the issue of language ownership and the
degree to which native speakers own their mother tongue more so than non-native
speakers. Regardless, the exile is ostracized physically to only public spaces and
dialectically through exclusion from the native languages field of oral communication.

While an-other in exile, his preoccupations reveal to some degree his former identity of

13

who he was in Argentina.

Chapter Two concerns the exploration of exile from another space- that in
between the borders of two lands- in Daniel Moyano’s Libro de navios y borrascas. in
which the exile, Rolando, travels by sea from a familiar New World to a foreign old one.
The vessel that carries him through international waters symbolizes the unanchored state
of the exile, who experiences a second birth from the mother ship into the adopted land of
Europe, mimicking in reverse the voyage of his ancestors who left Europe to settle anew
in the Americas. This chapter is an analysis of how the divide between fact and fiction is
narrowed and crossed as the exiles turn to the latter in order to try to understand the
immediate past (torture and disappearances). to help others overcome it. and to confront
the future. Moyano‘s protagonist, Rolando, consciously begins to nurture comforting
alternatives of himself as ‘other,’ often confusing his imaginative creations with reality.
As a musician who no longer has his violin to express himself, he recurs to a liminal
expression of language that incorporates music and words in harmony.

In Chapter Three, one of the first encounters with the host land is examined in
Marta Traba’s novel, We; in which the exiles have been intentionally
separated by the government from the natives into an abandoned train station. They
arrive by the truckload to this hitherto public space of transit that now ironically
represents one of immobilization and stagnation. This chapter studies how the exiles
grasp to their collective identity as Argentines in a desperate attempt to retain some

semblance of their previous selves in waiting for a change of fate within the host land.

Their imagined “pais de ficcién” fails. but as a consequence of their liminal status in the

14

station, experimentations with respect to other forms of identity take place. in particular
those with respect to the (de)constructions of female identity.

Chapter Four explores exile from the adopted land in milieus where the outsiders
and the insiders live side by side. Antonio Skarmeta’s No paso ne tie presents an
adolescent’s perspective of exile, and Mario Benedetti’s Ptimavera con una esguina rota
proposes a three-generational account of the experience. Without a large social netWork
to constantly remind the exiles of their identity by seeing their own reflection in the
others, as occurred in Traba’s novel, they must now rely upon their own memory in order
to remember/revision themselves. This chapter demonstrates how memory leads one to a
compulsive comparison of his/her immediate reality, “aca,” with the one left behind.
“alla,” including all that participated in creating one’s sense of self: one‘s home. the
climate of the native homeland, language, acquaintances, and vocations. all of which are
examined more closely. Learning how to survive in the new land as developed in these
novels involves the acceptance of becoming an-other, being born again to another
experience, yet always aware of one’s liminality, abiding somewhere in between the past.
and the future, between the homeland and the new land, living the exilic fate of a double
life of in-betweenness.

Chapter Five shows that the exilic experience can actually commence within the
individual’s own homeland. The moment Hector Tizon’s protagonist in W
yiente leaves his village behind, he becomes an exile. Unlike exiles depicted by other
writers Tizon’s protagonist is unique in that he is afforded the opportunity to bid farewell

to that from which he must indefinitely part. Aware that his last days in the homeland are

15

numbered, he striVes to retain to memory all that could possibly be of significance to him
later on. In his travels to the border of Argentina, I analyze his crossing of the racial and
dialectical divide (that between the oral and the written) as he records cultural
information in his diary about the indigenous peoples, who have historically been
excluded from official constructions of his own national identity. In addition, this chapter
considers some of the manifestations of the liminal crises the exile experiences with
respect to his own identity. as he is on the cusp, no longer knowing who he is or who he

is becoming.

l6

Chapter One

Institutionalized Exile: Manuel Puig’s

Maldieie’n eterna a quien lee estas paginas

The exilic space developed within Manuel Puig’s 1980 novel. Maldicion eterna a
W, comprises primarily institutionalized spaces in the United States.
namely a nursing home, hospital and mental asylum, limiting the protagonist‘s experience
of the host land to public spaces. In addition, the exile is physically confined to a
wheelchair, further restricting his area of exploration. Institutions tend to objectify the
subject’s experiences, and as a consequence, Ramirez becomes a public item to be
scrutinized and categorized according to the institutionalized generalizations and
definitions created within institutions themselves. Excluded from entering the private
spaces of the new land, the exile’s struggle consists precisely in attempting to penetrate
them.

Manuel Puig was born in 1932 in General Villegas, a small town 500 kilometers
to the west of Argentina’s capital. From the age of three he was already attending movies
on a regular basis with his mother, which would soon evolve into a passion. Determined
to write movie scripts for the actresses with whom he first became enamored as a young

boy,l Puig traveled to Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia2 at the age of 23 to

 

'His favorite actresses among others were Marlene Dietrich. Greta Garbo. Hedy
Lamarr and Rita Hayworth. (See Suzanne Levine).

2The Centro was Europe’s most important film school during the 1950's. Such
prominent directors as Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini and others
taught courses there.

17

study under the most distinguished film directors of the time. His experience of the
industry disappointed him though, particularly its authoritarian hierarchy and the
inexorability within the establishment to experiment beyond the lens of neo-realism. As a
consequence Puig decided to write screenplays on his own in a voice of his own. one of
which ultimately evolved into his first novel, Le treieie’ 11 de Rita Hayworth.

Puig‘s upbringing, his cinematographic education, his homosexuality, his
amalgamation of low and high cultures in the representation of literature, in addition to
his political reticence3 all marginalized him as a writer. Le traieie’ 11, completed in 1965,
took another three years for its publication, filtering through even the most liberal
publishing houses, including Seix Barral in Barcelona, to finally be accepted by Jorge
Alvarez in his native Argentina. Soon thereafter, however, Puig’s successful literary
adaptions of popular traditions, (film, soap operas, harlequin romances...), were being
emulated by those who initially dismissed him as a frivolous author, including the
canonized Boom writers of the 1960's“

After living a number of years in Europe and the United States, Puig returned for
an extended stay to Argentina in 1967 only to leave again in the early 1970's. This
decision was due in large part to Isabel Peron’s ultra-conservative government under

which Puig was added to the Triple A’s (Anticommunist Argentine Alliance) hit-list after

 

3 Puig was particularly soft spoken about politics in comparison to other Latin
American authors.

4Examples include Julio Cortazar’s We Leye Glenda Se Mueh. based on actress

Glenda Jackson and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julie and the Seriptwriter about a radio
soap opera writer.

l8

the publication of I he Buenos Aires Affair, (1973) a novel critical of both Peron's
policies and the ideologies of left-wing intellectuals. It was heavily censored and later
banned as pornography. It faired no better under the military Junta, which took control in
1976. and remained on the blacklist of banned books, as would Puig’s later novel, til
bcse de la mujer arafie (1976). [he Buenos Aites Affeir was the last of his novels to be
published in Argentina, and although Argentine publishing houses wished to continue
publishing his works, Puig refused to publish modified versions enforced by
governmental censorship. Searching outside his own country for publication eventually
led him to form an alliance with Seix Barral.

Political exile became a reality for Puig when in 1974 after being away from
Argentina for over a year, the Triple A called his parents’ home demanding that Puig
leave the country within 24 hours (Levine 242). No longer ‘free’ to return home he
would search for a place to root himself, but even after the restoration of democracy. Pui g
would never again live permanently in Argentina: “Exile and home would always be
two sides of the same coin for him” (Levine 10). At home, the intelligentsia‘s bland
reception and dismissal of his achievements, even as he was recognized and celebrated
abroad, only served to heighten Puig’s marginalization within Argentina. However. his
international fame depended precisely on his particularly brilliant ability to manipulate

the Spanish language of his own homeland.5 whether Puig was physically at home or in

 

5His first two novels indeed were crafied from a personal Argentine language,
while also: “As if by default, he found a way to avert the judgmental ‘Argentine eye’ by
copying the tone of others, by allowing real people, including himself. to speak or write in
their own voices. . . He could now use those wonderful cliche’s uttered by Male or
Carmen without impunity” (Levine 145).

I9

exile.

Maldieion eterna e guien lee estgs pe’ginas written by Manuel Puig while living in
exile in New York City during 1976-1977, takes the form of conversations between
Larry, a native New Yorker, and Ramirez, an Argentine exile. Ramirez, an elderly man
of seventy-four, convalesces in a New York City nursing home after being brought to the
United States, apparently without his consent, his request, or his recollection. His
interlocutor, Larry, is a thirty-six year old American hired by the Argentine to take him
out for strolls around the city in his wheelchair.

The novel’s narrative structure is comprised primarily of dialogue, divided into
two parts, 12 sections in the first and 10 in the second, with six short missives and a job
application ending the novel. Six of the 12 sections are presented as Ramirez’s dreams
and therefore the total number of ‘conscious’ dialogues between the voices corresponds
to 16, Puig’s trademark number.° No narrator intervenes nor do other characters engage
in their conversation.7 As characteristic of Puig’s narratives, the lack of a narrator serves

to debunk the authoritarian structure he had rejected in his other literary works. He

 

6Puig generally divided his novels into 16 chapters commencing with his first, I_.a
traieién,

7The only hint of a narrator is one that may be classified as a textual narrator.
Stephen M. Ross explains that a textual voice “is the result of elements in the physical
text that signify without necessary dependence on language and . . . prompt or allow the
reader to regard the printed text as a source of signification” (306). For example,
dialogue between the characters as such would remain purely within an oral domain were
it not for the textual narrator who transcribes their conversations, provides ellipsis at
various times in order to indicate that one of the two characters refrains from responding
to the other, and by providing and placing the written documents at the end of the novel
in a prescribed order.

20

overtly eradicates the figure who would conscientiously guide the reader along a
designated path to a pre-determined destination. As a consequence. however, the agents
of the speech acts lack specification, and the reader must therefore pay extremely close
attention so as not to confuse the two voices, which happens nonetheless.

In an interview with Jorgelina Corbatta, Puig confesses that his fictional
characters are based on real flesh and blood people. His inspiration for Larry was drawn
from his encounters with a “fascinating” American named Mark,8 whom he met in
October 1977 at a New York City municipal pool: “Fue un problema vivido en inglés y
yo queria escribir sobre eso. Le pedi permiso al personaje ese para tomarle notas sobre su
vida: tome' como doscientas paginas de notas en inglés, y ahora estoy tratando de resolver
esa cuestién” (620). Mark was divorced, suffering from depression. and a failed
academic. A sociologist by profession he could only find work as a part-time lecturer at
New York University. Eventually Puig convinced Mark to meet with him three times a
week for a couple of hours each time to take notes about his life, remunerating him for his
services (Levine 294).

Puig bases Ramirez on his own father, “En la novela, llega mi papa exiliado a
Nueva York y se enfrenta con este muchacho [Larry]” (Corbatta 620). From exile. Puig

returns once again to the fictional recreation of his own father after a four novel absence.

first examined in Le treieie’ 11 de Rita Hayworth." If we recognize that “compulsive

 

8 No reference to the surname of Puig’s testimonial figure has been provided by
either Corbatta or Levine.

9Manuel Puig’s father, Baldomero, nicknamed Baldo, is translated into a similar
sounding Berto in Le treieie'n who’s role in the novel is that of an emotionally

21

retrospection“, as Andre Aciman has indicated, defines “the one thing exiles do almost as
a matter of instinct,” (Aciman 13) we may then conclude that Puig’s own chapter on his
father had not yet been closed with Le tteicit'm. Baldomero Puig was a draconian figure
who frequently had violent outbursts, and always preferred his more virile nephew over
his effeminate son, Manuel. Their strained relationship did not improve over the years.
instead, father and son drifted apart, physically and emotionally. Perhaps for this reason
Puig’s fictionalization of his father embodies that of a man in exile. Indeed, Puig reminds
us: “Escribo novelas porque hay algo que no comprendo, un problema muy especial y
entonces se lo achaco a un personaje, a un tercero y, de ese mode. a través de ese
personaje trato de aclararlo” (Corbatta 605).
Language Ownership

The utilization of two languages in Meldieion accentuates an exilic problem: in
which language will the exiled writer write? Puig confesses, “Maldicie’ n fue escrita en
inglés, fue pensada en inglés” (Garcia-Ramos 36). Nonetheless, its first publication in
1980 by Seix Barral appears in Spanish. Although not published in Argentina, its
circulation and reception were favorable there, “where it became an almost immediate
bestseller” (Ester Martinez 80).'0 Two years later an English edition appeared, created by

combining the original English draft and its Spanish translation, that is. formulating a

 

unequipped father who fails the needs of his children especially Toto (representing
Manuel) who demonstrates homosexual tendencies from a young age.

”In contrast to Puig’s previous novel published in 1979 by Seix Barral, [Zebis
Angelieel was not allowed to circulate in Argentina until 1981, possibly as a consequence
of its erotic title (Martinez 80).

22

second English version under the auspices of Random House Publishing Company in
collaboration with Manuel Puig. This historical account of the publication process.
although interesting, is not without purpose.

Puig’s intention at the time of writing the novel, as he states in Corbatta's
interview was that the exile’s English be defective and the native's not, but then Puig
decides to write the novel in Spanish: “... se me ocurrio intentar, para el muchacho. un
castellano de traduccion, desangrado, ficticio” (620). Although Puig attests to the
betrayals of translators with respect to his own works, and Suzanne Levine suggests that
for this reason alone he may have decided to write Maldieit'm in English, he nevertheless
decides that his native tongue will contribute to the novel’s final product. The hybridity
of language through which this novel was written indicates Puig’s own liminal status as
an exile. He writes from two languages, both Spanish and English, a phenomenon that he
explores more directly in his next novel.ll The language that Puig develops from his
exilic experience and which he expresses in this novel differs from the language of his
earlier writings, though it will be seen to be just as innovative.l2

Questions about the legitimacy of the language expressed in the novel are posited

by Ronaldo de Feo with respect to the English edition: “ls Ramirez enough of a foreigner

 

”W was written in Portufiol, a mix of Spanish and

Portuguese, later published simultaneously in both Portuguese and Spanish by Nova
Fronteira and Seix Barral respectively.

'2 I argue that Manuel Puig’s novel does not fall into the following generalization
that Joseph Brodsky and others ascribe to exile literature: “Perhaps an additional truth
about the matter is that exile slows down one’s stylistic evolution, that it makes the writer
more conservative” (7).

23

or is he too fluent in English to be believable? Is Larry enough of an American. a native
New Yorker, or does be sound too foreign?” (18). In Newsday Gregory Rabassa’s review
of Puig’s novel denounced Larry’s language which he found unconvincing at times due to
a lack of contractions utilized by the character.‘3 Although de F eo gives Puig the benefit
of the doubt with respect to the language question, he ends the subject by stating that he
can do so “because the entire book is pitched at a higher, a heightened level of ‘reality'"
(1 8). While other realities manifest themselves in the novel, the “lower” level of reality-
language per se- constitutes a primary element in Maldicie’ n. for it is through the medium
of language that the characters define and find themselves confined.

De Feo’s analysis of the language proficiency of both native and foreigner applies
also to the original Spanish edition, even if the voices’ roles are inverted. In Spanish
Ramirez sounds a bit foreign in his native tongue, while Larry is somehow too native. In
constructing language contrary to our expectations of those who utilize it, Puig forces the
reader to question the issue of language ownership. Do natives own their mother tongue
more so than non-natives? Jacques Derrida in El menelingfiisme dcl otro argues with
respect to his French native language, although fluent in many others: “no tengo mas que
una lengua, no es la mia” (35). His explanation for the lack of a true linguistic ownership
can be traced historically. According to Derrida the language spoken by any given culture
is not an innate characteristic of its people, for “toda cultura es originariamente colonial.”

(57) and therefore the only language people can profess to utilize.in essence, is that of the

 

l3Another complaint by Rabassa, as delineated in de Feo’s article. is that Puig
should have paid more attention to “medium and milieu” than that expressed in the novel.

24

‘other’. The language of the ‘other’ represents. “esa ley llegada de otra parte. sin duda.
pero también y en principio, la lengua misma de la Ley, y la Ley como Lengua. . . El
monolingfiismo impuesto por el otro opera fundandose en ese fondo. aqui por una
soberania de esencia siempre colonial y que tiende, reprimible e irreprimiblemente. a
reducir las lenguas al Uno, es decir, a la hegemonia de lo homoge’neo” (58').

The ‘Law’ represents absolute authority and domination that subverts the
heterogeneous into the homogeneous and its manifestation breaches both the public and
private uses of language. The two interlocutors attempt by chance, or by forceful will to
trespass, as if each represented the ‘language of the law’, into the private personal space
of the other. Larry wants to appropriate Ramirez’s personal notes. written while the latter
was incarcerated in Argentina, for his own economical and academically motivated
interests. notes that Ramirez no longer recognizes as his own. Ramirez, on the other
hand, wants to appropriate for himself Larry’s personal history for his own in order to fill
the void of his amnesic memory, which developed upon arrival to the United States.
Because the exile’s survival depends a great extent on remembering the past, Ramirez‘s
survival, given his memory loss, depends on annexing someone else’s history. Through
these processes of appropriation, each character invades the private spaces ofhis
interlocutor and distortions of the original versions transpire as the other’s language of
law invades. Ramirez redefines for himself Larry’s personalized space by fictionalizing it
for his own interests and dismissing at will certain events while Larry constructs an image
of Ramirez based on the prison notes that the author does not even acknowledge as his

own. Each then, like Derrida’s colonizers, attempts to usurp the other‘s language. that is,

25

the other‘s personal space, to such a degree that one’s own language becomes
contaminated by the other’s.

Rather than create a hierarchy of linguistic models based on colonized and
colonizer, the two voices in Puig’s novel cross over into the other’s linguistic paradigm-
literally and ontologically, the foreigner’s becomes native and the native’s becomes
foreign. Neither owns any language exclusively. Rather, that language which may be
denominated as mother tongue, coexists in conjunction with its foreign correlative. In
this manner both Ramirez and Larry are strangers to their own native languages. as
Derrida attests with respect to his own: “La lengua que uno llama matema, nunca se
puede poseer porque siempre se vuelve al otro, es disime’tricamente del otro y el otro la
guarda” (59) One’s mother tongue is never purely ‘natural, ni propia, ni habitable" (81).
The mutual infiltration into the other’s private spaces creates ambiguities between the two
characters. In fact, at times the reader easily confuses one voice for the other
(compounded by the lack of clarification with respect to the agent of the speech acts in
the narrative).

In addition, the language of Post-Colonial Latin American literature develops
from:

. . . Writers who emerge from a culture and language born of an extended
colonial experience, [who] are themselves perhaps somewhat estranged
from the European languages that are (but are also not quite) their own.
They would seem to come to their language from outside, from its

margins. They would seem to try to free themselves from while binding

26

themselves to it, to work against while also working within it. (Kerr 4)
This Latin American linguistic development manifests itself in Maldicién through the
interplay of three European languages- English, Spanish and French- and their
translations which turn language and its users inside out, and where the “insider/native” is
“out” and the “outsider/foreigner” is “in.” It creates a language that is formulated from the
margins of those who speak it. As an exile, Puig writes this novel from a land outside his
mother tongue in a Spanish perhaps somewhat foreign to him, and in an English. not
quite his own, echoing the linguistic marginalizations of the voices in his novel.

Once the other’s borders, linguistic or otherwise, have been trespassed.
translations ensue and the subject in question becomes objectified through a transaction
that, “rarely involvc(s) . . . a relationship of equality between texts. authors or systems”
(Bassnett 2). Puig‘s Maldicion, however, implicates a bilateral translation between
different cultures and systems, represented by the Argentine and the North American.
each simplifying the ‘other’ into that which the translator desires.

Puig disclaims univocal absolutisms by dismantling those structures that are based
on hierarchical models. Literally, Larry wants to translate Ramirez‘s prison notes, but in
so doing. he also establishes a hierarchical situation in which he, the translator, excludes
the writer from participation in the promotion of the book’s decoding and publication. As
if in retaliation. before Ramirez dies. Larry will be denied access to these notes.
expunging possible mistranslations of the author’s life. On the other hand. Ramirez
fictionalizes, embellishes and truncates details about Larry’s past for his own personal

gain, but Larry too will claim ownership of that which Ramirez wishes to appropriate for

27

himself.
Oral Communication
The manner in which the interlocutors reveal themselves is, ofcourse. through a
dialectic that includes and excludes the other. Proficient in English Ramirez understands
the words that both he and Larry use to communicate with each other. and yet. with a
perfect knowledge of the language, he nevertheless explains:
Senor Larry. Yo sé ingle’s, se' todas las palabras. En frances. en italiano, se’ las
palabras. En castellano, mi lengua original, se’ todas las palabras. pero... Estuve
muy enfemto, en mi pais. Me acuerdo de todas las palabras, de cemo se llaman
las cosas que se pueden tocar, y ver. Pero otras cosas. . . Washington, Larry.
plaza, Larry joven, yo viejo. muy viejo. setenta y cuatro, y arboles. bancos. pasto.
cemento...( l 0).
The question of misunderstandings in both the English and the Spanish language is not
linguistic, but rather entails the psychological dimension embedded within uttered words.
Ramirez desperately pleads for explanations as to why someone smiles. or why one’s face
expresses pain while running, and be, literally, is disconcerted with the psychiatric
terminologies used to define him; words such as, “colapso nervioso, depresion. euforia”
(10) that the psychoanalysts used to institutionalize him. Linguistic definitions only
explain to a certain degree the significance of words, as Ramirez recognizes: “Sé lo que
significan, lei la definicion en el diccionario, pero tal vez no las haya experimentado
ultimamente. Y por eso entiendo el significado... hasta cierto punto, nada mas” (10).

And yet, he declares no such awkwardness with written discourse. An avid reader from

28

the moment of his arrival to the States he voraciously consumes information from
periodicals, encyclopedias and he even indulges in the fictional prose of Bront'é's
Wuthering Heights.

Like the discrepancy between his own “reading” and “speaking” voice" that
Ramirez recognizes, oral communication presents its own complications for him. It is the
intimate oral interaction between himself and another that befuddles his primary
understanding of language’s vocabulary.l5 Ramirez’s difficulty in comprehending
particular words, such as ‘smile’ depends not on his fluency in English or Spanish but
rather on his inability as an exile to enter, but yet again, another space- the oral and
emotional terrain of speech that belongs to the native. The interest in being read to by his
favorite nurse from the romantic novel of Bronté’s Wuthering Heights stems from an
attraction to the emotive element of language. Living in exile he expresses a clear
preference for the human element in literature over the political texts that Larry favors.
(Marx, Engels), texts that at one time would have most likely interested Ramirez in
Argentina as a political activist. However, the written discourse of Bronte‘s’s novel
impedes Ramirez from participating in a dialogue of exchange. At best, he can appreciate

the sentimentality of the novel, but in oral speech, he can neither reproduce it, nor at

 

I"In the library he comments to Larry that his reading voice, “no es mi voz...F.s
una voz joven. Una voz que suena bien, fuerte, segura, y hasta de timbre agradable.
Como la voz de un actor. Pero despue’s si tengo que llamar a una enfermera. o a
cualquiera, oigo mi verdadera voz. Casacada, carraspeante, y no me gusta” (50).

”The discovery that he dreams alone and not in unison with Larry forces him to
confront his own experience as separate from that of his interlocutor’s. This harsh
awakening provokes the onset of physical pain.

29

times even recognize it. What is particularly significant about Ramirez‘s absorption with
Bronte’s work, (he did finish the book in 2 days), is his effort in exile, through all means
of linguistic communication, both oral and written, to (re)discover and (re)connect with
the sentient self, something he completely neglected in Argentina- as evidenced in his
prison notes.

A communicative speech act is imbued with tonalities that qualify the language’s
content. In Meldieie’n, however, communication breaks down on a number of occasions
between the interlocutors as a consequence of sentient speech deficiencies.
Communication is interrupted when, as indicated above, Ramirez fails to place the
psychological component with the linguistic sign. The failure to link the two induces
psychosomatic pain in the subject but Larry’s explanations, which Ramirez may not even
comprehend, usually mitigate the uncomfortable physical symptoms.

The clear misunderstandings of emotional signs at the commencement of the
novel develops. soon afterward, into a confusion of an emotional situation. For when
Ramirez feels alone, excluded from Larry’s personal life, or is psychologically analyzed.
he actually manifests physical chest pain and heart palpitations. These visceral ailments
about which Ramirez complains are directly related to language and mis-
communications. And, although it is precisely the emotional connotations attached to
words that confound him, it is only through them, and the healing effect of speech. that he
is able to improve.‘6

(R)— ;Que' esta diciendol, tel dolor es ya intolerable! Expliqueme... lo que le

 

l"Ramirez at one point elucidates: “El silencio me enfenna” (80).

30

pedi.

(L)— Cuando se esta contento con algo, uno sonrie.

— gContento?

— Santo cielo geomo se lo explico? Si no siente dolor, ese dolor en el pecho, si
esta viendo e1 arbol, ese arbol suyo... con la rama y toda la fruta... Y quiere comer
la fruta.. Y va y agarra una, y se la come, entonces a lo mejor... sonrie. y muestra
los dientes.

: gMe entendié?

— No, demasiadas palabras. ...Pero el dolor ya no es tan fuerte, por lo menos. (l3-

14).
Larry, on the other hand, as a native, has access to the emotional field of expression.
which for Ramirez can only be approached through the language of fiction. Hence.
Ramirez’s insistence and Larry’s compliance to accept and follow Ramirez’s fictional
fabrications of Larry’s past in order to fulfill Ramirez’s personal emotional needs.
F rocking Larry’s experiences in fiction. however, functions as the antidote to Ramirez's
linguistic-emotional ailments.
The French Texts

After Ramirez is hospitalized due to a decline in his health he receives a package
of books from the Human Rights Organization that brought him to the United States.
These include three novels: Les Liaisons Dangereuses. La Princessc dc C leves and
Adolphe encoded by Ramirez while imprisoned in Argentina. Larry. upon perusing the
books notices there are numbers above the words in what seems to be a random order.
but, if rearranged sequentially, they form sentences: “‘Malédiction etemelle...a
qui...lise...ces pages.’ Es lo primero que dice. Maldicién eterna a quien lea estas paginas”

(124). Wondering whom Ramirez might have been cursing, Larry asks if perhaps the

words were directed at the policemen, who would read the pages or “a cualquiera que las

31

lea con malos ojos” (125). But Ramirez’s replies that policemen “ayuda[n] a la gente.
detiene[n] el trafico cuando pasa mi silla de ruedas” (125). The contradictory
interpretation of policemen indicates a more profound issue of temporal
misunderstanding between foreigner and native. For Ramirez the here and now
contextualizes his experience. He lives in the present, in New York, where policemen do
help those in wheelchairs cross the street, while Larry, on the other hand, searches for
retrospective significance of a signified from a land about which Ramircz’s memory has
disappeared, where policemen were associated with the dictatorial Proceso de
Reorganizacion.

With the appearance of these texts it need be clarified that the three copies are in
the original French form, and Ramirez’s encoded prison notes are then translated by Larry
from French into the language of the interlocutors, English. which we readers then read in
Spanish, the original first publication of the novel. Curiously. Alejando Herrero-Olaizola
recognizes that the first decoded phrase is grammatically incorrect in French, although the
reader (Larry) doesn’t mention this, and for that manner neither does Ramirez. The
French quote is, as written above but, “el uso del subjuntivo de lire (leer) no tiene lugar
en esta estructura; tan solo es posible utilizar el presente 0 el futuro, que daria a la frase
inicial del texto un cariz mas marcado...” (490). This is also verified with the French
translation of Puig’s novel which utilizes lira in its title and not lire. Herrero-Olaizola
argues that the subjunctive may serve as evidence of the limitations of the text. He bases
this on the fact that the original text and “el trabajo de reconstruccion o interpretacion que

Ramirez propone en su lectura de Les liaisons dengereuses tiene un limite bien marcado:

32

el texto de Laclos no puede ser simplemente reorganizado por la lectura de Ramirez sin
eludir una posible agramaticalidad, a saber, sin eludir la posibilidad de que su lectura
pueda romper las reglas que la rigen” (491 ). But of course, it’s not the act of reading that
breaks the rules but, rather, Ramirez’s act of translating and rewriting an ‘original.’
particularly one that has been canonized as a sacred text of ‘high’ literature.

When appropriating Laclos” words for himself, Ramirez transposes a new order
(literally and figuratively), incorporating his native grammatical code with respect to the
above quote, for in Spanish the semantic structure would indeed require use of the
subjunctive. Such an occurrence is common with non-native speakers who transfer their
own linguistic paradigms into other languages. If the subject has studied the language
sufficiently though, such an error could be construed as a psychological slip, as a way of
unconsciously retaining one‘s cultural heritage. Ramirez informs Larry earlier that he is
proficient in a number of languages, including French. But, since this is the very first
sentence he codes in the original texts, it may be interpreted that the error was intentional,
as a means of consciously forewarning the reader about the complexities concerning
reading and translating.

In the quote, the subjunctive predicate signifies what in Spanish would be an
unforseen, unknown future reader that may or may not even exist. but upon whom the
decoding of Ramirez’s text depends. Since the verb in question refers to the act of
reading. Ramirez may be implying from the beginning of his memoirs that the person
who may eventually read his work, if this were to ever happen, may not necessarily

“read” his text accurately. That is, the person translating his text may not necessarily be

33

true to the original, just as he, himself, was not with respect to the French texts. If we
consider Pires Vieira’s claim that translations disturb “linear flows and power
hierarchies,” unsettling the “logocentrism of the original” (1 l l), Ramirez’s curse may be
directed at those who, intentionally or not, do exactly that which he, himself, is guilty of.
Within Ramirez’s own translation and rewriting of the French texts he creates his
own ‘linear flow’ and “power hierarchy,’ which without the intervention of a ‘reader’ to
translate and thus disturb his ‘logocentricm,’ would remain intact. By denying Larry
access to the French texts he prevents the unsettling consequences of translation in his
own encoded work. Like Larry, we readers of Puig’s novel are denied, twice removed.
and condemned (as the title indicates), from any possibility of reading or translating the
prison notes due to our dependence on Larry’s oral reading of them to Ramirez. Only in
one of the missives do we learn that the Human Rights Reception Committee that brought
Ramirez to the United States, will take the necessary steps to publish his prison notes.l7
One can not help but interpret Ramirez’s last oral testament, in which he bequeaths his
books to the psychiatric hospital where he was last transferred, as the desire to uphold the
discursive hierarchies of his encoded text. It might seem ironic that he requests that his
work- a product of institutionalization as it was created within the walls of an Argentine
prison- continue within institutional confines, where if it were to be read. it would most

likely be translated according to the institutional ideology that harbors it; that is to say

 

”Larry, inadvertently informs the Human Rights Reception Committee of the
significance of these texts, which in turn provokes the organization‘s interest in
publishing them. Due to conflicting accounts concerning Ramirez‘s last will and
testament, Larry loses publishing privileges of the texts and they eventually fall into the
hands of the committee.

34

psychoanalysis. '8

One of the questions one may ask is why Puig chose these particular French books
to incorporate within his own. What do they reveal about Ramirez or even about Larry?
The oldest of the three, the Prjneess pf Cle’ ves, was written by Marie Madaleine de
Lafayette in 1678, Les liaisons QQgQLCQSQS by Choderlos de Laclos in 1782 and Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant in 1816. We readers of Puig’s novel, are not provided with any
information concerning the relationship of these books to Ramirez other than that they
were signed and dated by him decades before he would have been imprisoned where he
encoded them.'9 All three works have been canonized and classified as primary models
of the psychological novel. The oldest is considered France’s first and the proceeding
two exemplify the genre’s depth of development and evolution within the next 150 years.
Puig’s contribution to the psychological novel, as a twentieth-century artist, is one that
addresses twentieth-century psychoanalysis, as revolutionized by Freudian theory?”

All three novels respond to the construction of self as a struggle between

extraneous social demands and the inner unspoken emotive desires by the subject. The

 

l8How we read Puig’s novel too depends on our own ‘institutionalization.’ our
own dogmatization and breaking indeed from these ideologues that define our subjective
conception of reality. Indeed Puig’s novels generally follow the trend of questioning
univocal interpretations, embracing reality as a polyphonic experience.

"’Larry notices that they are: "Libros de su biblioteca. Claro que si. tienen su
nombre adentro. Y la fecha...l928...1930... Por algo el papel se ha vuelto marron...”
(124).

30 Nevertheless, he questions such a theory as it relates to homosexuality. as
evidenced in his early work, and, especially, later on, through the narrative devise of

footnotes in his bestseller Elmsddejetnyjflefla.
35

persistence of the first refuses admittance of the second, referring specifically to the
sentiment of amorous love. lne Princess pt Cleves involves a love triangle in which a
princess, being in love with a man other than her husband, decides to share her secret
with him, which in turn leads to her jealous husband’s untimely death. Yet, because the
widow ascribes to society’s moral codes, she considers it impossible to remany.
Laclos’s work, Les liesiens dangereuses, concerns one man’s challenge to seduce two
women. He, nevertheless, sacrifices his true passion for one of them to a desire for
recognition and fame as an undefeated libertine. Constant’s novel examines the ties
between father and son and the former’s convictions about women that Adolphe
questions as he learns that females cannot be conquered without consequence and that
their perpetrators, like he, may derive guilt instead of pleasure from such actions.
Ramirez and Larry’s public identities of the past (as an activist and academic
respectively) obscured the personal relationships in their private lives. But. with respect
to the enunciation of Puig’s novel, Ramirez’s adopted country imposes a generalized
exile identity onto him that he finds unfamiliar and unacceptable to his present conscious
self. Lany files for unemployment after being denied the work of decoding Ramirez’s
prison notes and after having rejected a position for a professorship at a prestigious
university. Therefore, in contrast to the protagonists of the French novels. Puig’s
Argentine and New Yorker ultimately fail within the public sphere of social expectation.

Puig’s voices long for an identity denied to them by society?‘ Ramirez yeams for

 

3' In Larry’s case it is the Human Rights Committee that ultimately decides his
Fate with respect to the prison notes, due to their own determination of conflicting
accounts. Ramirez, on the other hand, wants to be accepted beyond the institutional

36

an identity beyond exilic definitions and confinements, and Lany for one beyond his
unrenowned vocational status into a world that would recognize his achievements and
successes.

In comparison to the language factor in which Puig denies the originality of any
one language, so too here he demonstrates Bassnett and Trivedi’s assertion that “No text
can be completely original. . . .” (3). Both Laclos’ and Constant’s works build from De
Lafayette’s model of the psychological novel, and Mphe, in addition, as Elena Russo
has claimed, “is in many ways a reading of Laclos’s novel” (68). On the one hand, Puig’s
message seems to be that any given literary expression. by definition, partakes of an
historical intertextuality, that is, an intertextual relationship with the written discourse of
past, whether formally promulgated or not. As a work written about exile by an exile.
Puig’s novel attests to the interconnectedness of the written word despite physical and
psychological barriers. Moreover, the inclusion of these French texts engages Maldicion
within a Post-Colonial dialectic by subverting the European legacy that had translated the
traditions and peoples of the Americas as being inferior to their own. In _M_aldi_eien, the
‘colonized,’ both Puig and Ramirez, translate the European literary model. i.e., the French
texts, debunking imperial hierarchies, and, molding new models of equality through the
discursive mode of ‘stylization.’ Kerr’s definition of a stylistic operation between texts
would have to be read as an “interchange between equals. According to the structure of
stylization, neither voice or discourse would be situated in a privileged position. The

stylizing discourse would appear to treat the original, ‘serious’ discourse as having a

 

parameters of his exilic experience, beyond their definitions of his experience.

37

status equal to, perhaps even higher than, itself” (15). Puig, in this fashion, does not
privilege the ‘original’ French texts. but, instead he treats them as equal discourses to his
own.

Within the French texts, existing hierarchies of relationship are also questioned.
The plots of all three novels concern loyalties, love and the lack thereof between. or
among characters. Familial bonds in both Adelphe and The Erineess bind scion to parent,
which can be detrimental to the child’s exploration of self, particularly, as it relates to
amorous explorations. Father and mother, respectively, serve as intermediaries who
persuade and deter their children from following their own hearts, whereby the hierarchy
of the parent (authority) to child (subservience) relationship remains fixed. In Laclos’
novel those who seem to control the course upon which others follow fall themselves
victim to their own hierarchical web. Mnldieie'n may be considered a twentieth-century
reading of the French novels’ examination of hierarchical structures, including. especially
the psychological consequences of those between parent and child.

Before analyzing this aspect in Maldieie’ n. we must first recognize that all three
French novels address the inadequacies of language’s primary communicative function,
expressed succinctly in Adelphe: “‘language can only designate [man’s emotions] but
never really define them,’” and as Russo delineates further about Constant’s work. “when
it comes to the description of mental life, words can designate or indicate. but they can
not signify or have a general meaning” (106). Ramirez’s explanations to Larry about
language and emotive constructions or intentions reiterate Constant’s observation,

although vestiges of their inception appear even within De Lafayette and Laclos’ novels.

38

In the French works, language. at times, even serves the opposite intention of the
subject’s emotive will. All characters become linguistically alienated from expressing
their inner desires. Even within the language of twentieth-century psychoanalysis neither
Ramirez nor Larry apprehends the identity needs of the other. nor can they utilize
language to define these needs for themselves.

Missives provide a primary means of expressing emotional content in all the
novels considered here, albeit at times in an ineffective or insincere manner. But the
written word testifies to the daunting task of molding language to define the subject’s
emotions; a language at times encoded by the writer of which the recipient lacks the
key.23 In Puig’s Maldicie’n the missives serve not the amorous but rather the filial. In
prison Ramirez receives a letter from his son, and then, Larry receives in textual form. (a
will), from one who often literally role-played father to him.

To our knowledge, the notes written by Ramirez while incarcerated lack any
specified recipient, but he does, curiously, recur to missives, encoding a substantial
section of Les liasiens dnngerenses, which Lori Chamberlain addresses, in order to
introduce content of a more personal nature. Laclos’s 67'h letter is from Madame de
Tourvel to the Vicomte de Valmont who expresses ambivalent feelings toward him. She
claims not to want to “answer” his letter and asks that he not proclaim his love towards
her any longer, although she desires precisely this, while attempting to somehow defend

her honor. Ramirez as explained by Chamberlain:

 

32 With respect to Constant and Laclos’ novels the protagonists write letters to
their lovers concealing their true feelings from them, leading to dire consequences for
those involved.

39

. . . Has ‘translated’ his own “family romance’ from his native Argentine
into the language of French romance-which Larry in turn translates and
reads in English. In the process of Ramirez’ translation, however, he has
confused the paternal role with a feminine one (that of Madame de
Tourvel), making the son the seducer of the father, who in turn both
wishes to believe in the son’s love and prohibits any proclamation of the
son’s affection. What Ramirez perhaps unconsciously admits, by citing
Madame de Tourvel’s letter is the wish not only that his son loved him.
but also that he really did love his son. (270)
Empathizing with the difficulty of expressing one’s true feelings. especially those that
Ramirez feels toward his son, as revealed through Laclos’s 67‘h letter, I argue that
Ramirez discovers that he can filter his emotions through another written text into a
covert language rather than one that is overt. That is. through the French texts he
identifies feelings toward his son of disgust, disappointment and even envy. His
message, then, appears in between the texts. and in between French and Spanish, a
surreptitious operation that voices disapproval of his son without blatantly exposing his
own failure to love unconditionally.
Psychoanalysis and the Exile Experience
Ramirez has been separated from his society. mentally stripped of his old
identity, (as are all exiles to a certain extent), as a consequence of amnesia, and now in
New York he engages in a psychological rite that will determine whether or not he

survives exile. literally. His exile to the United States, symbolically, however. provides

40

him, like all liminal beings, with the opportunity, “to think about [his] society, [his]
cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them” (Forest 106). Ramirez recalls
absolutely nothing about his own past, but in his dialogue with Larry, their roleplaying.
and his own dreams, he expresses concern, albeit at times unconsciously, about the
powers that sustain human relationships, especially those of the triad mother-father-child.
Because liminality provides the possibility for standing aside from all social positions and
creatively formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements
(Turner, Dramas), Ramirez incarnates the possibility of creating a new position for the
exile, to be explored below, in direct opposition to that perceived and portrayed by the
‘other.’ This ‘other’ embodies the adopted society at large, who most likely is even
oblivious of Ramirez’s existence, but more specifically, it refers to the psychiatric
institution that labels him with words lacking any personal reference” (‘colapso nervioso.
depresion’ and ‘euforia,’). In addition this ‘other,’ (society, psychiatric institution and
Lany) simplifies Ramirez exclusively from a time-dependent perspective of the
preterite.24 Psychoanalysis as exercised by both institution and person (Larry) prove
ineffective in helping Ramirez unlock his memory; their understanding of Ramirez’s
exilic condition completely excludes his experience in the country of adoption.

Remembrance forms a part in the development of self identity. but in Ramirez’s

 

2’ Ramirez complains to Lany on one occasion: “Esta hablando como mis
me’dicos. El mismo modo de decir las cosas. No muy personal, creo” (54).

3" Ramirez’s death leads to an exchange of missives between hospitals in which
one psychiatrist attributes Ramirez’s downfall to a state of depression caused by his
incarceration in Argentina.

41

case, having lost his memory, he demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge about his
past. One of the consequences of this void is the absence of a national identity. Informed
by others that he indeed is Argentine, Ramirez searches for information about his country
in encyclopedic works but the contents of these texts only offer objective documentation.
Ramirez’s lack of personal experiences obstructs, in essence, the potential to form a part
of his native community, which, as delineated by Benedict Anderson, “imagines” itself.
His exilic status accentuated, then, without a memory upon which to grieve, differentiates
his experience from that of most exiles, especially taking into account that “la memoria
del exilio es la otredad, la alteridad, el otro” ( Martinez-Gutierrez 328). But Puig’s novel
provides an alternative perspective to the exilic experience. In contrast to the generalized
descriptions of exile, Ramirez, (without a memory), defies the typical exilic stereotype.
By creating an exilic voice with amnesia Puig’s novel faces marginalization even within
the genre of exile literature. Not one to follow molds, or models, Puig demonstrates the
existence of other realities and perspectives of the exile experience. Unlike all the other
voices studied within this dissertation, Ramirez symbolically embodies, even allegorizes.
Argentina’s void with respect to the past. In an interview with Armando Almada Roche.
Puig attested, “Lo que pasa es que los argentinos no tenemos memoria. Mejor dicho: no
nos agrada vemos tal cual somos. Un pueblo sin memoria pierde su identidad. Y la
Argentina, un pais que tiene miedo, al paso que vamos, es un pueblo sin memoria...” (57).
Even without Ramirez’s memory, a translation of the conscious and the
unconscious dialogue between the interlocutors can provide access into the inner

recondite furies and fantasies of the subject in question, the exiled Argentine. Pamela

42

Bacarisse points out that in Puig’s later works Freudian theory tends to be preempted by
Otto Rank’s notion of the will (110), but in Maldieién Freud’s influence in the
psychodrama between Ramirez and Larry predominates. The reader, in turn. recognizing
Freudian discourse, may interpret the oral text between the interlocutors accordingly.
Ramirez’s unconscious emphasis on the fulfillment of particular instincts, such as shelter.
food, and the sexual drive, correlate with his wish for participation in the imagined
community of the adopted country.

The exile in a foreign environment needs not merely physical shelter. but what
Leon Grinberg has called a “container.” For “the immigrant. . . leaving his country. . .
needs to come into contact in the new environment with an object that will hold and
contain him and to which he will become attached” (192). Ramirez feels little attachment
toward the nursing home or hospital, but he yearns for a more intimate relationship with a
real native and his home. This becomes evident during one of his strolls with Lany when
upon passing Carmine Street, precisely where Lany lives.25 Ramirez asks for an invitation
into his apartment; a request that Larry refused. By this time he had already asked if it
would be possible to enter some nearby locals’ residences?" Excluded from personal
spaces in the adopted homeland, Ramirez is confined to those that are public in which any
native person can have access to, but does not enter unless one is ill or elderly.

Institutionalized spaces are created within society so as to separate and protect its

 

2" While Puig lived in New York during the writing of this novel he lived on the
comer of Carmine and Bedford (from Levine’s book).

3" He earlier inquired about the apartments around Washington Square. that Larry
explains, had been converted into office buildings.

43

members from their diseased ‘others.’ As a consequence, Ramirez is unwelcome in the
new land, both as an institutionalized person and as an exile. Being physically confined
to a wheelchair makes his mobility within the new land difficult, but the psychological-
physical barrier that separates the foreigner from entering the native home denies him
admission into the adopted country’s private confines. On Christmas Day Ramirez tells
Larry, “No se' que’ daria por ver una de esas casas, en este preciso momento...” (196).
This unrequited desire to belong and attach to a “container” also invades his unconscious
thoughts. In one of Ramirez’s dreams in which he converses with Larry. the latter tells
him of a situation in which he made an unsuccessful attempt to take a young woman in
distress to a nearby house for shelter, “un rostro poco amistoso nos observo. Sacudio la
cabeza en sefial negativa. Era un viejo como usted. de poca paciencia” (106). Ramirez
declares that he would have opened the door, but Larry reminds him that he has no house
of his own. Again, this dream reminds Ramirez of his exilic condition. By not being
permitted to enter a home in this, his new country, he remains isolated and distanced from
any kind of social solidarity and warmth, while the shelter the institution provides him.
remains purely physical and inanimate. Grinberg admonishes that without proper
attachment to the reception environment the exile’s survival mechanisms can break down
(192), a factor that must be considered with respect to Ramirez’s demise, without
attributing to it the exclusive cause.

If we observe Ramirez’s relationship to food one gradually notices that he begins
to eat less and less. He occasionally buys Larry meals despite his own small budget, but

never during the narrative do they share the intimate act of dining together. One way in

44

which Ramirez does include himself in the participation of Larry’s dining experience
transpires with the use of the first person plural when he makes reference to ‘our’
restaurant, that is, Larry and Ramirez’s. The question remains as to whether or not they
did ever eat together there, but given Ramirez’s monetary contribution to Larry’s dining
experiences, (a common phenomena), the reader is inclined to believe that Ramirez
simply buys for himself the right to use the first person plural.

Ramirez’s diabetic condition induces occasional cravings for sweets while in exile
but he does not consume any at all. Similarly, problems with digestion prevented Puig’s
own father from consuming certain foods in his later years. Possible comparisons
between Ramirez and Puig’s father become even more evident with the fact that the elder
Puig died in a nursing home alone, already separated from his wife, Male, a number of
years, and distanced from his son Manuel. In addition, in the passage quoted by Larry
from Ramirez’s prison notes, the latter makes reference to a son, who, like Manuel.

7 Baldomero Puig, like Ramirez. disapproved

wanted to work within the world of acting.2
of his son’s vocational choice. Puig ultimately succeeds in his profession, (the fictional
son fails). despite the lack of moral or financial support from a father who would have

preferred his son to become an engineer.28

The bitterness of living in a community that ostracizes the institutionalized

 

27 Ramirez’s son wanted to be a theater director and Manuel Puig a screenwriter.

2” In Suzanne Jill Levine’s excellent detailed biography of Manuel Puig’s life she
explores the relationship between the acclaimed author and his father from which I am
able here to make the connections between the fictional voice of Ramirez and Baldomero
Puig.

45

(Ramirez) explains the desperate craving for a sweet experience, intensified during the
holiday season when family and friends feast together. Ramirez suggests to Larry that.
perhaps. for Christmas, he could indulge his sweet tooth. But no one offers Ramirez the
opportunity; in fact, not once during his exile in the United States does he consume
sweets. The little food he does consume expresses both physical and psychological
malnourishment, and the inaccessibility to sweets. literal and metaphorical, distances him
even further from the society that controls its distribution. According to Grinberg, “In
regression to more primitive levels of mental functioning. emotions tend to be expressed
in relation to primal things such as food. Food takes on special relevance because it
symbolizes the earliest structured link with the mother or the mother’s breast” (79).
Away from the homeland Ramirez searches for a ‘Mother’ substitute, temporarily
filled by Nurse Virgo who orally feeds him words from the texts she reads aloud. but
once Larry enters the equation her virginal status becomes irreparably tainted. for she no
longer is his alone. With respect to his own conscious and unconscious sexuality,
Ramirez, emotionally and physically, behaves like an impotent man?” Larry finds
Ramirez’s persistence for erotic details about his past voyeuristic. but Ramirez insists that

he is merely searching for an emotional understanding to “lo que sucede en lo interior dc

 

2” In his dream about Edith Cavell she dies because of Ramirez’s impotence (lack
of power and voice) in warning her of potential danger. Larry in this dream represents the
villainous German who rapes and executes her. In another ‘conscious’ scene in which
Larry and Ramirez role-play, Ramirez refuses to make any sexual advances toward his
wife, again demonstrating his sexual impotence.

46

la gente” (89).” Living in a society that thwarts his possibility for fulfillment of the
instincts only augments Ramirez’s exilic status. He remains a cipher of any imagined
community, for neither through shelter, food, nor women does the adopted society allow
him to enter its hearth.

Ramirez’s solution to his emotional emaciation rests in absorbing the live (life)
stories of his interlocutor, who describes Ramirez as a ‘vampire:’ “Se alimenta de la vida
de los demas” (89). Despite the inclination of the reader to interpret Ramirez’s case as
that of a victim of socio-political circumstance, his treatment of Larry questions society’s
preconceived notions about the exilic experience, for here the exile is predatory. Of
course, Larry is not innocent: absorption of the other’s identity is initiated through the
linguistic transaction and translation of the other’s language into his own which, as it has
been discussed earlier, involves both parties. In analyzing the Brazilian works of Haroldo
dc Campos, Pires Vieira initiates her article with two epigraphs from his works. one of
which can easily be applied to Mnldieie’n: “Translations as transfusion of blood.
Ironically, we could talk of vampirization, thinking now of the translator’s nourishment”
(195).“ Both, Ramirez and Larry, serve as translators, as vampires of the other’s life

blood, a figurative blood that with exchange dissolves identity borders between the two,

 

3" Larry’s intimate stories even affect Ramirez’s physiological response to food.
After listening to Lany’s sexual adventures with his to-be-wife at the beginning of their
courtship before they were married Ramirez becomes quite hungry, but upon discovering
later on that Larry’s wife cheats on him while Lany eavesdrops from the next room,
Ramirez loses his appetite completely.

3' If we recall Puig’s comment about creating a language for Larry. he explains it
as “desangrado,” literally without much blood.

47

each becoming more like the other. as in Ramirez’s dream about two Russian males who
mimic each other’s speech, not unlike, at times the indistinguishability between Puig’s
voices.

The role playing conversations between Ramirez and Larry. primarily serve the
purpose of teaching the former the emotional language spoken among the members of a
nuclear family-between a parent and child, and a husband and wife. Curiously, Ramirez’s
primary concern, in exile. is that of making his imaginary family happy by bestowing
upon them material gifts. In Argentina, by contrast, he ignored the emotional needs of his
real family. In fact, when he learns from Lany that his family died in a bomb that was
meant for him, he displays a callous disinterest, dismissing the information as fictional.
The economic factor upon which Ramirez bases his relationship with Lany is one that
replicates his familial and sole role of monetary provider in Argentina. Although
Ramirez hires Lany for his services he still feels responsible for him economically. He
provides Larry with money for meals, both consciously and unconsciously, (in his
dreams), even after Ramirez had threatened to fire Larry. Ramirez would have liked their
relationship to have been one transcending the financial contract and in their last
conversation, Ramirez asks Larry if he appreciates his friendship. Lany responds that he
only worked for Ramirez because he needed the money: “Pero usted es insoportable.
nunca se sabe con que tonteria va a salir. De pronto se vuelve contra uno, y no se
comprende por qué” (261 ). With Larry’s answer Ramirez’s old self reawakens: “gHe
vuelto a sentir este viejo placer! Bajeza, venganza, resentimiento. para mi eran palabras

vacias. pero ya no, ahora las experimento, y las comprende muy bien” (262). Given the

48

opportunity within exile to nurture a personal relationship with another and thus explore
his inner self, Ramirez is only able to fictionalize it and continue within the comfort zone
of an economical pattern initiated in Argentina, that here fails again. Immediately
following their last conversation, he is taken to a mental asylum and dies shortly
thereafter.

As seen earlier Ramirez criticizes psychoanalysis for the lack of personal attention
given to individual patients. Just as psychoanalysis fails to deal with homosexuality in
Kiss ef the Spider Wetnen, in Maldieie’n it fails to deal with the exilic experience.

Larry’s memories of his childhood and adolescence are imbued with Freudian
theory. He too has been treated by psychiatrists, though. one may wonder to what extent
his memories have been impressed and (re)formulated by analysis.

Puig’s Maldieie’ n is a drama in which Freudian theory becomes a concept of
inquiry and suspicion; the Oedipal equation is rewritten into an inverse translation.
homicide by the father of the son replaces the traditional unconscious act of parricide. In
Ramirez’s last dream Lany dies by the hands of a father who had threatened to wring
Larry’s neck, sounding much like Puig’s own father who when Puig as a young boy
dressed up in women’s clothing would “either slap him or, worse, threaten to beat him to
a pulp: [Baldo would say] ‘I don’t hit, but if I ever have to, I’ll kill you’” (Levine 42).
The prison notes describe a man haunted with jealousy toward his son and wife. who
believed that with him imprisoned, “estaran en paz, tranquilos, tienen toda la casa para
ellos” (258). Similarly. Baldomero’s separation from Malé led him to say that ‘los

novios’ (Manuel and mother) could finally be together without him. The son’s Freudian

49

instinctual desire to rid the familial triad of the father has been granted in both fictional
and factual scenario. But, within Mnldieie'n the initial self annihilation of the father
(Ramirez’s) as depicted in the dream about his own death. which leads to his own
hospitalization. is later replaced by another of Ramirez’s dreams with the death of the
son, (occuring after the falling out between Ramirez and Lany in their last conversation).
and leading to his admittance into a mental asylum where shortly thereafter he dies. It
happens when Larry puts his fate in the hands of his own father as suggested by Ramirez
in the dream, a mistake that results in Larry’s death. If, in Traieion. Puig “betrays” his
father, in Meldicie’n, the father is cursed from ever being anything but a perfidious traitor
to the son.

Ramirez’s dreams involve those of an amorous triad (the one involving a nurse
killed by Larry and this one above), those of paternal instincts or lack thereof (where in
the one above he fails as a father, and an earlier dream in which friendly dogs save his life
from Mafia figures and as Ramirez prepares to then risk his own life by giving them his
oxygen mask they jump out of the window), and those of reciprocal action between a
younger and older man (each man saves the other in the wilderness, in a cave and in a
later dream in Russia). From these dreams as well as the role playing between Ramirez
and Larry, it becomes clear that Ramirez is deeply troubled with his role as father and
lover, perhaps as a consequence of his obsession with political activism (in the homeland)
about which in exile he denies any interest (present or past).

Psychoanalysis as a means to unraveling the mysteries ofhuman nature is a

double—edged sword in Matdieidn. It can serve to open venues of the inner recondite self.

50

but Puig seems to imply that it can also disrupt one’s inner voice and identity with its
potent vocabulary. Ramirez repeatedly affirms that his identity will be revealed to him by
the women with whom he’s most intimate, and, or from the notes that he cannot place.
Depending on such amorphous bodies, simply accentuates that which unconsciously
haunts Ramirez most and of that which he himself is guilty--abandonment—-both sexual
(of his wife, and as the father figure to his son) and textual (of his own prison notes).

F ictionalization becomes a means to and end: to construct or deconstruct the self and the
‘other.’ Therefore, when we read Larry’s job application at the end of the novel we
question his identity again. No longer embellishing his life with fictional tales to appease
Ramirez’s psychological imbalances, Larry’s construction of self via written discourse is
not the same as the one from the dialogue. He projects an image of mental instability
which had been imperceptible within the oral domain between the two voices. In the job
application he writes on the back of the form when he should not, he requests only the
most lucrative position as researcher, and notes that he does not take drugs or stimulants.
The dual discourse at hand (oral or written) echos the existence of a dual Lany. and the
one pertaining to the written discourse had not been revealed to the reader beforehand.
This other Larry, who seems to contradict the Lany we have familiarized ourselves within
the oral discourse shared with Ramirez, could be Puig’s way of reminding us that the
same is true of Ramirez. We are bound by discourses to translate and yet these may be
inaccurate representations of that which we wish to comprehend.

Conclusions

From the onset of the novel, based on the title, the reader must ask herself why

51

she is cursed for having read these pages. The intriguing title took Puig some time to
create but in the company of Jaime Manrique he fashioned it, not to the Iatter’s favor,
who commented that he would never read a book with that title: “He [Puig] was so
amused that he decided this was a good omen” (44). Its omen to the reader, both Larry
and us, rings clearly. Larry certainly is cursed from ever translating its contents. and we
are cursed from ever reading the translation.

In addition, Ramirez’s last will and testament testifies to two different and
conflicting accounts presented in both oral and written format. Ramirez’s relationship to
oral discourse is one in which fantasy and imagination play an integral part. hence the
role-playing with Larry, and the addendums of information concerning events or
situations that never came to pass in reality. When provided with the oral equivalent to
its written counterpart, Ramirez has a tendency to refute the oral information in some
manner. He never accepts anything read to him from his prison notes. and when he could
have read them himself he becomes suddenly blind and unable to do so. Even though
Ramirez wishes for the return of his notes in order to (re)discover himself, he disregards
the encoded French novels as being the ones he refers to. But, when he does read, he
never questions the written word.

It would seem, then, that the rules here provided would explain all with respect to
these two discourses. One would be more willing to accept Ramirez’s final wishes for

the allotment of his prison notes to be those as explained in written format. the form he,

52

himself, accepts in his own experiences.32 But, in fact, problems arise. In his last will
and testament he bequeaths four books to his confident, Larry, when in fact only three
throughout the narrative have been alluded to. No one, though, in the missives
exchanged corrects this error, or what might seem to be an error to the readers of
Meldieie’ n. In addition, we learn that a certain nurse, Anne Lewis, “la unica persona con
quien [Ramirez] habia congeniado en el Hogar ‘Village,”’(275) allegedly spoke with him
during his final moments in New York. In their conversation she avers that Ramirez
complained about Larry’s behavior toward him. Shortly thereafter, in C alifornia, just
before he dies. he asks (orally) to donate his possessions to the hospital library. Were it
not for this female voice, all concerned with the matter were willing to abide by the
written testament, but Anne Lewis, possibly Virgo, has the last word. In fact. she
determines Larry’s fate. However, neither oral nor written discourse provides sufficient
clues for the readers of Mnldieidn to know Ramirez’s true intentions.

The exile is in between discourses and where the truth lies is beyond our ability as
readers to translate. In essence, the exile who lives between and betwixt languages.
cultures and discourses can not be defined or generalized into categorical constructions
that exclude the individual. Contrary to our expectations of a victimized exile living
deracinated from his home, Puig challenges us by offering an exile of predatory nature
without a memory. Manuel Puig defies the exilic stereotype and questions Freudian

theory in the process. Can we be defined by what we speak? Maldicion’s answer seems

 

’2 Like Larry, the man from written discourse differs from the one from oral
discourse.

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to be that language confines just as much the foreigner as the native. We are cursed with
or without it. We are cursed for attempting to translate the untranslatable elusive inner
self that ultimately escapes language itself. And yet while the mysteries of the individual

remain, Puig reminds us that the ‘other’ really is not all that different from the self.

54

Chapter Two

In Between Borders: Daniel Moyano’s W

The second space of exile to be studied here involves that developed in Daniel
Moyano’s W, in between one’s homeland and the adopted land,
aboard an Italian vessel named the Cristoforo Colombo, where not only the narrator. but
700 other “indeseables” (exiles) make their way to the Old World after being rejected by
the New.

The author, Daniel Moyano, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1930, but
only lived there a short time. He moved with his family to the provinces as a child and
later settled in La Rioja, which became his permanent home until he was forced into exile
with the military coup. Like He'ctor Tizén,l he has been classified as a ‘regional’ writer,
but upon leaving Argentina in 1976 and collaborating with European publishing houses,
his compatriots suddenly elevated his status to that of an ‘Argentine’ writer.2 Even after
winning several awards, including the internationally recognized Sudamericana Primera
Plana award for Elm in 1967, and the Premio Juan Rulfo in 1985, Moyano still felt
that he shared a common plight with authors from the provinces: “sin acceso a las
editoriales” (Gnutzmann 114).

Exile for Moyano, as well as for other authors studied in this dissertation, is a

 

' See Chapter Five.

2 In an interview Moyano notes this observation made by David Lagmanovich and
responds to it: “F ijate, nos han dado el derecho de ser argentinos. Esa es la situacion”
(Quimera 34).

55

condition first experienced within the homeland. Besides sharing the marginalization that
most, if not all “provincial” writers experienced, Moyano, in addition, was raised “en el
exilio de mi abuelo matemo, que era italiano” (Quimera 31). Like other Argentines (he
defines his country as: “un pais de exiliados europeos” given the large number of
immigrants who arrived at the turn of the last century), Moyano is exposed to the stories
of exile that brought his own ancestors from Europe to the Southern Cone, but unlike
most, he would travel the inverse voyage of exile to the Old World. At a young age.
Moyano had already become familiar with being uprooted. The death of his mother and
the abandonment of his father while Moyano was still young, led to years of being
shuffled among relatives, until the rescue of his grandparents who provided him with a
permanent home in Cordoba. These years of insecure domain put Moyano in touch with
the experience of inner exile, which in an interview he quickly differentiates from that of
‘outer’ exile: “No es un exilio como el que nos toco vivir al venimos a Espar‘ia, no, no,
hablo de esos exilios que tienen todos los seres humanos y que consisten en ir dejando
cosas. Yo he vivido cambiando de querencia toda mi vida y no me arrepiento. pues me
ha permitido mirar el mundo de otra manera” (Quimera 31).

This ability to look at the world anew, especially at the land of dictatorship left
behind, is expressed by Moyano through the literature he wrote in exile. The forced
deraeination from Argentina3 to Spain however, affected his writing ability for a number

of years: “Me habia olvidado de escribir. Cuatro afios despue's recuperé Ia capacidad para

 

3 On the day of the military coup, Moyano was incarcerated for 12 days with other
suspect ‘subversives.’ Upon his release, he and his family exiled themselves to Spain.

56

expresarme, hasta ese memento senti que seguia en la carcel” (Quimera 33). From exile
his first attempt at writing was to recreate the story of El vnele del tigre he had left buried
in his Rioja backyard just after the military took power. With its completion and
publication in 1981, he began another narrative endeavor that would directly addresses
the experience of exile that he personally underwent: “La salvacion fue encontrar el tono
para entrar de lleno en el Li hm de nnvies y hengaseas, ahi pude comenzar a liberarme dc
todo lo que nos sucedio.” (Quimera 34).

Writing as a means of liberation or catharsis from the past. seen also in Tizén’s
novel, serves both the author and the narrator of [.1th de nevios y herrnscn ‘- published
in 1983. It should not be surprising therefore, that the author and his character share a
number of characteristics: both are musicians, both are coerced into exile, both leave
Argentina by boat to settle in Spain, and both recur to the written word. and fiction in
particular, in an attempt to explain the unexplainable reality of violence and death
occurring in Argentina under the dictatorship.

Tizén in the prologue written in 2000 of the latest edition of La en sa y el viento.
wrote of his inability to move forward with his life while in exile until he completed said
novel: “Tampoco yo lograba ser otro porque me habia Ilevado la casa a cuestas.
Quitarmela de encima me costo esta novela” (13). Moyano’s salvation, as seen above.
also depended on the cathartic act of writing. But, while Tizon’s narrator professes to
write in order to facilitate memory recall of the homeland once far away from it.
Moyano’s narrator writes in the attempt that his story may enter the realm of

“comprensién” (perhaps just as much for himself as for his readers). and so that in the

57

process of narrating his story, he might also begin to forget about these painful events of -,
his past.4 Liberation for Moyano’s narrator however, can only be achieved by weaving
into one whole both ‘reality’ and ‘fiction;’ so that an incomprehensible reality (such as
exile, torture and the desaparecidos) can be digested within a fictional framework.

Rolando, the narrator of the 15 chaptered novel, records his experiences aboard
the ship, not as he had originally intended to do so- in a travel diary- but rather later on. as
an a posteriori creation from the adopted homeland based on memory (though he never
alludes to the act of remembering or even forgetting particular details or events during his
journey aboard the vessel).

Though Rolando does make references, albeit brief, to his life before being
arrested at his home, the approximate nine months of incarceration afterward, and his
current life in Spain, the majority of the novel concentrates on the voyage from Buenos
Aires to Barcelona, and the perceptions of and reactions to exile by himself and others in
the same situation as his own. Unlike Tizon’s narrator who had approximately a month
to assimilate and experience the consequences of becoming an exile. Rolando’s exilic
status happens within minutes. He had serendipitously bypassed the line for receiving
official documents permitting certain individuals to board the boat to Europe and just as
he had placed one foot on the stair leading to the vessel, an officer started to pull him

back but the man in front of Rolando, El Gordo, held onto his other arm and by mere

 

4 The narrator writes, “Y tomando prestado el clima de los viejos relatos sobre
fantasmas mi burda historia real puede ganar en fantasia y entrar decentemente en el
mundo de la comprensién, contandola como al descuido y un poco para olvidanne de
ella” (14).

58

might was able to free him from the grasp of the other. In returning to those 14 days
traveling across the Atlantic that mark the initiation of his separation from the
motherland, Rolando lets us peer into the first days of exile beyond the borders of home.
Moyano’s narrator, though he wishes to share his exilic experience with others. in his
attempt to do so adeptly demonstrates the difficulty in not only verbalizing the pain of
deraeination but finding the appropriate time-frame from which to begin and end his
account.5 Should the exile’s story begin at the point of departure from the homeland.
arrival to the adopted land, or prior to the events that led to one’s deraeination?“ In
reality, as we will see in this dissertation, the decision from which to begin the narrative
of the exile experience must be made by all authors. Moyano differs from others in that
while choosing to develop the exile experience in the physical space in between two
borders, he still brings to the forefront these vital questions that must be asked and
answered by anyone wishing to write about exile. Rolando struggles with this
predicament and though he chooses to write about his experience aboard a sea ship, he
had meant only to write a brief chapter about it, while the rest would then be dedicated to
his experience in the adopted land. Much of the first and final chapters express his

dissatisfaction with this decision concerning the physical space chosen for development

 

5 The last chapter is even entitled, ‘gFin?’

6 One man tells Rolando before boarding the ship that, “el suelo que pisamos ya
no es tierra argentina” because Buenos Aires was once made of water. The English.
“durante siglos fueron agrandando la ciudad por un lado y vaciando el pais por otro” (35).
Rolando asks himself then rhetorically, “Asi que antes de salir ya estabamos en el
exilio?” (35) The question of nationality becomes an issue that provokes anxiety in the
characters here as will be examined in Chapter Three.

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about the exile experience: “sucede que los comienzos, como Ios finales. siempre me
parecieron arbitrarios. Actuan como violacionies. Dejan en el olvido acaso las
posibilidades mas herrnosas. gDonde comienza un barco, o una naranja. o una mujer
desnuda” (15)? In compensation, Rolando plans on writing a sequel. “que se dcsarrolla
en Madrid enteramente” (260), but in order for this to be carried out he calculates that he
would need a one year leave of absence from the factory in which he works as a “peoncito
lijando todo el dia” (260): a highly improbable event. Both narrator and author coincide
in their narrative desires. In a 1987 interview with Gnutzmann, Moyano had informed
her that, “Actualmente estoy preparando otra novela, el Lihro de eaminos y de reines. que
sera Ia segunda parte de Lihre de nevies” (122). Despite the intentions on behalf of
narrator and author alike, no second part is ever produced.7 While in Argentina. Moyano
was a correspondent for the national newspaper Claan. and taught music at a
conservatory that he and others founded in La Rioja, but in Madrid he had little time to
write working for a multinational petrochemical company (Encucntro I74).

Finding a comfortable manner in which to tell his story. proves rather difficult for
Rolando. Often he becomes side tracked with tangential topics, he takes breaks (‘un
descansito’ from the main theme), in fact, certain details are omitted about his own life.

as well as the disappearance of two fellow passengers’ sons (Contardi’s and El Gordo’s).

He provides two brief (one paragraph and one page respectively) alternative stories that

 

7 Moyano’ s last novel, published two years before his death, was I res gelpes de

tjmhnl. And even a posthumous novel, t1_si_l_enej9_qtte_edr_c_h_ee, does not continue Lihre
dennuds either. It IS unclear as to whether or not he began writing the sequel. but as of

yet, there has been no indication that he did.

60

he would have preferred to have written about, and he tries to end his own about exile
numerous times, only to continue on further with the narrative. Just as Tizon’s
protagonist lengthens his departure from the homeland. Rolando lengthens his story of
travel to the new land because, “es dificil llegar” (391 ). In addition, the novel contains
four chapters (more than a quarter of the novel) dedicated to the fictional creations of the
characters themselves- a play, a story for Contardi to help him deal with the
disappearance of his son, and an allegorical tale without the influence of a narrator about
a ship leaving its familiar bay.

The structure of Moyano’s Lihre de navies, with its incorporation ofdiverse
genres dispersed throughout the chapters, reflects the liminal aspect of the exilic
experience. that functions in between categories. Li hre de nevies is a hybrid creation
both structurally and dialectically-combining two artistic expressions, music and
language, to describe the world, and the exile experience in a particularly unique manner.
On the open sea, Rolando belongs to no land, he exists in between two geographical
spaces and fiction facilitates his ability to cope with the past left behind and the unknown
future that awaits him in Europe.

Musical Language

As has been discussed in the first chapter, the question of identity becomes a
crucial one for the exile who has lefi his/her home indefinitely. Rolando realizes that a
part of his identity as a musician remains in the homeland with his violin, which was left
hanging in the garden when he was arrested. His separation from it. “dividio mi ticmpo

de vivir en un antes y un despue’s” (73). The forced removal from his home meant death

61

to a previous type of existence, including literally that of his violin. which hanging in the
garden would soon begin to rot.

Rolando’s violin, otherwise known as ‘Gryga,’ (the maker of the instrument).
made its way from Hungary to South America via an Hungarian exile, who when asked
by others about his trip across the Atlantic was incapable of even naming the boat he
traveled on, a phenomenon also experienced by Rolando’s Spanish grandfather who
emigrated to Argentina. Whenever Rolando’s grandfather referred to the vessel that took
him away from home, he simply called it, “el Cachorro” (the thing). Worse yet for the
Hungarian who, “ no podia nombrarlo, no tenia Ia palabra y era como si no existiese.
Daba la sensacion de andar como un barco adentro. Algunas veces intento sacarselo”
(54). As much as the Hungarian tried, his words would always become tangled, and in a
last desperate attempt to express himself he would then pick up his violin and play.
Where the Hungarian failed with words and compensated with music, the narrator unable
to play music compensates with words, though at the beginning of the novel. he wonders
if he will be able to tell his story, “No sé si me va a salir. Lo mio es la musica, antes que
las palabras” (15). Margaret Langer in a chapter from Philosophy in a New Key clarifies
the artistic difference between music and language: “The real power of music lies in the
fact that it can be ‘true’ to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot: for its
significant forms have that ambivalence of content which words cannot have” (243).
Rolando without his violin feels like the Hungarian musician who spoke broken Spanish:
he even emulates the Hungarian’s speech in order to express the rupture within himself

after having lost his primary tool of expression: “Yo también llora. . . cada vez mas lcjos

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de violino que quedaba colgado bajo el parra. Violino siempre antes conmigo y ahora
esta sinmigo. Avispos negros zumbando dentro de violino Mio, otofio Ilueve y caen hojas
y violinos” (61). But, without his Gryga, Rolando discovers something new: though he
lacks the ability to express himself musically through an instrument, he can express
himself musically through language.

In 1987 Moyano explained the musical nature of his novel to Gnutzmann:
“considero que toda mi novela esta estructurada musicalmente, no en el sentido del
lenguaje, sino en el sentido de la estructura, con sus temas y sus subtemas” (1 19). Indeed.
the novel has been written like a musical composition. Although it may be impossible to
designate the distribution of chapters according to one particular musical form, it does
seem to pattern a concerto. The chapters are naturally divided into three separate
categories (or movements of a concerto) according to time or theme: l-4=the first day of
travel aboard the Cristoforo; 5-9=the introduction to the first fictional representation
within the novel (a play, proceeded by an allegorical story); lO-l 5== just as Rolando
begins to write in his travel diary in Chapter Ten, a female passenger’s torture scars.
(Sandra’s), are revealed as the ship crosses the equator. After leaving the Southern
Hemisphere behind this last section directly tackles the issue of torture and disappearance
that Rolando had wanted to avoid, but cannot upon witnessing Sandra’s accusatory body
against the dictatorship. Chapter Eleven, entitled Cadenza, which musically is a solo
passage toward the close of a concerto (or here toward the close of the novel) actually
represents the narrator’s “solo” attempt to articulate in his own words that which

happened to Sandra and his own reactions to it.

63

Above all else, Moyano “buscaba que sonara” (119) his novel of exile, something
that also preoccupies Rolando. The sounds of words are important to him. and he spends
quite a bit of time analyzing their musicality or lack thereof. With respect to the boat he
travels on, the Cristéforo Colombo, he proclaims to change its name to Zampano because.
“cada vez que digo ‘Cristoforo Colombo’ me sigue sonando, aunque no lo diga. el resto
del verso de Dario... y me sigue durando el retintin” (207). The noun ‘mar’ sounds
more like a verb to him, and its monosyllabic structure confounds him given the
profundity (literal and symbolic) of its meaning. The title of a story that he and others
create for Contardi, also changes a number of times due to the dissatisfaction with its
sonority. One possibility for the title was ‘Faro,’ but the puppeteer notes: “En cambio
farol, fijese usted, a pesar de su aparente humilidad en cuanto objeto. suena mucho mejor
como palabra, tiene mas alcance, esa ele final le da vida a toda la palabra. la prolonga. le
da posibilidades de hacer durar un poco mas la 0, y de quedar vibrando en la ele todavia.
y todo el tiempo que uno quiera, como una gran arcada de violin” (308). The final
decision for the title of said story does not end here, other modifications are made with a
last suggestion in Chapter Twelve, which is all but a‘dying sound: ‘Fsss.’ only to return in
Chapter Thirteen to “el farol,” though the final title is never revealed. Onomatopoeias
like this, appear throughout the text, (plaf, glu, plof, lot), accentuating the novel’s oral
dimension, which is also achieved at the beginning of the novel via the fictional

framework of a Nordic seaman through whom Rolando orally tells his story.” and that we

 

8 Moyano’s own method for writing included paying heed to the oral dimension of
words: “A mi me gusta mucho contar mis cuentos antes de escribirlos y voy contando
diversas versiones, porque las palabras muchas veces me llevan a dar otra versién...”

64

readers. in a sense, listen to rather than read.

The story for Contardi is actually inspired by two Creole waltzes. produced in the
1920's and sung until the 1940's.9 Rolando complains to the others about following the
exact plot from the lyrics in creating their fictional rendition about the disappeared: “A
mi las palabras me gustan mas por su sonido que por su significado y no me tiembla el
pulso para usarlas, aunque sepa que me estoy desviando de los contenidos” (350).
Rolando’s decision to part from the waltz in order to “trabajar con entera libertad.” (351)
with words, testifies to a transformation within Rolando who now toward the end of the
voyage appears to accept language as a means of communication that he is perfectly
capable of molding for his own needs and desires, even if he may have initially
questioned his ability to express himself without his Gryga. Upon approaching
Barcelona, Rolando recognizes that he has changed, and in one way this relates to his
relationship with language: “De alla salio un Rolando contando Buenos Aires y es otro el
que llega contando Barcelona” (399). Indeed there is even a progression in his narrative
from a chronological description of events and the avoiding of reality via imaginative
constructs to the confronting of specific issues that led to the exile and death of so many
Southern Coners via other imaginative productions of language (to be seen below).

But, in an original manner, Rolando does not give up music altogether. What he
does is create a language that incorporates music, both with respect to its sonority, its

structure, and by simply using musical notation when he feels that words are insufficient.

 

(Gnutzmann 115)
° See Sara Bonnardel’s excellent article for more information about these waltzes.

65

For example, the first time he uses musical notation in the novel is to make a connection
between his grandfather’s boat and the Cristoforo, using an E sharp and an F natural. Of
course, both make reference to the same note, though their notation differs. That is. both
Rolando and his grandfather’s experiences of exile are comparable though theirjourncys
initiate from different spaces and times.

The lyrics of a number of songs also make their appearance in Lihro de nnvios.
which has been well examined by Sara Bonnardel. Fragments of the lyrics of popular
songs. including tangos, vidalas, bagualas, sung by artists such as Carlos Gardel, Agustin
Magaldi, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and the Northwestern cultures of Argentina. reflect
Rolando’s musical inclinations. By incorporating within the novel varieties of music
representative of a multicultural Argentina, Rolando provides evidence of the diversity of
his country that the dictatorship from the start had attempted to suppress. formulating in
its place an imagined homogeneic culture that ideologically supported the military and
conformed to its policies. In other words, the polyphonic effect of music. as created by
Moyano, absolutely defies the artificially created monophonic structure of dictatorship.
Moreover, the potpourri of genres that compose the novel function in the same manner as
the musical representations. Hence, music and language work hand in hand.

Music also inspires Rolando to imagine a unique manner in which an individual
subjected to an interrogation, might respond. He rationalizes that one merely needs to
find the right tone from which to address the interrogator, choosing carefully from three
conditions: “intensidad, altura y timbre” (66). If the person being interrogated could

somehow answer the interrogator’s questions using principles based on music. Rolando

66

believes that he/she just might survive. Better yet, he imagines, one would have an even
stronger chance of survival if one’s name were forgettable and unpronounceable to the
interrogator, a feat completed through music, and described by Rolando through musical
notation, like a simple chord (D,F.A).

Another strategy for Rolando in beating the interrogator at his own game involves
recognizing the surreal quality of the interrogations and the interrogator himself: one must
“tratar de ponersc a su altura [the interrogator’s] pensando que uno tambic'n es irrcal” (66)

That is. fiction can overcome fiction, and this is precisely how Rolando initiates his own
personal story in Chapter One. He asks the reader to allow him to occupy the place of a
traveler from the ‘mares del Sur’ who has just entered the home of a lighthouse keeper in
Northem Europe after a long voyage in order to tell his own ‘irreal’ story. The
“irrealidad” of his own exile, seems to require that it be told through some sort of “irrcal”
or fantastical setting. Verbalization of the exile experience is made possible by masking
his own identity behind that of a fictitious character of his own imagining. However,
Rolando’s intentions only last a few pages. Shortly thereafter, in the same chapter. he
reminds the reader that he is neither European nor the character he created. “simplemente
hemos pedido prestada esa casa donde suelen suceder Ios cuentos de aparecidos para
contar una historia relacionada con el Cono Sur, de infelice memoria” (50). The fictitious
north (a cardinal point symbolic of death) nevertheless provided not only a propitious
setting for stories about the unbelievable, about ‘aparecidos’ (ghosts), and their opposites.
the ‘desparecidos,’ who never reappear. The character of the Iightkeeper will be returned

to when the exiles decide to write a story for Contardi. The Iightkeeper whose vocation is

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“hacer girar Iuces sobre mares y desgracias” (20) in order to help stranded boats find their
way in tempests, cannot prevent shipwrecks or drownings. In fact. on the walls of his
home oval pictures hang of sailors who disappeared in the sea and the word ‘ovalos’ is
repeated numerous times by Rolando: to describe the faces of those who accompany him
in the truck headed to the ports in Buenos Aires, and with respect to the handwriting of
his grandfather in letters he wrote to his family who remained in Spain. Rolando
imagines that he too will write to his family in the inverse direction of his grand-father.
but unlike him his orthography shall consist not only of oval letters but of oval notes.
which he immediately fonns and incorporates in the narrative after this last observation.
From the boat the faces on shore become oval in shape as well. disappearing in space and
time, like musical notes that have been played.
The Mother ship

From mother land to mother ship, Rolando’s exilic experience aboard the
Cristoforo Colombo differs from that encountered by exiles living in the adopted lands.
For any exile, the separation from the homeland literally begins aboard some form of
transportation, like the Cristoforo Colombo in Lihtddenayjds. The Cristoforo
symbolically represents the unanchored state of the exile who belongs nowhere. Rolando
though, attaches his own symbolic value to the vessel that takes him to a foreign land.
First, he compares his leaving the homeland to the act of being weaned from his aunt.
C lara; as Rolando climbs the stairs to the boat, he imagines her assuring him that now
that he has been weaned, “ya estas en condiciones de echarte a andar por esos mundos”

(74). Hence, exile is compared to the physical separation from mother, who can no

68

longer provide of her own sustenance for her child’s survival. Now the exile must
depend entirely on him/herself. One of Rolando’s first experiences aboard the ship
verifies his exilic state. He becomes easily lost, in part contributed by the vessel’s
symmetrical form, and when Rolando finally asks for directions from one of the crew
members who answers his question in a language unknown to him, Rolando feels
“inmigrante hasta Ia me'dula” (73).

The experience of exile aboard the Cristoforo, becomes somewhat ameliorated
once the boat exits the Rio de la Plata and follows the coast of Brazil, leaving behind the
Southern Cone. At this juncture, Rolando decides to take some form of control
concerning his surroundings. He renames the vessel to something “mas acorde con
nuestros deseos y esperanzas” (208), eventually deciding on the name ‘Zampano’ from
Fellini’s “La Strada,” which expresses the itinerant state of exile, much like the
protagonist of the movie. Thereafter, for the first time Rolando refers to the vessel as
“nuestra segunda madre, que nos destetera” (208), though he alluded to this possibility
earlier when he climbed the stairs connecting the continent to the boat. referring to them
as the “escalera umbilical.” Therefore, weaning occurs twice. But. more significant still
is the second symbolic entrance into the womb after having been weaned before boarding.
In this manner. the exiles live in a liminal state, existing in between the living and the
dead (in the womb). Arriving to the Old World requires another birth and another
process of weaning. Though this time the ejection of the passengers is anything but
natural. just as exile is coerced, the symbolic second birth can only succeed with forceps

(210).

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Questionable Identities

The mother ship, as Rolando calls it, holds 700 people traveling from Argentina.
Uruguay and Chile (the Southern Cone), all of whom share a common political history of
dictatorship, and who leave their countries in exile to the Old World. Each of their
stories “eran iguales en sus estructuras” (70), which inclines Rolando to write that.
“Eramos setecientas fotocopias de una misma historia, donde no habia azar ni diversidad”
(70). Upon arrival to Barcelona, one passenger, Bidoglio, compares their lot to that ofa
boat with Turks he once watched disembarking in Buenos Aires: “... todos igualitos.”

(41 I), just as they will now be to the Spaniards: “Pareeemos todos turcos” (41 I).

For the Southern Coners boats are linked to their own concept of identity. for
when asked by the helmsman of the Cristoforo about their origins, one passenger
speaking for all simply states, “Descendemos de un barco como este” (198). Many of
their ancestors like the XV Century explorer after whom the vessel is named. in searching
for more than the Old World had to offer journeyed west from Europe to the Americas.
Now, they return east to Europe feeling as if they have failed their European ancestors.
Not only do the Southern Coners travel the inverse route of Christopher Columbus’ five
hundred years later, but in Rolando’s case he also travels the inverse journey of his own
Spanish grandfather. The symmetry present here with respect to the movement in space
and time is also experienced by Rolando with respect to his own body where the ocean
sustains him aboard the boat, “mantener unos huesos simétricos que sentia por mitades.
me pertenecia a medias, Ia otra mitad me seguia a duras penas, como si fuera mi sombra.

callada y achatadita” (101 ). Rolando perceives himself physically symmetrical but

70

psychologically separate: one aboard the ship and the other lagging behind. C uriously,
the captain discusses with Rolando experiments in which it has been proven that one
electron can pass through two holes simultaneously, psychologically speaking Rolando
too is both aboard the Cristéforo and somewhere else in another fantastical world (to be
seen below).

The land that Columbus described with superlative adjectives and likened to the
paradise of Eden, expels some of its unwanted members back to where their ancestors
came from. Where Columbus saw utopias, Rolando experienced incarceration. witnessed
disappearances, tortures and assassinations. In Christopher Columbus’ Diaries he wrote
about a land of marvel, and as critics have noted, one of the most frequent words repeated
by Columbus to describe the Americas is the word, “maravilla” (something wonderful).
Moyano dedicates an entire chapter to the meaning of the word and the interpretation of it
by the helmsman and that of a few exiles conversing with him in Chapter Seven.
According to the European helmsman what he understood to be a maravilla, “tenia que
existir forzosamente. . .” (195). Unable to precisely explain what it consists of he assures
his listeners that “no se trata de una fantasia.” The Southern Cone exiles remain
incredulous, for them ‘maravillas’ have ceased to exist except those of the imagination.
But before scepticism prevails, Rolando observes that upon the suggestion by the
helmsman that those who lack a land of origin might have come from the island of the
forgotten Atlantis, “vi que cada uno tenia en Ios ojos un pequefio brillo atlante” (199).
The helmsman momentarily entrances them with his argument: “Resistirse por olvido o

por logica a ser atlantes, sobre todo en circunstancias tan especiales como este nuevo

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exilio, es negarse una posibilidad, hacer desaparecer un reino, arrancar del Iibro una
pagina importante de la historia, 0 sea de la vida. Hay que ir preparando Ios ojos para
cuando aparezcan las verdaderas maravillas” (199). While the Southern C oners would
like to fall into the spell of “maravillas” and “encantos,” their experiences, especially that
ofexile itself, cause them to reject the existence of these other—worldly imaginings. The
interior monologue Rolando engages in with his defunct grandfather about the boat the
latter traveled on, brings to light his own desire for the marvelous to exist: “Por razones
de simetria quiero que sea un barco de maravilla, para que éste tambie'n lo sea, y ahora me
salis con que era un cacharro” (215). but as much as he wants the marvelous to exist. he
only receives affirmations that it does not. The Italian vessel, “no transporta inocentes
inmigrantes sino setecientos indeseables, indignos del Cono Sur” (215).

One person who does somehow experience the ‘marvelous’ despite exile and even
the fact that his son has disappeared is the painter Contardi. Upon arriving to Barcelona
the children aboard the Cristoforo surprise him with “una caja de zapatos llena de
basuritas para sus cuadros” (412). Full of cork, yarn, bottle caps, marbles and other
items. Contardi declares, “Es una verdadera maravilla” (412). With these items he plans
on creating a work of art depicting the province of La Rioja in Argentina. And Sandra. an
Uruguayan woman who was raped and tortured while incarcerated. decides that she will
begin to believe in God, not the God of war and rape, but one that she imagines as a
reformist, half sacred and half profane. The affirmation that she will believe in a God.
provokes her to ask Rolando, “No te parece una maravilla?” (262). In both cases. the

marvelous is a manifestation of an inner desire brought to the surface. The helmsman

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explains how he thinks ‘maravillas’ function, “Me ocupo de pensar en un hecho para que
pueda suceder. Si no las pensamos, las maravillas se cansan y se van”(202). Contardi
and Sandra demonstrate that even from exile, even with the grief of losing one’s son or
experiencing severe pain, the mind can still create and nourish maravillas. C ontary to Gil
Amate’s conclusion that Moyano’s novel lacks, “el mas leve vestigio, positivo.” (582).
Moyano here demonstrates that a positive perspective of the world can exist. despite
one’s inauspicious circumstances.

It is true, however, that nurturing maravillas is no simple task. Even if Rolando
classifies his exilic journey east as “...una tercera o cuarta generacion de espafiolitos
bastardcados que regresan fracasados de las Indias,” (394), when he empowers himself
with language and renames the Cristoforo to Zampano, the boat mutates (on occasion he
even calls the ship a ‘barco mutativo’) achieving for him the allure of a “barco
maravilloso” (216). But once the boat approaches Barcelona, it mutates back, “Ya no era
Zampano. claro; demasiado nombre para un camion donde se cargan trastos” (392). The
marvelous disappears with the appearance of a list of vessels due to dock in Barcelona’s
harbor, where one mistake is made with respect to the cargo aboard the Cristoforo,
indicating “Lastre” instead of “Pasaje.” Before Spain even meets these people, they have
been reduced to mere objects, and the ‘marvelous’ boat that Rolando had imagined.
vanishes.

Rolando believes that had he been traveling the inverse journey on a XVI Century
galleon headed to the Americas, he would have written about his “tremenda expectativa”

of things to come; perhaps then, his perspective of the marvelous would have been

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different. But. even his own name, represents an inversion of American and European
experiences. In contrast to the French epic here from Chanson de Roland. who dies
fighting the empire’s enemy, Rolando is his own country’s enemy, defenseless against the
exile forced upon him, and destined (like most exiles) to be forgotten by his compatriots.
unlike his revered and beloved French counterpart. In addition, the title of Moyano’s
novel, Libre de.,, brings back images of the Medieval Libra de caballerias, (knights
errantry), where heroes without fear or flaws of character engage in fantastic adventures.
saving damsels in distress and Victoriously gaining fame and fortune.‘0 Again, Rolando’s
exilic experience represents the anti-heroic adventures of his European counterparts.

Comparisons are also made with respect to the Spanish exiles who left Franco’s
dictatorship in the 1930's to the Southern Cone exiles of the 1970's and 1980's. They
arrive to Spain with the desire to integrate, “seamos europeos,” but for all who arrive, the
government stamps in their passports, “prohibido trabajar en Espafia” (427). and as one
sarcastically comments, their situation is, “Como en el 36 cuando llegaban alla Ios
exiliados espafioles y se juntaban veinte mil gallegos en el puerto para esperarlos y habia
amistad y laburo para todos. Igualito” (419). The Latin American exiles find themselves
rejected by both America and Europe.

Only the Spanish cook aboard the Cristéforo, Rafa, (who left Spain as a
consequence of Franco’s military dictatorship) could possibly fathom the difficulty of

deraeination and that of transplantation that awaits Rolando. In an act of exilic

 

'0 Various critics have noted the comparison of Rolando to his French counterpart
as well as the historical significance of the novel’s title.

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camaraderie, he gives Rolando the address of his niece in Madrid. His generosity of spirit
is even more remarkable when one realizes that he does so believing that Rolando is the
mentally disturbed passenger, known as Masoca, who desperately asked for a compass
upon boarding the ship, worried that they may be headed for another torture camp in
Southern Argentina. In any case, Rolando’s beacon of hope lives on “Humiliation
Street.”
Nieves/Sandra and the Barco Paralelo

For Rolando, Nieves represents the “caballero’s” damsel, but unlike the knight
errantry heroes, his lady needs no rescuing. In another reversal of roles, it would be she
the one rescuing him from the marginalization of exile. Indeed. he even imagines her as
an intermediary who somehow convinces the ultimate Spanish authority (envisioned as a
count). to allow him entrance into Spain. Rolando finds himself fantasizing about her. as
he did about other women while he was incarcerated. but this time instead of her being
“borrosa[ ]y cambiante[ ]... ahora habia un puente real que la fijaba: el papelito”(which
contains her address) (84). When it comes to expressing his erotic fantasies about her.
Rolando decides to cloak his voice through that of an-other, this time the passenger.
. Bidoglio." The ‘erotic’ details remain innocent. After all, Bidoglio’s voice is still
Rolando’s, and he can only write about that which he feels comfortable with. In his
fantasies though, he imagines them walking about in a Madrid where it begins to snow (a
rare phenomenon in the Spanish capital). It reminds the reader of the tango. ‘Volver.’ (a

name Sandra suggested for his parallel boat as well as for his imaginary child). so often

 

" Rolando writes, “preferiria pasarme a otra voz, como si la contase otro” (89).

75

mentioned in the novel, where one verse alludes to the snow that falls on the singer’s
face: “Volver, con la frente marchita, las nieves del tiempo platearon mi sien.” Through
Nieves, he in effect, also returns home.

Coping with a traumatic event, such as exile, manifests itself in various manners.
For Rolando, as seen above, Nieves represents a physical link to the other side, and
through her he finds comfort. Masoca obsessively searches for scientific evidence. such
as a compass. that will provide him with objective information about the vessel’s
direction. Contardi, in contemplating Goya’s painting, ‘El quitasol,’ becomes one with
the work when he decides to, “meterrne dentro del quitasol” (290), where he finds peace
and tranquility. Other exiles aboard the ship recur to playing music, and later as we shall
see, fictionalizations of their experiences also help mitigate the pain of their experience.
In Rolando case, once he receives Nieves address, he fabricates in his own mind a ‘barco
paralelo,’ in which he places her beyond the grasp of any interrogator (his experience
with interrogations and death lead him to remain cautious even with his fantasies).l3
Through the parallel boat Rolando can imagine that he is an-other: Nieves’ beau, father of
their child and living a content life in the land that soon enough will label him an
outsider. By imagining himself as this ‘other’ he avoids the fact that he is becoming an
undesirable ‘other’ (a man without a land, without a family. a vocation or security). This

parallel boat functions like a treasure box, in it he could “guardar ese monton de cosas

que desde hace milenios andan dando vueltas por el mundo sin poder posarse por falta de

 

'2 “Y si un gendarme muy avisado llegaba a descubrir sus amores secretos. podria
matarlo a e'l pero jamas a Nieves, que era inmortal en el barco paralelo” (95).

76

palabras. que necesitan ser nombradas o deseadas para salvarse del olvido” (88)."
However. because it holds so much, its size overtakes that of the Cristoforo, erasing it and
Rolando in its path, and provoking the narrator to temporarily lose his mental and
physical health. Somehow the parallel boat stays afloat but once he allows the imaginary
to invade reality. by telling others that he has become a father (of an imaginary child he
and Nieves engender together), even if it was done merely to keep Sandra quiet while
listening to a musical concert aboard the ship, he soon realizes, expressed in the third
person that, “todo se Ie iba de las manos. incluso el barquito paralelo”(115). Though he
would have preferred to continue writing about his parallel boat and his relationship with
Nieves (259), an incident with Sandra, destroys the imaginative coping mechanism to
avoid reality by using it instead to confront reality.

The only real flesh and blood woman that Rolando invests time with is Sandra,
and especially once he and others learn about the torture she endured while incarcerated.
This occurs on one particular evening as the boat approaches the equator when Sandra
raised her arm to say goodbye to a Southern Hemisphere constellation and her short
sleeve slid back revealing torture scars. With this visual reminder of the cruelties

inflicted on the body by the dictatorship, and where the body functions as evidence

 

'3 Other attributes of the parallel boat include, “Un barquito que se pareciese mas
al de mi abuelo para poder vincularrne a un ticmpo verdadero. Surgido del deseo, no de
la me’canica migratoria. A la vez, especie de arcon para ir guardando lo que hallase en el
camino que hay que hacer solito después de ser destetado por la tia Clara. Area para
guardar virtualidades, objetos en proceso de ge'nesis que hay que alimentar con el deseo
hasta que crezcan, y volcarlos despue's en la realidad que nos imponen, aunque mas no
sea para enrarecerla. F iccién contra ficcion, algo parecido a acoplar palabras propias a las
del interrogador, para descolocarlo y hablar de igual a igual. Un barco para asegurar las
existencia precaria de las virtualidades” (88).

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against it, Rolando feels unable to continue his imaginary affair with Nieves or pass on
the topic of torture to the barco paralelo, so that he would not have to write about it.
Indeed, when he looks at his own body in the mirror for the first time after nine months,
he finds it unrecognizable. He would have preferred to “seguir tocando con sordina”
(260), but with the above incident, he decides to throw the mute away and play his violin
without being concerned about its volume. He had tried circumventing the topic of
torture until this point, but now he feels obliged to dedicate a chapter to it.
Geographically it proves important because Rolando addresses those issues that forced
exiles to leave the Southern Hemisphere just as they are crossing the equator and leaving
it behind." Rolando begins this chapter entitled Cadenza, with an admonition to his
readers, “puede resultar un tanto fuerte. . . no porque vaya a mostrar camicerias y
torturas... a esas cosas que las cuenten Ios que tengan mejor estomago que yo” (257-58),
and for more details he suggests the reader consult Amnesty International. The
‘Cadenza,’ or cadence, (where “la orquesta se va apagando y me quedo solo ante el
publico con mi violincito, tengo que lucirrne” 259) which doesn’t end the novel since
another four chapters proceed it, approaches in an obscure manner Rolando’s attempt to
address that which he “no volveré a tocar el tema en mi vida” (280). He is barely able to
transcribe information about Sandra’s experience in prison- the fact that Sandra was
raped by all the guards for example- and he can only listen to her story with the help of

alcohol. Once inebriated Rolando takes advantage of her. His identity suddenly changes

 

'4 With the changing of the stars, many exiles hope that the Northern Hemisphere
will also bring them better luck.

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and he becomes an—other, not one based on fantasy but one who in reality he envisions to
be like his own abusive father who mistreated his wife, or like Sandra’s torturers to whom
she would plead, “por favor” as she does now to him. The man he no longer recognizes
in the mirror, is the one who earlier had imagined that if he could only remember what he
was thinking the moment before he was arrested he could now continue as before. “todo
volvera a ser como antes, al menos por dentro. Sera como volver a casa” (147). His
behavior with Sandra demonstrates that he can no longer return to a time of innocence.
He no longer is the man he once was, returning home is impossible. The Cadenza is not a
musical score, but a compositional literary rendition and he creates it not as a musician
but as an-other, as a writer.

Another consequence of learning about Sandra’s torture, is the fact that Rolando
can no longer continue writing in his travel diary. Though he had only the night before
written in it its first and now last line, “Anoche empezaron a cambiar las estrellas.” he
feels it improper to continue. Like his grandfather, Rolando now finds himself also
failing at the attempt to write a travel diary. Indeed he fulfills the same objective by
artistically creating a rendition of his experience via an a pasteriari novel. The travel
diary then became the medium through which he and his friends aboard the Cristéforo
would write their story about desaparecidos for Contardi, appearing later in the novel. Of
the remaining four chapters after Cadenza, two are dedicated to this fictional creation.
Fictionalizations

Having at least approached the issue of torture in the Cadenza, Rolando’s next

chapter turns to fiction in order to verbalize in a coherent form. his and others’ thoughts

79

and feelings about the desaparecidos left behind. As mentioned above, Contardi’s son,
Haroldo, has disappeared, and it is for him, at least formally, that Rolando and the others
write their fictional story. Before continuing, it must be noted that the painter Contardi
and his son Haroldo, sonorously remind the reader of the writer Haroldo Conti. a friend of
Moyano’s who disappeared during the military dictatorship." Contardi had explained to
Rolando at the beginning of their voyage that, “todo objeto necesita un marco para ser
percibido plenamente” (85). This need is temporarily fulfilled by telling Rolando’s own
story of exile within the Northern European setting. Its construction does not completely
fail for the exiles later utilize the Iightkeeper theme in framing their story for Contardi.

Fiction and reality function together to create a real physical text about that which
many feel to be quite surreal, be it exile, torture, or/and the desaparecidos. At the
initiation of Rolando’s journey, the Spanish cook, one with over 40 years of exilic
experience tells him, “Los inocentes... se niegan a vivir en la ficcién pero no pueden o no
alcanzan a ver que son ellos los unicos que podrian devolver la realidad al mundo:”
paradoxically he affirms, “es sonar Ia realidad en un mundo ficticio” (77). In fact.
Rolando later realizes that reality can be “un desaparecido mas” (339) but fiction may
help in reclaiming it, especially the historical omissions in the official story told by

dictatorship. In the novel there is much debate concerning the meaning of the word

 

'5 Moyano explained to Gnutzmann that Libre de nevies. “Es un homenaje.
digamos, carifioso a Conti.. . A mi me detuvieron el mismo dia del golpe y estuve doce
dias en la carcel. Luego fui a Buenos Aires, porque ahi no me molestaba nadie por ser
otro distrito militar. Llame' a Haroldo por teléfono para decirle que me iba y Ie avise' que
se cuidara. Pero él me contesto que no le iban a hacer nada, gporque ? gque' habia hecho?
Me invite a un chinchulin, pero no fui. Ese misma dia 10 detuvieron.” (121)

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‘desparecido.’ To most, these people are dead, but for some, the desaparecidos are
neither dead nor alive, and thus, they exist in limbo. Contardi believes that while the
desaparecidos are dead, the violent nature of their deaths left behind their souls in search
of their bodies. They cannot move onto the other world until these have joined again.
Contardi conjectures that help for the desaparecidos can only come from “afuera”
(outside). “algo asi como un faro” (289). And hence, the passengers create a story about a
Ii ghthouse. its keeper, his daughter, her coming of age and departure from home. and
finally, the father’s strange disappearance."’

Rolando’s obsessive return to the role of matches in the lighthouse keeper’s
ability or lack thereof to maintain light in the lighthouse, reminds the reader of Rolando’s
prison companion, El F Iaco, who cached as many matches as possible in hopes that
attaching them to his body he would be able to fly to his escape. Neither El Flaco nor the
lighthouse keeper survive.

At the beginning of the story the creators of it want Contardi to identify with the
lighthouse keeper, who would always keep its light burning, but then, the story takes a
life of its own, and Contardi’s needs become secondary. Bidoglio for one, feels that they
should be “objective,” even if it is at Contardi’s expense: “que a la historia hay que
Ilevarla hasta sus ultimas consecuencias” (310). And although Rolando tries to follow the

plot of the song in creating the story, he too notes, “Si esto no sirve para Contardi cs otro

 

"’ The Iightkeeper is also Haroldo Conti, the ‘faroldo.’ Moyano explained in an
interview with Navarro that his friend, “Una vez paro en casa, en La Rioja, y se la paso
comprando faroles para su coleccion. Mi hijo Ricardo Ie dijo, ‘Vos te llamas Faroldo
Conti’” (199).

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asunto.” (31 1). According to the passengers, fiction must have some sense of veracity.
and even if they’d like to present a happy ending in the story for Contardi. they realize
that it would not be realistic.

But, ironically, after all of them make an effort and actually do see a light from
what they think is the shore of Africa, their fictional light keeper suddenly becomes
“real,” and it is to him that they give credit for the Iight’s appearance. The suggestion here
is that reality and fiction may be difficult to separate. The reality of the light seen by the
passengers of the Cristoforo now becomes a part of the story for Contardi, they write that
the light keeper, “estaba muy feliz y en curda acurrucandose en su catre cuando recibio
nuestras Ilamadas telepaticas y se le jodio la casa” (316).

The story demonstrates the creative process in which the passengers engage:
deleting passages, rewriting others, but also discussing the various possible outcomes for
the light keeper. the possible reactions of their primary audience-Contardi. and to what
extent he should determine the storyline. After a brief interruption with Chapter Thirteen.
the story continues, though this time Rolando clearly indicates that after having polished
the first part in order to satisfy Contardi, with the second. “podemos trabajar con entera
libertad” (351 ). This story that was crafted with such thought for the benefit of Contardi.
in the end was never given to him. In fact, Rolando still holds it in his possession.’7 Why
did they not give Contardi the story? Could it be that the fictional rendition of an account

about desaparecidos for a man who’s son goes missing seems cruel, as Rolando implied,

 

'7 In Chapter Ten, he writes about the only sentence recorded in his travel diary.
(which later becomes the story for Contardi), and he alludes to the proximity of its
location: “un cuademo que anda por ahi dando vueltas todavia...” (231).

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when they first began the project? Their attempt to mitigate a real event via fiction in the
end may not have been successful for Contardi, who never reads it. but it does serve a
purpose for all who participated in its creation. Through their characters, they, like
Moyano himself, can begin to liberate themselves from their traumatic experiences.

Another fictional rendition of an historical event, takes place in Chapter Five. in
the form of a play with puppets about the period of Argentina’s first years of
independence. The parenthetical annotations concerning the scenes are provided by
Rolando. in an objective style, delineating in written form, movements and other facets
only visible to the audience. So detached is he as a narrator of the play, that he even
addresses himself in the third person, when he speaks. The chapter includes both that
presented on stage and that discussed in the audience, particularly their reactions. which
vary from disgust (like La Torre de Pisa who disagrees with the ‘historical’ account of the
events presented), to embarrassment" (Rolando finds the topic too ‘intimate’ to be
addressed in a public setting).

The title of the puppet performance, ‘El lavallazo,’ refers to General Juan Lavalle
who in an act of treachery in 1828 ordered the assassination of the then legitimate
governor, Coronel Manuel Dorrego. In this chapter Moyano juxtaposes this event of
early Argentine history with that of the military dictatorship of the 1970's and 1980's.

The play alludes to a vicious cycle of repetitive deleterious political actions that the

 

'8 At the beginning of the narrative Rolando also uses the word, ‘vergiienza’ when
he was arrested and taken from his home while his neighbors watched. His private
feeling of embarrassment for being treated like a criminal though he is innocent, is
reverberated in this ‘public’ setting of a (hi)story symmetrical to his own.

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Argentine people, as a whole, never benefit from. Representatives of government are
corrupt and utilize any means necessary to achieve the power and financial prestige they
want. be it in the nineteenth century or in the twentieth.

In Chapter Two, Rolando mentioned Dorrego in his musical theory conceming
interrogations, where he explained that Dorrego “es fusilado sin palabras” because he was
denied a court appearance or the right to verbally defend himself before his executor.
Lavalle. The exiles too are sent away from their homeland in silence. but unlike their
predecessor. they are able to voice their stories, which they choose to do so through
ficfion.

Those few who do disagree with the historical rendition of Dorrego’s death argue
that, “L0 que pasa es que cambian la historia como se Ies antoja y no respetan ni a su
madre” (163)- a comment that could have easily been made by the exiles concerning the
present military dictatorships, is instead uttered by an Argentine tourist.” El Gordito
responds to the above comment, that nothing has been changed, “salvo la historia oficial”
(I64). Moyano seems to imply that official versus unofficial historical accounts have
plagued Argentina, from its very beginning as a nation, and until there can be some sort

of a consensus about the facts, including those of the last century about which people

 

'9 In Bonnardel’s study in Noveln y exilin; enteme n Marie Benedetti. Jose’
Denese, Dgiel Meynne she describes how history was molded by its writers to create a

hero out of a villain:
Las cartas Ieidas por Rauch en la pieza de teatro. forrnan parte de los
archives de la Historia argentina. Una vez que esas cartas toman estado
publico, el fusilamiento de Dorrego es visto desde otro angulo y Lavalle
aparece en las versiones de algunos historiadores como un militar honesto,
victima de las presiones de politicos avezados que se sirvieron de él sin
comprometerse. (1 16).

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should be less attached to emotionally than to those of the present, the country will
continue to be divided.20

In any case, Moyano asserts that, “todos en el barco eran titeres, como una gran
farsa. como la historia de Lavalle y Dorrego de la funcion. . . Y la historia de Dorrego
significaba un eslabon fundamental en la cadena de nuestros dramas. Lavalle es nucstro
Videla” (201 ).2'

Just as Moyano utilizes real names of historical people and places, he also makes
use of fiction in order to mask the real name of another (Contardi), to hide his own voice.
or to prove the potent force that fiction can have on reality. For example, two passengers.
Bidoglio and El Gordito, have known each other since childhood, but never spoke again
after Bidoglio stole El Gordito’s eraser. Aboard the ship, El Gordito tells everyone that
Bidoglio has the face of a police officer, and although he is not one (but one who did
suffer from the police’s actions) everyone aboard is easily persuaded by El Gordo’s
arguments and they begin to think that maybe Bidoglio not only looks like a police
officer, but is one. Though the two later reconcile their differences, Moyano proves that
fiction can quite easily alter reality for both participants and observes alike. for good or
for bad.

Curiously Moyano equates exile with a return to childhood. And true enough.

Rolando does return to childhood memories. especially those that were significant in

 

3" The counter argument by the tourist is, “Ahora me explico por que los corren
del pais” (162), El Gordito assures her that she is correct.

3' Quoted from an interview with Felipe Navarro and published in Novela y exilio.

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establishing his own concept of Argentine nationality. The maps he would color as a
child, where different colors divided the land from the ocean, become real in his mind as
he is separated from his homeland- colors blend at the border, and then separate again.
Childhood games suddenly have significance: toy soldiers that were played with as a
child, are real soldiers as an adult. Rolando wants the reader to understand that he/ she too
will play a game with respect to the novel, “en el momenta menos pensada estaremos
jugando sin saberlo” (15). That is, the suspension of disbelief will be established again
and we readers will enter the game of reading fiction without being reminded that it is,
until the next time. But, the creation of fiction becomes a game for the narrator (and
Moyano), with examples such as the puppet play, the chapter about the ship and the bay.
and the fictional story for Contardi. Even the characters themselves engage in the game
of looking for a lighthouse while writing their story, losing themselves in their own
creative fictions.

Indeed, fiction is the only artistic creation allowed into the adopted land. As seen
earlier, Rolando’s Gryga is left to drown in the rains of the Northwest, and another
musical instrument, a guitar, drowns in the Mediterranean. This particular instrument,
shaped by the Northwestern Argentine, Fede, into a musical object of perfect delight, had

no worthy player of it until one couple without children decided to have a child just so
that Fede’s guitar would have someone to play it. At Barcelona’s harbor, it accidentally
falls into the water. Consolation is given to its owner by telling him that Spain is the land
of guitars (implying that he can easily find another to replace it). Even if musical

instruments drown, Moyano’s novel assures the reader that language will not. Words will

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survive shipwrecks, injustices, and history. At first torn from having lost his Gryga.
Rolando now creates a maravilla of his own, a fictional story about reality that utilizes
both music and language, a hybrid genre that depicts the in between liminal state of exile.

including that of his own identity as ‘other’ and the same.

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Chapter Three

The Arrival: Marta Traba’s mm

Marta Traba’s novel, En ennlqnier Ingar, develops the exilic space within the
adopted land partially explored in Chapter One. Here, the Southern Cone exiles’ first
“encounter” with the new country transpires through a second medium- from a physical
space separate yet within the space of the host country.

The author was born in Buenos Aires. Argentina, and left her country in 1950 to
study art in Rome and Paris after having graduated from the National University of
Buenos Aires at the age of 20. In an interview Traba told Evelyn Garfield, “I left
Argentina because I didn’t like it there at all, not at all” (124). The political repression
under Peron and the claustrophobic conditions of living in a city that was unequipped to
handle the number of its inhabitants, which had tripled in just a few years, were reasons
that she cited for leaving.

Shortly after Traba’s stay in Europe she relocated to Colombia, a country she
would call her home for some 14 years until she candidly criticized the govemment’s
violent retribution against students who were protesting a visit by Rockefeller to the
University of Bogota’s campus. Though the government of Colombia had at first
demanded that she leave the country within 24 hours, people from around the nation
immediately came to the defense of this art critic who had become a national celebrity.
Of her accomplishments one must mention that she founded the Museum of Modern Art
in Bogota, and consistently and passionately informed others about Latin American

artistic contributions with her numerous publications and television programs. The

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overwhelming response by and outrage of the public, persuaded the president to pardon
her, but in turn, she was obliged to relinquish her position as professor at the University
of Bogota. The effect was the same: she was forced into exile. She would live the
remainder of her days in temporary homes-Uruguay, Puerto Rico, Venezuela. Spain. the
United States, and France. Shortly before her untimely death in a plane crash with her
husband Angel Rama, near Madrid, Spain in 1983, President Belisario Betancur of
Colombia granted her Colombian citizenship.

Marta Traba began writing fiction after having established herself as an art critic.
Her first novel, WW, won the prestigious Premio de Novela from
the Casa de las Americas in 1966. She would live to write another six novels. two of
which have been published posthumously.

One of these two is En euelguier Inger,l written in the United States the year
before the Reagan administration rejected her application for permanent residency in
1983. Her outspoken political views during her three years in Washington DC. would
ultimately lead her into exile once again. The title of the above novel could very well
refer to Traba’s own exilic experiences; at the time of writing the novel her fate within
the USA was still unclear, and later on she ascertained that her life, “no ha sido mas que

una serie de saltos acrobaticos en el vacio” (Poniatowska 892). En cunlgnier lugar

 

' The second is Cesnsjnfin. In an interview with Evelyn Picon Garfield, Traba
had told her that Eneuntqnjenlngfl, and the novel that preceded it- C pnversaeién nl sur.

as well as Veinte ands ne es nnde (posthumously published in 1988 as C ese sin fin)
would comprise a trilogy that she wanted to entitle, La vidn n euestas: “There is no other
possible theme in my present writing than that of the life we began to carry around with
us on our backs when it became impossible to return to our countries” (139). The second
of the trilogy, studied here, deals entirely with the theme of exile.

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recognizes the absolute unpredictability of the exilic “landing,” if you will, from the leap
beyond the familiar into the unknown, or “vacio.” as Traba defined it. to literally
‘anyplace’ where one might be accepted.

For most exiles, the landing into the host country, once, hopefully. a host country
has been found, is anything but smooth. In addition to coping with the unsurmountable
sadness of all that has been lost, the exile must confront some of the foreign elements of
surviving a new environment, such as those of the linguistic, economical, political and
social ilks, to name but a few. Just as in Moyano’s novel the exiles aboard the sea vessel
are vulnerable to the possibility of a shipwreck, through the voice of Mariana in Traba’s
novel, the arrivals to the new land feel as if they have experienced just that. The
difficulty and abruptness with which the exile must assimilate the constant input of new
information is apparent in even the simplest of matters, such as that which opens Traba’s
novel in which Mariana hailing a taxi to work finds herself helplessly unable to remember
the name of the city she now inhabits. This city’s name soon comes to her mind. but
Traba strategically excludes it from the novel, thereby delineating the feature of the
qualitative “cualquier”/any “lugar”/place (un)described in the title.

Traba sets the novel in an undisclosed northern European city where exiles
escaping Argentina’s military dictatorship arrive and settle in an abandoned train station
provided by the host government. Six thousand exiles live in the station and in the
surrounding emergency homes adjoining it. They arrive by the truckload to this hitherto
public space of transit that ironically now represents one of immobilization and

stagnation. Its location at the outskirts of the city separates the natives from the

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foreigners, dissuading contact or conversation between the two. The diegesis is sustained
by two events that galvanize the host country and affect the fate of the stationers. First.
Flora, a victim of torture in the homeland whose newborn child disappeared there.
commits suicide one year after living in the host country. Basically overnight, the host
government renews its policy of ‘dislocation,’ i.e., evacuation, of the stationers.
provoking the exiles to politically mobilize in order to protect themselves from the
possibility of being left without any shelter at all. Two years later F Iora’s torturer, Torres.
who accompanied Flora and her husband on the exilic voyage to Europe and with whom
they shared an apartment in the host country, is found assassinated in another continent.
With Torres’ death the host government immediately decides to once and for all demolish
the train station with no promise of accommodations afterward, giving originally one
month’s notice to its inhabitants, and then suddenly only two days.2 After being forced to
leave their own homeland, the exiles become now an object of coercion by another state.
initiating, as many explain it, their second exile. The connection between Torres and the
host government with respect to the final dispersal of the exiles is not arbitrary, it is based
more on similarity between the two than difference, for both intentionally sought to

annihilate or remove that which hindered their ideal of a homogeneous society, be it in

 

2 After the explosion of two bombs in a newspaper building that had been printing
articles opposing the exiles, the host government made the decision to demolish the
station within two days. No clues are provided as to who may have been behind the
attacks, (The fact that, “Raul [who plays no role in the novel] estaba formando una
milicia armada” (207) as noted by Ana Cruz, seems to be in response to the newspaper
bombings in the first place). The host government cannot be dismissed as a potential
culprit, since, it would then be able to expedite the dispersal of the exiles, with whom
they have become increasingly impatient.

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the homeland (citizens in disaccord with the policies of the government). or in exile (as
outsiders). Torres’ obsession with creating order and giving orders (even to himself) in
order to maintain a homogenous state, is taken with him in exile where he describes the
station as. “toda esa gentuza viviendo en el peor desorden, en la peor anarquia. sin nadie
que los metiera en vereda” (72)... “e1 orden se habia perdido. Rumiaba el orden, queria
tragarlo y no era posible; vomitaba el orden” (73). The host government is really not
much different than Torres in that they recur to physically ostracizing the exiles from the
native citizens so as to maintain their own idea(l) of order.

For the majority of exiles arriving to the host country they have no other option
than to stay in the train station. Hundreds of exiles have applied for apartments especially
built for them by the host land, but only a select few inhabit these prized residences.
obtained through either pure savvy (like Flora) or political position, which even under
these circumstances requires a waiting period of a few months. Not all exiles were
satisfied with these arrangements; given the spacial constraints in the station and the
indeterminacy of their stay away from the homeland, some in their 20's or 30's, decided to
take an alternative less accepted route (by the other exiles), offered by the government
and move to a remote area known as the “tiendas del Este.” This run-down commercial
zone with time becomes reactivated through their efforts without infringing unwantedly
upon the natives or their territory. Approximately 1,000, or 1/7 of the total exiles
obtained an apartment in the Este, where they are able to work for a living and contribute
financially to their own personal needs. Due to the location of the tiendas del Este. those

inhabiting this area come into contact with the city and its inhabitants. whereas the station

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dwellers, isolated from contact with the natives. choose not to venture beyond the
perimeters of the station, regardless of the months or even years they have spent there.3
The fact that the Eastemers can in large part provide for themselves in comparison to the
stationers is one of the points of contention between the two groups. Luis. the 29 year old
protagonist of the story, who lives with his mother in her print shop near the station. is
unemployed, and often feels that the Eastemers judge him for it. Many of the latter are
interested in making business deals and adjusting to their new environment as best they
can, while the stationers, in many ways epitomized through Luis, wait for the host or
home government to change their fate. Because these two institutions have been slow to
change in the exiles’ favor, the stationers have rebelled on numerous occasions against
their deplorable living conditions: the dilapidated station, the tight quarters without any
possibility for privacy, and the endless waiting in line for meals and latrines. But. with
the overcrowding even of the tiendas del Este, they have no where else to go.
Maintaining Nationality

In Traba’s novel integration is not a goal for the exiles (they even lack curiosity
about the country they now inhabit), nor is it wanted of them by the host govemmcnt-
which displays a distant reception of them into their land. While the exiles reside in a
new land, they are forcefully marginalized within it. In fact, their present exilic state is
one that they hope soon to forget, one that they envision as temporary. Therefore the

disinterest by many of the exiles (Eastemers and stationers) to learn the language of the

 

3 In fact the majority of the station dwellers have not visited the host city even
once, regardless of the time spent in the host country.

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host country, its politics, its culture, even to visit the city that they inhabit, represents their
conviction and desire that exile does not and cannot become a permanent state for them.
As Leon and Rebeca Grinberg delineate in their Psychoanalytic Perspectives on
Migration and Exile:
In any migration the subject fantasizes about returning, but these fantasies
usually meet with one of several fates: the idea remains as a future
possibility and meanwhile acts as a source of secret pleasure to
compensate for the persistent discomfort of uprootedness; the fantasies are
acted out in sporadic visits; or the fantasies lead one to make concrete
arrangements to return. (179)
In En eunlgniet Inga; the exiles’ fantasies with respect to the return home apply primarily
to the first fate- to psychologically ameliorate the current upheaval of the exilic condition-
though one character, Mariana, does actually return home, and another character. the
older son of Alicia, still as a child, begins to save money in order to return to the land
where his father was murdered. In general, the exiles in this northern European country
also comfort themselves by pretending to believe that a rendition of a better version of the
country left behind is being formulated within the train station, through in reality they are
cognizant that their efforts remain primarily within a fictional domain.4 The

fictionalization of the station as a pseudo-sovereign state, a ‘pais de ficcién’ as they

 

‘ Various characters realize this at some point in the novel: Vézquez. Ada. Ali and
Mariana who says that she prefers a world in which “nada se' comunica con ella” to
“buscar la mentira de la estacion... Pero lo cierto es que Ali no ha pedido deshacer su
argumento de que eso es una ficcion de pais” (108).

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denominate it, however, does present ‘real’ ramifications to those inhabiting it when its
‘bordcrs’ are threatened and later dissolved by the host land.

First of all a better understanding of country and nation must be addressed before
further exploring the “pais de ficcién” imagined by the exiles in Europe. Luis conceives
‘patria’ in a manner that holds true for many of his compatriots, “para e'l la patria se
transportaba con la gente y estaba ahi donde siguiera Ia discusion y se amiaran lios entre
grupos y personas” (63). For Luis, one’s ‘patria’ can be transferred beyond its traditional
political borders via its people if they are able to stay together to keep its language and
culture alive. Hence, his obsession with tabulating the new arrivals to the station, their
whereabouts, his preoccupation with the possibility of evacuation from the station. and
his disappointment when his compatriots stray, if they do, into the host city.

Benedict Anderson’s definition of nation as an “imagined political community”
also applies to the exiled community at hand. By imagining themselves as a country
within another country, if even one that is fictional in nature, certain developments arise:
the political parties of old are reestablished, politicians vie for leadership, free elections
are declared. and political scandals ensue. Of the six political leaders that emerge,
Vézquez gains the majority of support from the stationers with his demagoguery, and
harangues about an imminent return home. He hopes that his political role in exile will
ensure him the reputation needed to succeed back home. However, in exile he must.
“manejar un material irreal, pero vencio esa irrealidad con un discurso que tomo cada vez
mas cuerpo, adaptandose a las nuevas circunstancias. . .” (60). He is able to establish a

so—called “programa, una direccion departamental y una tesoreria.” demonstrating that

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exilic fictional imaginings can propel real political manifestations within the train station.
Fiction functions not only as a defense mechanism against the present struggles of exile.
it can transform reality.
Yet, beneath the politically active surface of the train station lies a deep paralysis
that has infected and affected all of the deracinated as a consequence of the existential
state of immobility symbolized in the train station that takes no one anywhere. lnhabiting
a dimension in between the fictional and the real, in a non-space (in the new land but still
separate from it) and a non-time (where the present tense is interpreted as temporal and
hopefully forgettable) also affects the exiles’ identity, which in Traba’s novel they try to
preserve by reinforcing their common nationality.
In Ross Poole’s definition of nation, he elaborates upon Anderson’s concept of
“imagined community,” stating that the first steps toward its explanation
are when we realize that when we imagine the nation we do not merely
construct an object of consciousness, but we also form a conception of
ourselves as existing in relation to that object. The nation is not just a
form of consciousness, it is also a form of self-consciousness. As
members of the nation recognize each other through the nation, they also
recognize themselves. If the nation is an imagined community, it is also a
form of identity. (12-13)

When this self-consciousness of nation for the stationers becomes jeopardized through

the host nation’s evacuation policy, the exiles indefatigably defend their territory (the

station) which in effect, is equivalent to defending their own identity- all that is left for

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them from their lives in the homeland. Suddenly, the fictional cohesion of community
becomes a real sensation and one that the exiles feel naturally inclined to protect.

Other exiles who had arrived to other areas of the country encountered similar
provocations by the host government that they tried to disrupt to no avail.5 Here. besides
the 6,000 living in and around the station, the Eastemers also rally to support their
compatriots. Any attempt to create distinctions between the two groups, which have not
seen eye to eye on all issues related to their exilic status, fails. Men. women, the young
and the old, all march outside the station united in their effort to prevent the dispersion of
their people, and of what ultimately would be their last ties to a tangible rather than an
abstract concept of national identity. This time they succeed in thwarting the host
government, but their future is precarious, for of those in other cities who were obliged to
leave their exilic communities, over time they lost all contact with other nationals. “se
desconectaron enteramente de ellos” (206). The fear of breaking apart from a group that
reinforces the identity of its members and together consciously imagines the return to a
better homeland is articulated by Luis: “que algun dia ese pais se trasladaria en bloque a
su verdadero lugar, cuando echaran a los asesinos en el poder; pero jamas los echarian.
jamas, si empezaban a licuarse y disolverse en ese mundo extrafio. donde hablaban otras
lenguas y tenian otros modos de vivir incompatibles con los suyos” (144). For Luis, and

others, the dispersal of the collective community into the host land is akin to the loss of

 

5 One character remembers, “no hicieron mas que mandar a los chicos para que se
pusieran delante, y claro, los tipos se bajaron de las caterpillar, sacaron a las chicos... y
después que revisaron que no habia nada, ni gente ni muebles en las casuchas. las
voltearon en minutos” (129).

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self.
Us versus Them

Poole’s definition of an imagined community depends on its existence. “as an
object of consciousness. It is the public embodiment of the nation’s conception of itself.
As a form of identity, it exists as a mode of individual self-and other- awareness” (12-13).
Indeed, both the host country and the exiles differentiate themselves from each other.
The newspapers on more than one occasion “sefialaban con temor el crecimiento
incontrolado de los refugiados en la estacion” (I38). Luis realizes that they have become
a threat to the host country: “Se trata de que somos una ciudad dentro de la ciudad y
crecemos como los monstruos de las peliculas de ficcion” (129). Comparing themselves
with aliens from another planet is truly in accord with their sentiments that their
experience is one belonging to a fictional realm. They have become the ‘other.’ and the
‘other’ for them envisions the exiles as foreign- as misplaced and displaced beings. while
they in turn dehumanize the natives, referring to them as savages and strange people with
a bizarre language.

In order to avert the natives’ attention from the exiles in their homeland, the
government of the European country decided to place them in an area away from the city.
a space that both the natives and the exiles disparage and even compare to a concentration
camp. Curiously though, it seems that the natives have been led to believe that the exiles
live in the way they do because they want to, not because they have not been offered
adequate housing. From the newspapers, “[los exiliados] leia[n] con disgusto que

hablaran de ellos como de pordioseros amontonados unos sabre otros, sin trabajo, sin

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porvenir, empefiades en volver a un lugar que dia a dia se hacia mas infranqueable y
remoto. gCome era posible que vivieran come bestias? gCeme era posible que no
tuvieran un techo propie. . . Y la gente se preguntaba también: gceme era posible” (198)?
With photographs printed in the newspapers of the stationers, “La opinion publica se
horrerize: gcuando y come se pude establecer ese campe de concentracien?” (199), but
even journalists realizing from conversations with some of the stationers that they are
unhappy with their current residence, wonder why then they had refused the relocations
offered by the government earlier. The Galvez family being interviewed by one particular
joumalist simply doesn’t understand what relocation offers he is referring to, and as the
narrator comments, “Era un dialogo de Ieces” (200). This conversation is actually one of
the few attempted between the natives and the stationers and though they misunderstand
each other, it is not due to the lack of an efficient interpreter. as transpires during the
evacuation attempt between representatives of the station and those of the host country."
but rather an intentional non-translation by the host government to the exiles. Given the
surprise expressed by the journalist with respect to his interviewees response above. the

reader must also assume that the host government has not been informing its citizens of

 

" During the protests against ‘dislocation’ after Flora’s death. representatives of
the host government arrived to the station prepared to assess the situation and possibly
evacuate the exiles, when instead they found themselves listening to a rather quiet
interpreter interpret Vézquez’s speech to the protesters about why the stationers should
remain where they are. Unable to hear their interpreter- one of the exiles who has some
knowledge of the native language- the inspectors preferred to “mirar el espectacule de
Vézquez veciferande y se desentendieren del sentido” (153). This first attempt (at least
in the diegesis of the novel) at a dialogue between the two groups and especially that of
attempting to communicate the exiles’ cencems to the representatives of the host country
goes unnoticed and unheard.

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its true policies toward the exilic community. It seems that the European country wants
its citizens to believe that it is taking appropriate andjust action with respect to the exiles
and therefore. the fact that they continue to live in the station can only be assumed by the
natives to be based on their desire to be there. Once the natives see the photographs taken
by the journalists of the station and the conditions in which the exiles live, no one from
this European country seems reluctant to utilize ‘concentration camp’ to describe them.
though the blame is placed on the exiles for its very existence. Ironically, given
especially twentieth-century European history, the natives never heed the fact that people
do not voluntarily live in concentration camps, but that rather, they are coerced to reside
in them. The lack of liberties exiles experience is also manifested linguistically during
the earlier evacuation attempt by the government, when the term ‘ghetto’ is used to
describe the stationers themselves. These terms must not be simply glossed over for they
connote violent and cruel treatments of innocent people who historically were pursued
and persecuted for their ethnicity, sexuality, nationality or religious affiliations. Traba
includes the exiles within this group. Pursued and persecuted in the homeland they new
experience the same in the adopted land. It is no wonder then that upon learning of
Flora’s death Luis could only imagine that the local papers might write something likethe
following about them: gDe qué pais de salvajes llegaban? gQué podia esperarse de gente
que habia side perseguida, violada, torturada, destrozada?” (138). What Traba seems to
imply is that this ‘civilized’ European country can be just as ‘salvaje’ (cruel and corrupt)
in the name of democracy as the homeland the exiles fled.

Reference to the ‘other’ is also made by the exiles with respect to those

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compatriots who stayed behind. Tensions have always existed between these two groups.
as Noe Jitrik and others have documented, and as Traba fictionalizes through the voice of
Luis, “Nos hemos ido saliendo de alla Ios mas capaces, Ios jefes, Ios profesionales. Ios
tipos diferentes a esa manada de bestias que se quedo moviendo la cabecita
afirrnativamente, come mufiecos de celuloide. De mode que la casa esta aqui y no alla,
pero sin el lastre de aquella basura” (56). This dichotomous creation by the exiles
between ‘us’ and the ‘other,’ even between those left behind who shared the same
ideology as those now in exile, is precisely one of the factors fomenting their current
anxiety in the host country with respect to themselves.7

The fragility of the exiles’ identity away from all that is familiar and known.
provokes the exiles to expect of each other a more uniform and limited expression of self
so as not to further isolate themselves from each other. Indeed many of the exiles. such
as Ada. do not tolerate any deviance from the specter of a cohesive unity of exiles. that is.
any semblance of ‘other’ among the exiles is firmly objectionable. When Ada takes her
friend Alicia downtown for the first time and they decide to try on clothing in a
department store, Ada becomes extremely uncomfortable with Alicia who lets her guard
down and role-plays that of a woman who could afford and enjoy the dress she is trying
on. Alicia embraces becomes an-other, if even in jest, but Ada still judges her friend for

what she interprets as a betrayal to the stationers. Even though Ada realizes the

 

7 It is the belief of many exiles that the future of their country depends on the
democratic governmental system they develop/practice in exile. Luis. for example, feels
that “el pais verdadera se estaba construyendo afuera y volveria a recolocarse” with the
fall of the dictatorship.

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marginalization of the stationers, when Alicia tells her that they, “deberian venir aca. que
se yo, caminar per estas calles...Es inhumane que los hayan acorralado en aqucl
campamento horrendo” (182), Ada responds incredulously, “gPero que hariamos aqui?”
(182’). The answer is exactly what happened to Alicia, they would potentially become an-
other, and Ada. like some exiles, including Luis, fears that their previous identity and
connection with the homeland could crumble as a consequence. Staying together would
ensure the exiles a certain measure of stability with respect to their identity, and the
otherwise inevitable confrontation of becoming an-other.

Because the “pais de ficcion” in the new land depends on the return to the
homeland, many begin to realize that the creation of a transnational space entails more
difficulties than they might have imagined. The fictional country, first of all, depends on
maintaining borders within already sovereign borders. Without the train station. the
leaders have no method of uniting physically, controlling or accounting for their
‘natienals’ inhabiting the host country. The fictional constructions of country, rely
secondly, on articulating as possible, what have come to be prolonged dreams of an
imminent return to the homeland. Home indeed, is exactly what the ‘fictional’ country
cannot fictionalize to the exiles in present tense; and a lack of a home is precisely the
reason why the exiles do not desire to stay in the train station but must because the host
government provides none for them. As long as the exiles have no other choice than to
remain in exile they would prefer to remain close together rather than dispersed

throughout the country as has occurred in other cases with exiles (which they explain to

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the host government in Ana Cruz’s manifesto).8 The architectural plans they have
prepared would even save the host land money. 7

Their preoccupation with becoming an-other perhaps explains their overlooking
of the ‘other’ who walks among them, namely Torres. He has gone into exile along with
his victim and her spouse, because of a chain of events related to the former. The other
exiles Ieam about the extent to which Flora endured torture in Argentina with the autopsy
of her body, in which scars, especially a very long one along her torso. explain to many
the reason for her suicide. Later on the narrator describes Torres’ own version of events
in the old school converted into a prison and center of torture: “Fue mala suerte que
cayera justo cuando el médico cosia a la Flora, mientras dos enfermeras la entubaban para
que no se les quedara ahi mismo. Y en cambio de felicitarle per ese buen trabajo, [el
jefe] Io empujo fuera de la sala de emergencias y empezo ahi mismo a darle bofetadas y
patadas hasta que lo dejo en el suelo Ilene de moretones” (149). In vengeance against his
superior, Torres frees Flora and her revolutionary husband, Ali. Exile however does not
liberate Flora. Ali or their marriage from the tortuous past. In fact, like Vzizquez and
Mariana’s marriage their relationship is one struggling from a lack of communication.
literally. a paucity of exchanged words between the two.
Pseudo Dialogues

Just as the station represents a semi-fictional nation to many, but one that they

hold onto due to the lack of an alternative, so too can the personal relationships between

 

3 The exiles even have plans created by an architect that would allow them to live
near the station.

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some of the characters be categorized. In order to better understand these, we must first
look at the narrative voice and the textual construction of the novel itself.

In contrast to previous works examined in this dissertation, Traba’s novel does not
follow the pattern of a fictional autobiographical account written by a character who
experienced or is experiencing exile. A traditional third person narrator guides the reader
through the thoughts and actions of a few key voices in the story, though most details
about living in the station are provided through the perspective of Luis. Secondly. the
chapters in the novel are not arranged in a linear chronological fashion. The second
chapter actually transpires before the first (‘la muerte de Flora’), which not only anchors
the novel in a violent act of self-destruction that transpires after fleeing from the physical
torture endured in the homeland, but the first chapter also accentuates the psychological
pain the exiles take with them to the adopted country, and from which they may not
necessarily become liberated. Chapters Three and Four deal exclusively with the
‘desalojo’ and ‘demolicion’ respectively. and Chapter Five with the ‘partidas.’ Chapter
Two entitled, ‘Ia pieza’ becomes of central relevance because it transpires primarily
within the private spaces of Mariana’s home where intimacy can be expressed, or at
worst, fictionalized, as Ali denominates his relationship with Mariana in retrospect.

Mariana and Vazquez share an apartment together as husband and wife though
they both are engaged in extramarital affairs and rarely see each other, let alone converse.
Aware that her husband has been seeing Ada for some years, Mariana decides to find a
lover of her own, also someone younger than herself. Her affair with Ali ends with the

death of her lover’s spouse (Flora). Mariana and Vazquez’s relationship functions on a

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public level, that is, they are loyal to each other in the public eye though not in the private
one. Even Ali and Vézquez mutually respect each other despite the latter’s awareness of
Ali’s affair with his spouse, but Vézquez admires Ali’s courageous feats in the homeland.
and Ali the political voice of Vézquez’s in the new land. The affair between Ali and
Mariana was an intimate relationship more of pseudo dialectical than physical
significance. Neither Flora nor Vézquez hardly speak to their spouses. In Ali’s case they
have barely exchanged words in over a year. Ali and Mariana try to compensate for their
spouses’ silence by speaking about it to each other and listening to that which their
spouses refuse to hear. They confess to each other episodes about the past as best they
can. “lo que le paso a ella, lo que le paso a él,” but, “ han adquirido un tone impersonal.
de investigadores que examinan hechos que les son extrafios” (95). Their words about
personal experiences however, become impersonal in format; words have become
somehow separated from the subject in order to confront the past, and therefore. the space
of the ‘pieza’ beckoning intimacy (dialectical and physical) is not fully answered.
Though both Ali and Mariana condemn Flora for her silence, they often feel that they
must recur to the voice of another by reciting the poetry of W.H. Auden (who also
underwent exile) in order to articulate their sentiments concerning human suffering.
Between the other characters little dialogue occurs as well. Luis and his mother.
like Ada and Vazquez, rarely have time to speak to each other about issues other than
politics. The discourse between Mariana and Flora, which by all indicators seems to
address intimate issues concerning Ali and his disappeared daughter, ended disastrously.

Ada and Alicia’s attempt to discuss their exilic status essentially terminates their

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friendship. Dialogues seem incapable of addressing intimate issues related to exile or the
exilic experience, they are only pseudo conversations, for language seems at least
initially. insufficient to explain the unexplainable nature and consequences of exile.

However, the manner in which Flora confronts the past is highly personalized. and
transcends the verbal. In remembrance of her and Ali’s disappeared daughter’s second
birthday, she decorates the apartment in celebration. Ali is unable to talk to her about the
occasion and escapes to the arms of Mariana in search of comfort. F lora’s actions not
only honor a life lost, but they also confront Torres- the man responsible for her
daughter’s disappearance.
Female space

Many exiles are confused as to why Flora committed suicide when she did. a year
after living in the host country: “gpor qué mierda no se mataron 31151?” (66). But, perhaps
another question need be addressed here: once we learn about the horrors of the torture
Flora endured in Argentina, how was she able to survive afterward, even a whole year in
exile? The fact that she finds an apartment in which she, her husband, and Torres share
the same private space, can only be analyzed upon realizing that Torres is the man
responsible and therefore, the only one knowledgeable about her daughter’s
disappearance. It would not be surprising that Flora’s decision to live with Torres in a
private space entailed a strategy of breaking his silence with respect to their disappeared

daughter, believing that such a space might provide for the discursive opportunity of

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revealing intimate information.9 Nevertheless, Flora’s own verbal silence does not last
when against Ali’s wishes Mariana decides to confront her the day after the birthday
celebration. Flora commits suicide the following day after their exchange. (from which
the reader is excluded, except for the detail about their yelling to each other that Torres
overhears), and in the post-scriptum we learn that Ali and F lora’s child never reappears.
Flora had never fit into the pattern of expectation that the exiles had of each other.
especially those of Luis, who “trataba de crear dependencias y lo Iograba en casi todos los
cases” except with Flora, “y por eso mismo la desestimaba y se ponia de parte de Mariana
y hasta de Ali, con tal de hundir a Flora. Nunca consiguio de ella la menor confidencia.
jamas ella Ie conto, come tarde o temprano hacian Ios otros, las terribles situaciones por
las que habia pasado” (57). She would not even reveal this information to her husband.
Flora’s suicide resonates louder than words ever could. Back home she became a
heroine for her intrepid acts against the dictatorship, never relenting even as a pregnant
woman and as a mother of a newborn child. Defying the mother myth of recoiling from
the public sphere to concentrate her efforts on the private affairs of motherhood, Flora
became even more engaged in political causes, becoming commander of a mission that.

led her to into the hands of Torres.'0 In exile. Torres had hoped that she or Ali would

 

9 I disagree with Vara Rust’s analysis in her dissertation that Flora’s obtainment of
an apartment to be shared with her husband and torturer, “es consecuente con su estado
de desequilibrio mental; la Flora de antes de la mutilacién no hubierta tratado de obtener
privilegios porque luchaba por su completa eliminacion” (185). I do not believe Flora’s
obtainment of a lucrative apartment was done in order to enjoy a bourgeoisie lifestyle. it
merely represents the means to an end.

“7 Specifically, Flora “habia side la de la bomba en El Tigre” (70). While in the
novel El Tigre refers to a place, perhaps even a concentration camp, the name was also a

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have denounced him, “para que todo el mundo supiera quien era, pero no decian una
palabra. Lo peer es que no lo veian,” (72); they had mysteriously unarmed him. By
remaining silent about her tortuous past, Flora was able to minimize her role as victim.
but once provoked to speak with Mariana. revealing details to her that the latter believes
even Ali is unaware of, F lora’s identity became that of another victim with a language
that Luis or others could catalogue and soon forget. The act of committing suicide. I
believe, counters her own vocabulary of victimization, and her suicide then definitively
destroys her identity as victim and concomitantly that of Torres’ as torturer. The fact that
this occurs as a consequence of her celebrating her daughter’s birthday, also indicates
Flora’s renunciation of her previous identity as mother, for her daughter. as Mariana must
have confronted her about, most likely no longer lives.

Flora’s suicide portends Torres’ own physical death for he is incapable of existing
beyond his previous identity of torturer (exercised and expressed in exile on the only
being he could physically victimize-an unclaimed dog). The narrator explains that, “Le
aterrorizaba pensar que los [Flora and Ali] perderia de vista y podria llegar a olvidarse de
si mismo” (72). Although most compatriots are not surprised by her death, it does
galvanizes particular individuals to realize that the past can no longer define their present

relationships: Vazquez soon leaves his wife, Mariana; Ali moves into the station and

 

pseudonym for Jorge Eduardo Acosta. During the ‘Dirty War’ he was Chief of an
International task force and was responsible for 5,000 disappearances and murders,
including the death of R. Walsh.

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stops seeing Mariana;" and Torres leaves the exilic space altogether.

While in Traba’s novel the exiles have little tolerance for anyone who breaches
the uniformity expected to maintain the cohesion of the group, the ‘other’ does
nevertheless manifest itself, be it via the occasional Eastemer or stationer who slowly
begins to Ieam the language and culture of the host land, but in particular via the women
who debunk their traditional roles as designated within hegemonic structures. The exiles’
liminal position, in fact, seems to foment experimentation with respect to identity and
therefore, while all exiles do unite with their fellow citizens together in defending their
national identity as seen above, renegotiations do take place with respect to the identities
of voices considered subaltem in the homeland.

Traba’s own definition of female writing “no esta contra la literatura masculina.
primera cosa, ni esta per encima de la literatura masculina. ni esta por debajo de la
literatura masculina. Es una literatura diferente, es decir que su territorio ocupa un
espacio diferente” (Hipotesis 21-22). This ‘different space’ is epitomized in her novel.
En eunlgnier lngnt, with the female voices who respond to their liminal status by
contesting the ‘fictional’ representations of them, as created by the societies from which
they came. in order to establish within exile an identity of their own accord. Separated
from the physical barriers of the homeland, the adopted space provides the propitious
environment for such experimentation.

Ada. Vézquez’s lover and some 25 years his junior, superficially seems to embody

 

" Ali and Mariana’s relationship only existed because of the difficulty with their
spouses, with Flora dead, Ali no longer needs to continue seeing Mariana.

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a traditional female sacrificing her best interests for those of her partner. For example.
she gives up an apartment in the city and remains in the station so that Vazquez would
appear to be in close contact with the stationers, even though he does not dwell among
them. She does make his political career easier as his attentive secretary in both public
and personal matters, but while Ada convinces Vazquez that he needs “una compafiera
docil” (59) she does not exactly fit this mold: as a woman of action she founded a school
for the children of the stationers, a job for Ali as a teacher there, and later on a human
rights organization named after Vézquez upon his decease. By participating in the
patriarchal political system, cognizant that a woman’s role in the predominantly male
system depends greatly on her influencing those in power, she is able then to create a
space for her true objectives: bringing to justice those guilty of crimes comparable to the
torture and death of her father by the military in the homeland. Indeed, it is because of
Ada that Vézquez’s interest in politics is even renewed in the first place, and once the
station has been demolished it is Ada who involves herself and Vazquez in other affairs
related to the homeland. The incident between Ada and Alicia can in part be explained
as a difference in ideology with respect to hegemony: Ada prefers to work within the
system, while Alicia does not mind looking beyond it.

Ana Cruz, Luis’ mother, asks the host government for the abandoned offices
within the train station and establishes in one of them a print shop in the lower floor,
creating jobs for a number of people, and producing enough income so that it became
unnecessary to ask for unemployment benefits. Ana Cruz’s endeavors represent a success

story: she is the first exile to establish a business. and a flourishing one at that, who also

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happens to be an indigenous woman in the community. In addition, she is the only person
who after learning of Flora’s suicide blames Torres and states. “haganle a él lo mismo”
(65) and when he is murdered two years later she candidly replies that he deserved it.
Before even learning about Torres’ identity Ana instinctively knew he was a torturer and
named him as such. His presence however, was tolerated by most until Flora’s suicide.
when he then fled, but who the responsible party or parties were in assassinating Torres,
is never revealed to the reader; we only learn that his body was found somewhere near the
Rio Grande.

Three females in the novel are mothers: Flora, Ana Cruz, and Alicia: Ada role-
plays a mother figure to young children both in Argentina and in exile as a teacher. These
women all present alternative versions to the myth of motherhood as an idealized state
with no other preoccupation in life other than that of fulfilling maternal obligations. Ana
Cruz. for example, who is an older woman, has a lover with whom she shares her
apartment. She is politically active, back home she maintained an intimate relationship
with a white man (Luis’ father) for a number of years until they mutually decided to
separate, though most believe she must have been raped when they see her son’s white
skin. In the host land the written word is in her control, for it is through her print shop
that the exiles publish their manifesto sent to the government. and later, once the
government warned of the demolition of the station, Ana Cruz took it upon herself to
inform the stationers of the govemmcnt’s new policies acting against, “Ia ignorancia en
que se mantenia la gente” (199). As an indigenous person Ana’s crossing into the

patriarchal structure of the exilic space is significant, as a woman and as a minority. In an

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interview with Garcia Pinto, Traba explained the connection between her socialist and

feminist ideologies:
En que todo lo que escribo, sea ensayo o narrativa, esta impregnado de esa
simpatia social, alimentada desde una perspectiva socialista. Agrc'gale a
eso de que, siendo mujer, no puedo sino escribir come mujer. y por
consiguiente me siente parte de lo que Pierre Bourdieu llama
acertadamente las ‘contraculturas,’ refiriéndose a los grupos minoritarios.
e'tnicos, y tambie'n a las mujeres. Escribo lo que llama Elena Poniatowska,
la ‘literatura de los oprimidos;’ escribo algo que sea verdad, que siente la
imperiosa necesidad de comunicarlo y que tiene una gran carga de rabia,
de colera revanchista ante las injusticias y las atrociadades que nos rodean.
(43).

Ana Cruz is an example of a woman who was able to overcome some of the problems

women face, though we must remember that her business succeeds in exile, where

experimentation takes place with respect to gender expectations and where she was able

to literally voice (print) her own cencems.

Alicia, a 24 year old woman with two children helps Ana in the print shop. Even
though most mothers in the station seem preoccupied with returning to the homeland.
Alicia makes sure that while they are in the host land her children are enrolled in school.
The day that her children delightfully screamed without fear while playing together
outside, Alicia realized that they were finally recovering from the ghosts of the past.

Their future is important to her. but so is her own. Alicia’s dreams do not die as a mother

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or a widow, in fact, she makes an effort to materialize her dream of becoming a poet.
After Ali’s break-up with Mariana she initiates a relationship with him, crossing the
border of traditional gender role expectations, and as announced in the post-scriptum they
are married for four years. Afterwards she marries a successful poet; Ali remains single.

The power of the written word goes virtually unexplored by the exiles, except by
the women, like Ana with her print shop, which at one point becomes the vehicle through
which the exiles express their arguments against the evacuation policy to the host
government. Alicia too, in a contrasting manner to Ana, uses the literary word to express
her own experiences through poetry. Mariana who was an eminent lawyer in Argentina
brings home from the library where she works a book of poetry by W.H. Auden whose
words pacify both her and Ali when they lack the ability to speak what they feel (as
explored above). And both Mariana and Ada cut out newspaper clippings to help
Vazquez distinguish his friends from his enemies, who change sides more regularly than
not. It is the women who utilize and control the written word in their community, and
with that they can help shape their own fiitures as well as the collective future of the
exiles.

Mariana in her role as wife felt compelled to follow her husband into exile. even
though she was not being pursued in Argentina, and was aware of his affair with Ada.
Her own involvement with a much younger man seems to help her emotionally overcome
the difficulties of her broken marriage and it also reaffirms her own sexual prowess as a
mature woman capable of seducing someone half her age. Mariana is one of the few

exiles who has friends in the city where she works, ordering on occasion works in

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Spanish to be added to the small collection of Hispanic literature in the library. In the
homeland Mariana was friends with Flora’s mother, Angelica,l2 whose draconian
parenting toward Flora led Mariana to cease their friendship around the time Flora was a
teenager. In Argentina, Mariana had always respected Flora and they would have
become friends had Angelica not impeded it. Mariana’s interest in speaking to Flora after
the latter’s birthday celebration of her disappeared daughter, transpires however. only
because of her association with Ali, whom she later loses because of her intervention.
The exchange between the two women most likely involves an issue that all of the exiles
must face at some time or another: that of accepting or not becoming an-other in order to
survive exile. By committing suicide, among all of the other symbolic issues discussed
above. Flora also rejects for herself the option of becoming an-other.

After learning of Flora’s death, Mariana thinks: “Tal vez yo también esté muerta.
penso. Y sintio un indescriptible alivio” (52). Death may seem inviting when one has
lost already so much, as here Mariana confesses to herself. When she runs into Torres on
the street, Mariana physically aceosts him and he flees as quickly as possible from her
punches that leave her hands sore and swollen. Mariana never empathized with the
stationers’ lot, she referred to them as ‘mendicants,’ but she speaks for them when she

says. “Aqui no era nada” (170).'3 Once she and Vézquez separate. she decides to return

 

'2 As a member of a bourgeois, conservative family, Angelica never was able to
understand what had happened to her daughter or how her grand-daughter disappeared,
even when she left to Chile in search of the young child. Politically she was the complete
opposite of her daughter.

'3 Sandra in Moyano’s novel, also reiterated the same sensation upon landing to
the Old World: “No se', no soy nada, no soy persona” (388).

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home to her previous life. The fictional image of a traditional wife no longer applies; she
returns home to fulfill a dream about establishing a flower business. Unlike the other
exiles, Mariana had a choice with respect to returning to the homeland, this choice
perhaps hindered her, as Luis explains from becoming an-other, “come le estaba
ocurriendo a los demas” (171). As she prepares to leave, she fulfills the exilic dream, she
tells herself, “nunca estuve aqui” (220). and in the airplane headed home she feels that,
“ya tengo otra memoria” (224).
Conclusions

The last section of the novel, a one page post-scriptum,” delineates the futures of
the characters after the demolition of the train station. Other than Mariana no one returns
to the homeland, each finds his/her own niche in exile, as best as he/she can, and with
respect to the homeland, “El poder paso de un militar e de un grupo de militares a otro.
con tanta frecuencia, que el pais, finalmente, deje de ser noticia. No interesaba a nadie”
(247). The absence of the name of “el pais” could in effect represent any country with a
history of dictatorship, for this reason perhaps the narrator commences the post-scriptum
with the following words: “Como se trata de una historia real, parece necesario contar que
les paso a les personajes en los afios subsiguientes” (247). In other fictional accounts the
futures of the exiles remain shrouded in mystery; Traba here wants the reader to cenflate

the fictional with the historical in order to prove that life does go on and it can even

 

'4 Some critics only attribute four chapters to the novel. assigning the fifth as a
coda-entitled “Las partidas,” literally concerning the departure of two characters- Mariana
and Luis from the host country, as well as the entry of the majority of exiles into the host
society and thus their farewell to the life they have become accustomed to in the station

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flourish, (as in the case of many of the characters), after the initial disruption of exile.
whether based on fact or fiction.

Traba’s novel captures the psychological aspect of the “landing” in the adopted
land- the difficulty the exile experiences in moving forward and capitulating to the
probability of remaining longer in exile than hoped for or anticipated. Through the train
station, Traba creates a physical space for the existential angst of the exilic experience.
where the exile belongs no-where nor to any-time. What they have left to hold on to are
fictional renditions of the old country lost, and while the “pais de ficcion” doesn’t survive
exile, the manners in which nation and nationality are constructed and contested help
provide a better understanding of them both beyond the perimeters of the train station.
How we imagine ourselves and our identity is in many ways dependent upon the
reflection(s) given to us by our society and by our nation, yet many of these images are
based on fictional reflections. These are what the female characters in Traba’s novel
contest, and in exile, they experiment with respect to gender identity in order to create
one that is more fitting to their own experiences. Marta Traba’s ‘anyplacc’ in effect.
becomes the ideal location for discursive and corporeal experimentation with respect to
the fictional, and the hitherto silenced; it argues for and acknowledges a model of identity

that is based upon principles of inclusion and heterogeneity.

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Chapter Four

Processes of (Pseude)Integration: Antonie Skarmeta’s No paso nada

and Marie Benedetti’s Erimevere cen nna esquina rnta

This chapter about the exile experience examines the integration processes. or
lack thereof, with respect to exiles in a host country. In Ne pese’ nade by Antonio
Skarmeta and Printevera epn nne esgttine rote by Mario Benedetti the exiled characters
have already established themselves within the adopted land: Germany in the former and
what appears to be Mexico in the latter', where they live side by side the natives. What is
particularly unique and valuable about both authors’ presentation of the encounter with
the new land is the perspective of various age groups. including children, adolescents and
the elderly.

Antonio Skarmeta was born in Antofagasta, Chile in 1940. Before the coup d’etat
of 1973. Skarmeta had traveled outside his native country a number of times, including to
Europe. Latin America, and the United States. He has obtained a number of prizes for his
literary work, including the coveted Casa de las Americas, and he has also been
recognized for his involvement with film, such as his script, La victerie, which was
awarded a prize at the Prague Film Festival in 1973, and in 1976 he won the Bundes Film

Prize in Germany for Reine le trwgnilidfl en el peis. In 1992 his television program, “El

show de los libros,” became a big hit, bringing him great popularity. Given his particular

 

' Though the host country is never explicitly named, allusions to it are made. such
as the physical descriptions of its urban landscape, phonetic pronunciations of particular
words and idiomatic expressions which all point to Mexico. Nevertheless. by not naming
the host land, Benedetti universalizes the exilic arrival to any country around the globe.

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background, Skarmeta explained in an interview, “I was a man who had really rehearsed
exile” (Alternative 72-73). From 1973-1975 he lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and
then moved to West Berlin and remained there until the fall of the dictatorship in 1989.

Mario Benedetti was born in El Paso de les Toros, Uruguay, in 1920. At the time
of the military coup, he was chair of the department of Hispanic literature at the
University of Uruguay in Montevideo. As he states, “estuve muy poquito, un afio y poco
porque vino el golpe; Ios militares entraron en la universidad y me tuve que ir corriendo”
(105). He went into exile first to Argentina, then Peru, Cuba, and later Spain, where he
now lives six months out of the year,2 and the other six months in Uruguay. He has
received the Premio Reina Sofia de Poesia Iberoamericana and in 1987 Amnesty
International awarded him with Premio Llama de Oro for his novel, Primavera con una
esgnine teta, which will be discussed in this chapter.

Of all the exiled writers examined in this dissertation Skarmeta and Benedetti
were the most prolific; the fenner wrote some five novels during those 16 years of exile";
and the latter some 6 works during his 7 year exile. though a decade had passed since
writing his last novel.4

The narrator of Skarmeta’s Ne pese’ nede is a 14 year old male adolescent who

 

2About Spain he says, “estoy casi como en mi casa” (105)

3 Sofie que le nieve erdie 1975, Ne pese’ nade 1980, La insurreccion I982,
Ardiente pecieneie 1985, Meteh Ball, 1989

4 WM 1977, Cen y sin nestalgie 1977, Cotidienes, 1979, Viento del
___oexili 1981. W 1982.9;eoamflas I984.

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recounts in the first person his story of exile from West Berlin. Barely a year in Germany
since his family left after the military coup, Lucho has had better success than the rest of
his family adapting to the cultural and linguistic challenges of the new land. With respect
to the latter, Lucho is the only member of his nuclear family who is able to communicate
in both German and Spanish. As a consequence, his family has come to depend on him
for translations: be it the television for his younger brother or scheduling appointments
for his parents‘ students who are learning Spanish. As an adolescent coming of age.
Lucho experiments with the ‘adult’ German world that surrounds him, while also
attempting to reconcile his Chilean heritage. His encounters become dangerous when his
interests in the opposite sex lead to an unsolicited fistfight with a German boy. Lucho
immediately defeats him, but the victim’s older brother decides to unrelentingly seek
vengeance. Once Lucho accepts the challenge to fight the older brother and again prevail
against a stronger and older adversary, the two miraculously become friends. It is this
exilic Bildungsroman that compels Lucho to tell his story. Skarmeta deftly crafts this
autobiographical account in a manner veracious to a young adolescent’s mind. who‘s
speech emulates the oral quality of colloquialitys, with an at times anachronic
organizational method. both of which nevertheless, transcend its puerile nature to

intensify a type of adolescent awkwardness akin to the exilic state and the existential

 

5 Lucho at times asks questions to his reader/listener. such as, “(a qué no adivinan
quien estaba en persona en medio de todos los Internationale Solidaritat? No, pu’, esta
vez se equivocaron. No era Michael...” (84); or, “gUstedes han oido ese refran que dice
‘hogar, dulce hogar’? Bueno, al tipo que lo invento habria que darle el Premio Nobel de
los mentirosos” (66).

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pangs of exile, that afflict both the young and the old."

Primavera con una esguina rota is comprised of 45 chapters, that are not
numbered as such, but instead are arranged by seven different titles each dealing with a
particular character in the novel and not arranged in any particular order: lntramuros (6
total)-about Santiago who is incarcerated in Uruguay; Don Rafael (7 total)-Santiago‘s
father; El Otro (7 total)-Santiago’s best friend, Rolando; Exilios (9 total) -Mario
Benedetti’s voice; Heridos y Contusos (7 total)-Santiago’s wife, Graciela; Beatriz (7
total) Santiago and Graciela’s nine year old daughter; Extramuros (2 total)-Santiago‘s
discourse once he has been released from prison. Everyone but Santiago has left the
country; he remains in Uruguay enduring the inner exile of incarceration. Benedetti
utilizes various narrative techniques in presenting the voices of each character: letters
written by Santiago in lntramuros- of which all are written keeping in mind the censors.
except for one received by his father; stream of consciousness as expressed by Santiago
upon his release from prison in Extramuros; monologues in the first person for both
Beatriz and Don Rafael; a third person narrator in El otro and Heridos y contusos; and
autobiographical/testimonial accounts about Mario Benedetti in Exilios- including one
poem within this section of chapters. The voice of each character is presented in the first
person except for Rolando and Graciela, whose thoughts are communicated via a third
person narrator or via dialogues. The novel opens and closes with Santiago, who

outnumbers in chapters all other characters except for the italicized autobiographical

 

6 Lucho himself realizes the disorder of his thoughts, perhaps in part due to the
fact that he retells the story from memory: “Ahora me ven como me ven y no pasa nada.
Es que les cuento todo revuelto y a saltos” (44).

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sections about Mario Benedetti, which exceeds the former by one section. Through this
device of incorporating his own voice, Benedetti conflates the fictional and the factual,
where exile becomes not only an imaginative construction, but one based on reality. In
Benedetti’s Brimavera a number of genres are present: 7 novel, autobiography, epistle.
poem, fiction, history, or in this case. a hybrid creation of all, testifying to the liminality-
the state of in-betweenness- of the exiled author and the exiled fictional character that I
argue is characteristic of exilic writings. It can be said that no one character dominates
the story, though it is true that the characters are all connected to and revolve around
Santiago in some way. as he who is absent from his wife, daughter, father, and friends‘
lives. but who nevertheless is always present in their thoughts, as they are in his.
Benedetti’s story testifies to the fact that exile and incarceration do not merely affect the
individual at hand, but his/her whole network of social relations. Santiago‘s wife and
daughter must not only face the travails of reincorporating into a new environment. they
must do so without him. The ties that Graciela once felt for her husband, begin to
disintegrate after four and half years of separation, (with the possibility of never reuniting
again if the authorities decide to detain him indefinitely), as she decides to once and for
all move forward with her life once she realizes that she no longer physically desires him.
Ironically, she and Rolando begin an affair just a few months before Santiago's release.

who has not been informed about Graciela’s change of heart.

 

7 I agree with Rosa Maria Grillo who states Mario Benedetti's novel is “dificil dc
definir” (150).

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The New Land versus the Homeland

The life of an exile, as delineated in the novels by Skarmeta and Benedetti, and as
many a critic has realized, can be divided into two temporal tenses and geographical
constructions: the “aqui” versus the “alla,” equation. Memory anchors the exile to the
time and place of “allé,” which can lead to a compulsive comparison of his/her immediate
reality with the one left behind, including: one’s home, the climate. language.
acquaintances, and vocations, which shall be examined here more closely.

One of the greatest difficulties about deraeination involves the act of leaving
behind one‘s physical house, the place one calls home. Here, the exiles have already left
their native countries and they have begun the process of assimilation in the host land but
the idea(l) of ‘home’ resonates strongly within them. Both Lucho’s family and Graciela‘s
move into apartments in the host countries, but even afier the initial shock of relocation.
their abodes still do not quite feel like home. For Don Rafael, when he first arrived to
Mexico, he referred to his apartment simply as, “una habitacion.” slowly, with time. he
promoted it to an ‘apartment’- “un simulacro de casa: una habitacién con agregados"

( 23), but it never quite acquired the physical warmth deserving of the denomination.
‘home.’ In Lucho’s case, the apartment in which they reside has only one bedroom for all
four members of his family. He explains that of the four of them his mother suffered this
change the most because in Chile they had plenty of bedrooms and space. Though the
children, like their parents, have difficulties adjusting to the cramped quarters, they adapt

much more easily than their parents because for them ‘home‘ is wherever their family is

together. The new land certainly requires of all exiles a readjustment of their previous

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concept of ‘home,’ which sometimes can only be tolerated by believing in its temporality.
that the return to home in the homeland will occur in the not too distant future. which was
seen in Traba’s novel.

Ifone's private space does not quite feel like home, the public sphere feels totally
alien to the exile, in particular for older generations. It was seen in Traba’s novel, how
most exiles beyond their thirties avoided any encounter with the host European city and
those who do venture into the urban center, like Mariana, became easily disoriented. In
Benedetti’s novel. Don Rafael, a 67 year old, used to find comfort in the familiar streets
that would lead to his home in Montevideo; now in exile he is constantly and not
pleasantly surprised by the topography that always seems to change on the route to his
apartment. In an effort to mitigate his perpetual shock, Don Rafael begins to use a cane.
which he eventually disposes of once he accepts that his concept of ‘normality‘ will .
henceforth be the perpetually abnormal.“ Lucho, on the other hand, finds the streets
welcoming, especially its dark comers that he and the opposite sex use to their advantage.
On the streets is precisely where Lucho both integrates into German society holding
hands with his German girlfriends and yet, where he also disintegrates within it, when his
exilic status is revealed and requires defending from local adolescent ruffians.

In both Skarmeta and Benedetti’s novels the climate/topography plays a key role
in formulating the identity of their characters. In No paso nada one of the first calamities

the family faces in Germany is Lucho’s younger brother falling ill “por el cambio de

 

8 Don Rafael explains that with respect to utilizing a cane: “Era una consecuencia
del desaliento.. . Aqui, empece’ a caminar y a sorprenderme. Y la sorpresa me fatigaba"
(23).

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clima” (28). For the exile, the change in weather is not merely interpreted as a difference
in temperature, it actually represents another barrier to overcome, of the many in exile.
which in an extreme case, as that presented here, can manifest in the form of illness. The
climate of one‘s homeland can also represent and form an integral part of one‘s identity.
Lucho, who arrived to Germany when he was 13, remembers distinctly the warmth and
sunshine of his homeland. In fact, numerous times during recess in Germany he would
search for a patch of sun, like a “largarto” (as his friends called him in Chile), trying to
warm himself in the overcast skies and intemperate weather of Northern Europe: “Yo y el
sol. intimos” (31). Unlike his German classmates, this association with and love of
sunshine distinguishes him from them. For Lucho, this physical memory and connection
with Chile is also based on the unique topography of its land, and of all things. its
tectonic plates. While watching the film “Earthquake” in the movie theater, as the
audience laughed with excitement, he felt “mucha pena porque me acordé de Chile” (32).
His nostalgia seems a bit misplaced to an older generation, especially to his father who
cruelly responds to his son’s story by physically striking him, and verbally insulting him:
“Me dijo que si estaba tonto de andar echando de menos los terremotos, que 10 (mice
bueno que tenia estar lejos de Chile era no sufrir los terremos y que ahora yo venia y le
salia con esa estupidez” (32). Lucho’s remembrance of the land left behind can be said to
be amorphous, at best, for nothing else provokes nostalgia for Chile like this episode at
the movie theater. Still, his emotions of nostalgia are real, but in comparison to his
parents, Lucho’s response is dependent primarily upon his physical memories of Chile.

rather than those of perhaps more complex categories of higher cognitive thought

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experienced by his parents.

If Lucho’s memory clings to what he recalls best about C hile. Beatriz, who was
five years old when she left Uruguay with her mother, recalls virtually nothing about the
country left behind. Not even does she have ‘physical memories’ of the homeland‘s
climate, for when her mother tells her about a fourth season, fall, Beatriz is somewhat
incredulous that it even exists: “Yo le digo que puede ser pero nunca la he visto" (30). It
is only through her father that she is convinced when he writes her that. “esta muy
contento porque las hojas secas pasan entre los barrotes y e'l se imagina que son cartitas
mias" (31). Beatriz’s interior monologue about the different seasons allows her a space to
reflect about the ‘importance’ of spring, which is the season when, “aprehendieron a mi
papa. Aprendieron sin hache es como ir a la escuela” (30). and for which reason her
mother. “no le gusta la primavera” (ibid). Beatriz recognizes that “cosas lindas” can also
happen in the spring, but the act of being separated from her father during this season,
over five years ago, taints the positive associations normally made with it. In fact.
spring's symbolism of renewed grth and life even for Santiago had been distorted
when years ago his mother died of a heart attack while listening to Vivaldi’s ‘Spring‘of
the ‘Four Seasons” on the radio.9 From this time onward, Don Rafael believed that the

word spring, “ha quedado ligada para siempre a su [Santiago’s] vida“ (190).'0 Indeed. it

 

9 Mercedes, Santiago’s mother, had confessed to her husband two years after
being married how wonderful it would be to “morir escuchando alguna de las Cuatro
Estaciones de Vivaldi” (190).

'0 Don Rafael elaborates, “Es como su termometro, su patron, su norrna. Aunque
no lo mencione sino rarisimas veces, se' que para e'l Ios aconteceres del mundo en general
y de su mundo en particular se dividen en primaverales, poco primaverales y nada

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is the image with which he describes his euphoria in returning to his family. “despues dc
estos cinco afios de inviemo nadie me va a robar la primavera” (196). He continues, “la
primavera es como un espejo pero el mio tiene una esquina rota" (ibid)- being
incarcerated and separated from those he loves may have damaged Santiago‘s own
symbolic rendition of spring, and though he suspects that exile may have also affected
that of Graciela’s, he is quick to disregard this thought, as “una locura y ella me esperara
en el aeropuerto con beatricita y el viejo/ todo recomenzara normalmente naturalmentc
aunque el espejo primavera tenga una esquina rota eso si la tendra seguro la tendra“
(I97). Santiago’s suspicions however, are correct, spring can never be the same after
having experienced exile (whether within the homeland or outside of it).

One entire chapter in Primavera is dedicated to Beatriz’s fascination with the
urban landscape of rascacielos. The skyscrapers certainly catch the young girl’s curiosity
not merely because of their size or the linguistic element that demands a singular article
for the noun, whether referred to in the singular or plural, but also because she imagines
that her father would enjoy visiting the skyscraper that her mother works in. Beatriz‘s
interest in the world surrounding her and all of its glorious and bizarre manifestations.
provoke in her a yearning for the father who has been absent for half of her young life.
The connection between present and past is a constant in Beatriz’s mind, the past
associated with her father, is always present in her thoughts.

Other differences that lead to comparisons between ‘aqui’ and ‘alli' involve the

vocations of the exiles in the host country, usually not the same as those held in the

 

primaverales” (l 90).

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homeland. Lucho‘s parents were both professors, but in Germany, the only work they can
find is that of tutoring students who are learning Spanish, though they themselves cannot
speak German. Lucho’s role, as mentioned earlier, would then be to schedule
appointments for his parents, quite a responsibility given that “Ios primeros meses
dependia del teléfono que comiéramos” (30). Their situation at the beginning was so dire
economically, that as Lucho explains, “no vimos ni el pellejo a la came" (45) for six
months. Lucho’s street-smarts however, lead him into in-door markets to keep warm
during the cold winter in Berlin where he stumbles upon a particular store in which
samples of various foods are offered to the customers; thanks to this, Lucho recalls. “dc
hambre no me moria” (46).'l When he does finally find a job after school, Lucho shares
his earnings with his family and even his younger brother who likes to read comics.

In Benedetti’s novel, Don Rafael, like Lucho’s parents, used to be a professor, but
he too must now resort to teaching Spanish in order to make a living. Exile for Don
Rafael however, does not signify a complete disillusion vocationally for now an old
desire to write fiction has been rekindled within him. Graciela, on the other hand. feels
desperately bored with the rote nature of her job as a secretary, even though she very well
knows, “... no todos los exiliados del Cono Sur han conseguido una tarea tan bien
remunerada con solo seis horas de trabajo, y por afiadidura con los sabados libres" (47).

For the moment no other vocational options are available for Graciela, and as the sole

 

" When Lucho told his parents about this store they did not believe him, but one
day when his father had to provide a blood sample as part of the bureaucratic procedure
for exiles, he asked Lucho about it. They decided to go together: “Ese dia 10 pasé muy
bien con el papi” (47).

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provider for her daughter she must continue working at a dissatisfactory job. With
respect to Rolando, it appears that he is unemployed though neither he nor anyone else
refers to his current employment status.

In addition to the difficulties in finding a position in the adopted land that
remunerates sufficiently to support a family, let alone one that fulfills the creative
potential of the individual, exiles must also overcome the language barrier. even if they.
like those from Benedetti’s novel, move to another Spanish speaking country. For
Lucho’s family the task is an even greater one, given that they must learn German. In any
case, the differences in language/dialect are addressed by the exiles, whether it be through
a verbal awareness of the various forms of expression existing in different dialects or by
making an effort to learn the host county’s language, as in the case of Skarmeta’s novel.

Lucho‘s motivation for learning the language is attributed in great part to his
attraction to the opposite sex, like his schoolmate Edith. “Pienso cosas que me gustaria
decirle cuando la vuelva a ver otra vez, que me salgan bien en aleman. Me fijo bien
cemo se dicen, en el diccionario” (32). Besides Lucho’s own vested sexual interests in
learning the language, sessions both in and out of school advance his skills. such as that
of practicing German while playing soccer with his classmates, and especially learning
some of the essentials from his best friends who understand his linguistic isolation having
experienced it themselves as Greek exiles. Soon he became “un fanatico de la radio
portatil“ (49), and he began to memorize the lyrics of German songs, “cuando agarraba
una palabra, abria el diccionario, y la iba repitiendo hasta aprenderla.” with time. “..yo era

61 tipo que sabia mas canciones que nadie en Berlin” (49). His parents. on the other hand.

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who work during the day, have little time to dedicate to the study of German. When they
do. Lucho can’t help but to silently poke fun at them, “Al papi le ha dado que para
pronunciar bien el aleman hay que hacer como si uno tuviera una papa entre los dientes"
(96). Lucho’s younger brother does not learn German as quickly. probably because he
lacks the adolescent curiosity that foments Lucho’s interest. In this sense, Lucho‘s age
benefits him, but his accent and misuse of certain German phrases can still get him into
trouble. One evening with his second girlfriend, Sophie, a couple of Gemian boys began
to taunt them; his response, spoken with an accent was that, “estaban apurados,“ which at
that time of night in Germany could only mean that he was in a hurry to go bed with her,
something he unfortunately did not intend to imply. Upon hearing this, one of the boys
tries to put his hand up Sophie’s skirt, and Lucho defends her by kicking him in the
testicles. The force of the impact requires hospitalization of the boy. Being able to
respond verbally with the correct speed to a question or an assault, is precisely the manner
in which Lucho fell victim to his foreignness with the German language. The short
amount of time expected for a verbal comeback. and especially one under such strenuous
circumstances, led to a mistake in translation by Lucho who recurred to his mother
tongue. Thus. the problem that Lucho faced was not only that of sounding foreign with
respect to his pronunciation, but that of the time pressure of producing a coherent and
intentionally meaningful response. The next day Sophie breaks relations with Lucho and

provides the victim’s brother, Michael, with his home phone number.'2 Michael‘s

 

'3 Sophie’s actions against Lucho cannot logically be justified though we may
imagine that she no longer finds Lucho appealing since his status as exile became fully
disclosed in the above incident.

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mission to avenge his brother begins by harassing Lucho by phone, then by following him
in the streets and finally, two days after the fight with Hans, Lucho and Michael take their
battle to a wrecking yard where the younger of the two defeats his German adversary. and
ultimately befriends him.

The linguistic exile that Lucho experiences as a foreigner. prevents him initially
from orally being able to liberate himself from a perilous predicament. When Michael

965

first calls him at home, all Lucho can answer to Michael’s threats is ‘yes: De repente se
me habia olvidado todo el aleman. Asi era el comienzo cuando no entendia nada.
Repetia si, si, y ponia cara de idiota” (70), but by the end of the conversation his fear is
replaced with valiance:

-Bueno, Chileno, vienes o no?

-No- le dije.

-Entonces, donde te agarre. . .

-... me sacas la cresta. Eso ya la dijiste.

-Entonces...

rm y cuantos mas? (73)
Even Lucho is astonished by his own response. One day later, on the anniversary of
Pinochet’s military take-over in Chile (September 11‘“), Michael calls again to set a date
to fight Lucho. This time Lucho accepts the ‘invitation,’ (a tribute to the Chilean spirit to
fight the adversary who unjustly pursues the innocent), especially since he knows that he
has put his family’s exilic status in jeopardy and if he wishes to continue living in
Germany he must either fight him or face the possibility of deportation upon Michael‘s

notice to the proper authorities of his brother’s hospitalization. No matter the degree to

which Lucho hitherto was accepted into German society, he cannot escape his exilic

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condition: “Total, estaba perdido por goleada. No tenia mi pais, la Sophie no queria
verme nunca mas, un tipo me andaba buscando para arreglarme, y habia mandado a un
aleman al hospital. Por mucho menos hay gente que se pega un tiro” (66).

Benedetti’s novel is more subtle with respect to the differences in language
between Uruguay and the host country, Mexico. Beatriz, Don Rafael, and Rolando
realize the linguistic changes from their homeland, and though more often than not. it
might appear humorous, on occasions Rolando reminisces the “sobrentendidos.” That is.
sometimes, even in Spanish, he finds that it is necessary to “explicarlo todo y escucharlo
todo" (39). Don Rafael begins to cuss in the local dialect. reflecting however, each time
on how he would have expressed himself in Uruguay. And Beatriz. whose curiosity
about language leads to searches in the dictionary and queries to her elders. not only
reflects the human desire at any age to verbalize one’s thoughts in a meaningful and
coherent manner, she epitomizes the linguistic ‘desajuste’ of exile and dictatorship. its
incompatibilities with previously known meanings, and their replacement for new ones.
In the chapter entitled, “Una palabra enorrne,” Beatriz analyzes the meaning of the word
“libertadz’ for example, “si una no esta presa, se dice que esta en libertad. Pero mi papa
esta preso y sin embargo esta en Libertad, porque asi se llama la carcel donde esta hace ya
muchos afios. A eso el tio lo llama qué sarcasmo” (109). Her friend, Angelica, likes the
word ‘sarcasmo’ so much that she gave her new puppy the name. She understands her
father to have been imprisoned “porque tuvo muchisimas ideas. tantas y tantisimas que lo
metieron preso por ellas”(111), and while she too at times has ideas. “todavia no soy

famosa. Por eso no estoy en Libertad, 0 sea que no estoy presa” (l 10). It is a confusing

I31

world in which language distorts meaning for its own sarcastic purposes. leaving both
young and adult alike disgruntled, disillusioned and unable to ‘own’ language. in the
Derridian sense studied in the Chapter One.‘3

Beatriz recognizes that having arrived to the host land at a young age she does not
remember much about her native country, she notes: “Una de las diferencias es que en mi
pais hay cabayos y aqui en cambio hay cabaios. Pero todos relinchan” (84). Observations
with respect to the nuances in pronunciation between the two countries’ dialects depends
not on Beatriz’s own memory of the country left behind, but rather on what she hears
from her closest examples in the new land: her mother, grandfather, and Rolando. In any
case, her conclusions are optimistic, and language for her is not a barrier. if she can enter
and decipher its sometimes mysterious code.

A vital factor in the integration process depends on the exile‘s association with the
host country and its inhabitants. In Lucho’s case, his contact with the other school boys
playing soccer and his quick response of “No paso nada” in Spanish when something
went awry, led the others to don him this particular nickname though they do not
understand its meaning nor the fact that the phrase contains three separate words. thus.
their pronunciation of it is that of one long sound: nopasonada. The Germans ironically

(though ignorantly) name him “nothing happened” when in fact. a great deal has

 

'3 In the novel Beatriz ponders two other words that provoke in her both
fascination and confusion: polucion and amnistia. The two have symbolic meanings with
respect to her father and Rolando, the sexual connotations of the first. (which Beatriz
unravels) are in reference to Rolando and his affair with Graciela, which will have a
direct effect upon Santiago’s life when given amnesty. Not only do words become
contaminated, friendships and intimate relationships do as well, something which Beatriz
at her young age realizes.

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happened to him and his family. It is another linguistic misunderstanding. for I ucho
writes his story (or tells it-this is not quite clear), that which we readers read. precisely
because paso algo in his life. And this something is with what he begins his story on page
one: the date of the military coup in Chile. Lucho knows that he is Chilean and is proud
to show his inquisitive schoolmates, who had never heard of his country, where it is
located on a map. However, he is careful in choosing not to tell them anything other than
the soccer feats associated with Chile’s National Stadium. He prefers to remain silent
with respect to its later defilement into a concentration camp where his own uncle was
murdered, “Yo nunca ando contando estas cosas porque no me gusta que la gente se
ponga triste" (28).

Lucho’s best friends however, are not Germans, but Greeks. Their common
differences as ‘other’ (ones who are not integrated into Germany) bond them into a
friendship that lasts beyond the return of his friends back home after the fall of the
dictator Ioannides. Lucho’s access into the German world however is achieved through
the females he pursues, first Edith, then Sophie, then back to Edith. It is for them and
because of them that language becomes such a vital force, for better or worse, in his
young life. This method of integration, via the female sex, is something that even Don
Rafael acknowledges and accepts for himself in Benedetti’s novel.” In fact. through his
lover, Lydia, (whose name literally means to face the other). he begins to lose his notion

of foreignness. “no me siento extranjero porque ella no es mi extranjera sino al go asi

 

'4 Both Lucho and Don Rafael experiment with this form of integration, but
neither of them ever forgets about the possibility of one day returning home.

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como mi mujer” (170). She becomes the host country incarnate, introducing the exile to
the customs, food and people of her land. Even in Daniel Moyano’s novel, Rolando’s
imaginative relationship with Nieves “se trata de fundar otra realidad porque a la otra la
pcrdimos, y toda fundacion, como es natural, pasa primero por lo erotico” (9| ).

In the case of Graciela, the loneliness of exile, and the possibility that her husband
may never be released from prison become issues for her with respect to how she must
cope in the new land- whether alone or perhaps with another man by her side. Her
associations with the natives are limited to her colleagues at work. Only on one other
occasion outside of work does the novel relate an encounter between Graciela and the
Mexican people. Upon returning home after taking Beatriz to school. (with whom she
became upset and even started to cry because Beatriz wanted to cross the street with a red
light), Graciela stumbles across a mendicant woman with two children asking her for
money. Graciela responds by telling her that, “(No se da cuenta de que Dios no quiere
amarla?” (88). Graciela’s cruel words seem to reflect more a loss in faith about a
supernatural protector in her own life than in that of the mendicant's. She has survived
exile, the loss of a husband, the raising of a child by herself, all of which have made her
more bitter about life, including perhaps her ability to respond compassionately to another
in need. Later she realizes her act of injustice, but at the time she did not apologize for it.
The exilic plight is not limited to adults, it also instigates the young, like Lucho. to pose
philosophical questions about the existence of God, “Yo 3 veces no creo en Dios porque
veo que en el mundo a la gente le cuesta mucho ser feliz, y si Dios que pudo hacer el

mundo como e'l queria no lo hizo feliz, es que Dios no es tan poderoso como dice la

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religién, si es que acaso Dios existe... Yo por ejemplo no entiendo bien por que Dios no
hizo nada para salvar a todos los compafieros que los militares mataron en Chile” (91).
His questions go unanswered.

That same afternoon of confrontation with the mendicant. Graciela initiates an
intimate physical relationship with Rolando. She confided earlier to a friend that with
Santiago, “El problema es que la obligada separacion a e'l lo ha hecho mas tiemo. y a mi
en cambio me ha endurecido” (73), but this ‘endurecimiento’ becomes soft again in the
amis of her lover. The narrator notes that from her sexual experience with Rolando.
“nunca habia sacado tanto partido, no 5610 fisico, sino tambie'n espiritual” (156). It is a
relationship that both Rolando and Graciela commit to a future, complicating matters
when all involved learn of Santiago’s imminent release.

Memories and Loyalties

Liminality as a condition of existing in between categories, be it with respect to
country, grammatical tense or reality versus fiction, necessitates a link to each one of the
categories one is still affiliated with. For the exiles abiding in the new land their
experiences are similar to those represented in other geographical areas of exile explored
in the dissertation, except in this case. that which binds them to the homeland is solely
dependent upon memory.

For the younger generation of exiles who may have little or no memory of their
native country, they learn about it from their elders, and develop from them. what
Marianne Hirsch has coined, “post-memory.” She describes this memory as

“characterized by those who grow up dominated by narratives that precede their birth.

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whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped
by the traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created” (420‘). I
would extend the definition of the term a bit further to include narratives that proceed the
birth of the individual, but who may simply be too young to remember the events
themselves. They are shaped by “traumatic” events but also by the more mundane ones
remembered by their parents which they may not fully comprehend, but that they do
attempt to imagine in their own way.

In Lucho’s case this is certainly true, for as seen earlier. his own memories of the
homeland (the nostalgia for earthquakes) are immediately dismissed by his parents who
have memories of more pleasant or eventful times. In fact, in Lucho’s home he is
constantly reminded of his Chilean roots by the picture that hangs on their wall of the
presidential palace in flames caused by the coup d’etat. It represents a moment in history
that changed the fate of Chile and his own family but about which he reveals no personal
memory of the event itself. Still, it shapes his narrative, for with it, he begins his story.
What he clearly remembers is his birthday two days later, on the 13'h of September, and
receiving a guitar that he would never play because it was left in Chile with his aunt when
his family went into exile. Later it was sold in order for his aunt to buy food. September
1 1th is in fact therefore responsible for the change in Lucho’s young professional
aspirations for the future, “A mi ya no me importa que hayan vendido la guitarra y que
nunca pude tocarla, porque ya no quiero ser mas cantante. Ahora quiero ser escritor”
(26). Exile requires of Lucho that one means of expression (music) be left behind while

another (language, including literature) be acquired in the new land. just like Rolando in

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Libro de navios.I5 The fact that he writes, “No es que ahora yo me crea Goethe. .
instead of comparing himself to a known Chilean writer, like Neruda, for example.
indicates the extent to which Lucho is culturally responding to the host land’s own icons.
This is not to say that all Chilean icons are replaced with Gemian ones. for Lucho many a
time makes reference to Chilean star athletes and musical artists that he loves. He
represents a model for the liminal condition of exiles, who exist and often learn from
living in between two very different cultures.

His parents are dedicated activists against the Chilean dictatorship. and in
Germany they are both involved in organizing meetings and charitable events in benefit
of the homeland, (in which Lucho also participates). His parents’ sense of duty toward
their compatriots involves a sense of frugality in the host land for the economic benefit of
the Chileans at home: as his father explains to Lucho, “Que cada peso que gastaban en
nosotros aqui, era un dia mas que duraba alla el fascismo” (44). On the anniversary of the
military dictatorship. the Chileans unite together to march in Berlin in order to vocalize
their cause and raise money through donations and the selling of Chilean crafts. In fact.

1‘h of September late into the evening of the 9‘“, the same

painting posters for the l
evening Lucho kicks Hans in the testes, excuses him from arriving home early the next

morning (after spending the night at Sophie’s in order to avoid possibly being accosted on

his way home) by showing evidence of paint on his hands to his parents. But. when on

 

'5 Lucho mentions enjoying his German literature class in school, especially
Bertolt Brecht’s (who was forced into exile) ‘La excepcion y la regla.’ which he relates
to Chile’s corrupt judicial system. That same day he receives his first threatening phone
call from Michael.

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the 12‘h Lucho complains of sickness (more psychological than physical given the later
appointment with Michael that day), his father, “Me siguio hasta el bafio diciéndome que
yo me echaba a morir por un dolorcito de guata, y que pensara mejor como estaban Ios
ninos de Chile con sus padres presos y pasando hambre” (75). Lucho’s father never lets
him forget, “por que' estabamos aqui” (75). Lucho does understands the political reasons
for their exile, and like his parents he too wants to return home, but he must deal with its
consequences in Germany in his own way, and often all alone. As a family they do share
moments of pain and joy, such as all of them weeping together in sadness or rejoicing the
march in Berlin on the 1 1'“. Each, however, regardless of age, has his/her own battles to
light whilst in exile.

Beatriz, in contrast to Lucho, remembers even less about her homeland; her
primary link to the homeland is her incarcerated father. Cognizant of her origins. but
confused about her current status, she decides to ask her ‘uncle’ Rolando, “cual es mi
patria, la tuya ya se’ que es Uruguay, pero yo digo en mi caso que vine Chiquita dc alla. eh.
decime de veras, cual es mi patria” (103). He answers her that she has two patrias. one
‘titular,’ which is Uruguay, and one ‘suplente,’which is Mexico. These terms do not
quell Beatriz’s yearning for a stable and clear answer, she personally feels oddly in
between, and no linguistic terminology can mitigate this feeling.

All of the Beatriz entries make reference in one way or another to her father. no
matter what the present situation is, she is always in some manner able to relate it to her
father, papa. While she consciously uses the term ‘papa’ to refer to her father. she rarely

uses the term ‘mama’ but instead ‘Graciela’ when referring to her mother. This provides

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Beatriz with the ability to at times manipulate her mother’s emotions to her own
advantage. (especially when she may have done something to the dissatisfaction of her
mother), by calling her mama instead of Graciela, as she usually does. But with respect to
her father. he is always Beatriz’s ‘papa.’

Lucho’s parents loyally send what little money they can to their compatriots. but
Graciela’s loyalty to the homeland cannot be measured in economic terms. it is dependent
upon the conjugal ties with her husband. The letters she receives from Santiago
constantly remind her of the past, and of her life with him; she knows that his memories
of her and their life together represent his only mental escape from his present physical
incarceration, but for her these reminders only create an emotional prison for her, as she
tries to escape from the past in order to rebuild a future for herself. When Graciela begins
to have feelings for Rolando, she asks her father-in-law for advice about whether to
inform Santiago of the events or not. He suggests that she remain quiet for the benefit of
his son, who most likely clings to the belief that his family, and in particular his wife. will
wait for him until he is released. Don Rafael asks for the loyalty to his son that Graciela
in her affair with Rolando is unable to return to her husband. As a consequence. Graciela
finds herself in between the past and the present. She continues to write Santiago as if
nothing has happened, (though he notices that the tone in her letters has somewhat
changed), while also hiding from Beatriz the truth about her relationship with Rolando.
Beatriz however. suspects something. as both Rolando and Graciela note, in Beatriz’s
penultimate monologue she clearly distinguishes her preference for and loyalty to her

father: “Cuando venga la amnistia capaz que Graciela le dice al tio Rolando. bueno chao”

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(176).

Don Rafael’s own memories of the homeland and the notion of home are
discussed above. Having lived the majority of his life in Uruguay, exile becomes a
challenging matter: “Reorganizarse en el exilio no es. como tantas veces se dice. empezar
a contar desde cero, sino desde menos cuatro o menos veinte o menos cien” (96).
Nevertheless, as he realizes, “lo esencial es adaptarse” whatever one’s age, and to make
one’s own exile one’s own even if others may attempt to impose a foreign definition of
identity upon them. As painful as exile is, Don Rafael still enjoys some of the pleasures
of life, like his new girlfriend, and wanting to experiment with writing for the first time in
fi fteen years. Don Rafael’s suffering stems from the knowledge that his son at any time
of the day or night might be victimized by torturers, whose pain he physically feels. "’
Having escaped Argentina, and not his son, he experiences a rather common syndrome
among exiles of ‘survivor’s guilt,’ (diagnosed by himself). Don Rafael realizes that il’a
return to the homeland is possible, it will be the generation of his grandchildren to rebuild
the country and the role of their elders, like him, “recordar lo que vieron. Y también lo
que no vieron” (98). The older generation’s responsibility to the young is to inform them
of the “unofficial” history silenced by the dictatorship so that the future generations will
remember and learn from the past.

We learn about Santiago’s memories through both his monologues as well as

discussions about his letters to his recipients. namely his wife and father. To Graciela.

 

'° “Pero yo a veces imagino que a Santiago le estan aplicando la picana en los

testiculos y en ese mismo instante siento un dolor real (no imaginario) en mis testiculos.
O si pienso que le estan aplicando el submarino, literalmente me ahogo yo también” (51 ).

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she tells a friend that Santiago yearns for her touch but no longer feels the need for his.
He remembers happier times with her, attending concerts and vacationing. but to his
father we learn of a letter that the past has also haunted Santiago, where he confesses to
the murder of his cousin Emilio. When the incident occurred, the two were alone-
Emilio, armed in policeman uniform instructed his unarmed revolutionary cousin to
surrender, Santiago offered his hands as if to be handcuffed and then maneuvered them to
his cousin’s neck and choked him to death. Santiago since then suffers from recurring
nightmares about Emilio. He feels guilty for killing his cousin in this “innoble” and
“ruin” manner, even though he later Ieams that Emilio was an infamous torturer.
Nevertheless. Santiago realizes that with this violent act “acogote’ me infancia” (130).
This rupture of familial loyalties, as a consequence of ideological differences. in a way
portends other broken loyalties outside the homeland, specifically those involving the
amorous triangle among Santiago, Graciela and Rolando. Past and present may not be
able to make amends. The Emilio of Santiago’s childhood with whom he would play was
not the same Emilio as an adult.'7 Santiago writes, “lo mate' sencillamente para
sobrevivir” (131), and when undergoing torture sessions, he explained to his father that
he came to realize that those who would say nothing to the torturers would live. “De ahi
que te repita que no sé si calle’ por conviccion o por calculo” (126). His lauded loyalties
to his comrades then, Santiago believes, may have simply been circumstantial in his own

efforts to save himself.

 

'7 Santiago tries to understand his own violent behavior against his cousin in the
following manner: “Son, como te diré, dos valores distinos, dos identidades distintas, dos
Emilios yuxtapuestos” (13 1 ).

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Don Rafael after talking with Graciela about her affair with Rolando becomes
obsessed with trying to find “ese hijo verdadero que acaso todavia no se' quien es“ (125 ).
He wants an explanation as to what could have led to this “desamor” by Graciela. if
perchance it reflects in Santiago an inherited “carencia [que] ha heredado de mi 0 de su
madre" (125). He then re-reads the letter that somehow bypassed the censors that details
Emilio’s death and about which Santiago asks that his father not disclose the contents to
Graciela, “porque ella tiende a simplificar las cosas” (132). This letter in a sense
humanizes Santiago from the elevated irreproachable status to which all of his
acquaintances had placed him—the perfect loyal friend and comrade- who, nevertheless.
took the life of his cousin. Perhaps, had this letter been written to his wife she too would
have been more understanding of his weaknesses. instead, he becomes a man to idolize
rather than one to love. As much as Santiago tries these memories are concretely
ingrained in his mind: “El primo no se me borra” (129).

El Otro

Of the seven titles of chapters in Bendetti’s novel, one is designated“El Otro.” of
which there are seven entries pertaining to the voice of Rolando, who for Don Rafael.
Beatriz, and Santiago (though he knows nothing during the diegesis about his wife’s
affair) is the other Man and rival for Graeiela’s love. The symbolic significance of the
‘other’ does not pertain to Rolando’s case alone, though we will here begin with it.

Rolando’s reputation in the homeland was that of a womanizer. one who never
seemed able or even interested in settling down with one woman. In exile however, it is

not he who seduces Graciela, but she, for even if he were attracted to her or any of his

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comrades’ wives. he had never been disloyal to his friends in Argentina. The only
difference now, and as a consequence of exile, is that “la Graciela dc ahora es otra cosa.
Y e'l tambie’n ha cambiado” (134). Exile has changed them both and now Rolando has
become a man capable of commitment to one woman, but in doing so to his friends wife,
he will always be El Otro, (at least to one disapproving of his relationship with Graciela
and about which we may assume that the narrator does).l8 Graciela has also changed. she
is a woman of economic independence, one who supports herself and her daughter
without a man, and one who initiates relations with Rolando- embracing her other sexual
self . which with Santiago was repressed.

Santiago’s incarceration in Uruguay also designates him as the ‘other,’ the one
experiencing another type of exile, that of inner exile- about which he writes to Graciela
that, “algun dia abandonare' este raro exlio” (78). Both he and Graciela experience their
own type of exile while separated from each other, and therefore, when Santiago is freed
from prisOn, catalogued in the novel under the chapter titles of “extramuros.” he actually
is not liberated from the muros (walls) that have been built in the host land by Graciela.
(closing him out of the relationship with her, though it is true, that he too has built his
own walls, excluding her from secrets of his past). In order to ‘document’ the damage
inflicted upon couples who have been separated like Graciela and Santigo, Benedetti

includes a chapter about a couple, friends of Rolando, who when the woman is released

 

'8 We could hypothesize that Don Rafael is the potential narrator of the story.
given that he uses the term “heridos y contusos” in one of his dialogues and he certainly
would not look auspiciously upon Rolando, but rather as the ‘other’ who destroy’s his
son’s family.

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after six years of incarceration is afraid that her boyfriend will no longer have an interest
in her since she has dramatically changed physically as a consequence of the torture
sessions. She sends him a picture, and he tells Rolando, “...nunca imaginé que el estar
feliz incluyera gsabes? tanta tristeza” (180).

Exile changes everyone, it may begin in the homeland with the subtle and often
unconscious changes that progressively develop and transform the individual in the host
land until one’s identity is comprised not only of that which was expressed in the
homeland but also new manifestations of the hitherto unexplored ‘other’ within. The
combination of the two may perplex the individual as to which manifestation is his/her
real self, noted by Don Rafael, “Pero también cabe la posibilidad de que el verdadero
Rafael Aguirre sea e'ste, el insoportable, el pesado, el retorico. y que en cambio el otro
Rafael Aguirre. el que disfruta haciendo juegos de palabras y se burla un poco de los
demas y bastante de si mismo, sea en realidad una mascara del otro” (168-9). But. in
exile, the individual is both the same and ‘other,’ they live with respect to their identity in
a liminal status, as with so many other facets of their lives away from home.

For the young, exile may represent an expedited rite of initiation from adolescence
to adulthood, as in the case of Lucho: “No me gusta decir de mi mismo que era un ‘nifio’.
porque mi papi nos dijo que desde ahora en adelante se habia acabado la nifiez para
nosotros. . . Que las cosas iban a ser muy duras, y que teniamos que portarnos desde ya
como hombres. Que no anduvie'ramos pidiendo cosas porque no nos alcanzaba para

comer” (44). Childhood is left behind as the harsh realities of life suddenly become a

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personal struggle for survival.'9

The physical form of Benedetti’s novel. with its diverse chapters. also mirrors the
theme of ‘other’ with its incorporation of the sections entitled ‘Exilios,’, which refer
directly to the author Benedetti’s own personal experiences. Mario Benedetti writes
about the events leading up to and including his own exile, and provides chapters for
them in his novel Bantam. As testified in the recent Autobiografia sobre Benedetti,
that which is described in the first two and last entries of “Exilios” are verifiable as
autobiographic details of Benedetti’s life. The other remaining six include a poem. a type
of eulogy, and the encounter of other exiles, friends or unknown acquaintances, trying to
find a place to call home, away from home. Given that these entries appear in italics and
are about Benedetti’s life experiences, the reader must reevaluate the novel as a hybrid
creation in which both fact and fiction serve a creative need of the exiled author. making
both real and unreal the exile experience.

By incorporating his own personal voice, Benedetti creates another ‘other’ within
the novel. In fact, given the question of loyalties in the novel-that of Graciela to her
husband, that of Rolando to his friend, that of Santiago to his cousin, that of Don Rafael
to his son, that of Beatriz to her mother and father, one begins to wonder if in fact not
only Rolando or even Benedetti’s voices in the novel represent the ‘other’ but that all to
some degree are the ‘other’ in each other’s eyes.

If, as Santiago explains, one positive element can be obtained from exile-inner

 

"’ Lucho’s younger brother also loses some of his innocence. in fact, he is so
untrustworthy of others (not to mention hungry) that when they leave the house with their
sandwiches for lunch at school, he immediately eats his.

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exile- it is that of getting to know oneself better than before, to understand the necessary
silences required for a successful relationship, such as that of sharing quarters with a
stranger. Rolando echos this philosophy when he tells Graciela that they must embrace
silence with respect to their thoughts about Santiago for they have spoken all they can
about him. Don Rafael asks that his daughter-in-law remain silent in her letters to
Santiago with respect to her affair with Rolando. Silence is a powerful tool in the novel.
it can hold pieces together sometimes better than words can. Of course, silence does not
guarantee safety or freedom, in fact it often speaks more about the personal and collective
vicissitudes of exile than words spoken or written can. Herein lies the superb narrative
technique of Benedetti’s: not to tell too much, but to hold on to enough silence about his
own experiences and those to come between Graciela. Rolando and Santiago. for the
reader to imagine the underlying un-vocalized suffering caused by exile.

In Skarmeta’s Now, the author also bases his own experiences of exile to
Germany in the creation of the novel. He became inspired to write the story after meeting
a friend of his adolescent son who liked to write and play music. Skarmeta realized.
“nuestros muchachos navegaban fluidamente en un doble codigo: aceptaban los restos del
nuevo ambiente y al mismo tiempo no se desafilaban del universo de sus padres” (21).
The ‘other’ in Skarmeta’s novel, besides the Germans to the Chileans or the Chileans to
the Germans, is the adolescent and the elderly, the at times overlooked young and old.
who also endure the pangs of exile and the strenuous processes of (pseudo)incorporation
into a new and foreign environment. Curiously Don Rafael and Lucho explore more in

the new land than the generation of the latter’s parents. In fact, Lucho and Don Rafael

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seem at times more in tune to the suffering of others than Lucho’s parents with respect to
the younger and older generations. Lucho recalls, “cuando la mami y el papi se
encerraban a llorar con las noticias de Chile, a mi me daba pena por ellos, y como soy
medio sentimental, lloraba”(110). On the other hand, when Lucho’s father sees his son
crying he tells him “La proxima vez que lo pille llorando le voy a sacar la chucha para
que llore con ganas. gEntendié?” (1 l I) There is little understanding on the part of
Lucho’s parents with respect to their children’s behavior or exilic difficulties. just as in
Benedetti’s novel no one seems too concerned about how Don Rafael makes on in the
new land, though he is concerned about everyone else.
(Pseudo)lntegration

Integration in the adopted country, as stated in the Introduction of this dissertation,
is resisted by political exiles because they classify themselves as temporary inhabitants of
the new land who are merely waiting to return home. Nevertheless. as they wait they
almost inevitably have encounters with the native inhabitants. These encounters and even
relationships, however, are with strings attached- to the homeland. For this reason the
exiles’ integration process can at best only be called one of a pseudo nature. In addition.
the exiles may be unwelcome in the new land, they may be discouraged from forming
their own groups there, they may be separated from the natives and they may even tell
themselves that the return home is imminent in order to avoid confronting the subject all
together. Barriers must be overcome. from the linguistic to the economic. political and
social, to those involving one’s own personal relationships with those who remained in

the homeland versus those who have gone into exile as well.

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Skarmeta’s novel while disclosing the struggles of an adolescent boy trying to fit
into a foreign German environment, ends the story positively. Lucho fights and defeats
Michael with a blaring knockout, but afterward invites his adversary to a pizza. They
become friends, Michael learns about Chile, and becomes so interested that he decides
the following week to attend a meeting of the Chile Comite’. The ‘other’ is not that
different after all from any one else; differences in skin color, language or culture exist
but Skarmeta’s novel rejoices the ability of all to be able to overlook them, even after
severe damages inflicted upon each other, to instead celebrate their common humanity.
Just as Lucho’s Greek friends were able to return home, Skarmeta seems to suggest that
hope too exists for the Chilean exiles, but meanwhile, they can try to become friends with
their host countries, and once they get to know each other they can hopefully learn from
each other as well. In the end, Lucho even wins the girl (Edith) who attends the Chilean
march with her father and donates money to the cause.

Curiously, in Benedetti’s novel one chapter is dedicated to the story of an
Uruguayan family living in exile in Germany while the father is imprisoned back home.
The children are able to gather the support of their classmates and their parents so that
with enough influence, letters and money, they are able to persuade the Uruguayan
government into releasing the father of the exiled family. But, not all stories about
separated families in exile have happy endings, Santiago’s future with Graciela and
Beatriz in the same household doesn’t appear to be auspicious. Becoming assimilated in
the new society may require first, as Benedetti’s novel suggests, the confrontation of

one’s past, whether to move forward or not, but always, as Don Rafael explains. “todo

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comienzo es joven, y yo viejo rejuvenezco... Estoy condenado a rejuvenecer” (68). Being
an exile involves the acceptance of becoming an-other, being born again to another

experience, yet always aware of one’s liminality, abiding somewhere in between the past.
and the future, between the homeland and the new land. (therefore never quite integrated).

living a double life of in-betweenness.

I49

Chapter Five

Leaving Home: Héctor Tizon’s W

Héctor Tizén’s 1982 novel, entitled La casa y el viento,l concerns the travels ofa
man who experiences one last time and records for future reference in a diary those places
and people dear to him before he permanently leaves his country. His departure is
voluntary but his country’s growing dictatorial climate during Argentina’s Proceso dc
Reorganizacion persuades him to bid goodbye to all that he loves.2 Once he closes the
doors to his home, he enters the zone of exile and displacement, although he still remains
sheltered within the familiarity of his homeland, a condition different from others who
physically crossed the borders, but one clearly experienced by Tizon who regularly
considered himself an exile within his own country.

The homeland of the author Héctor Tizon is Argentina’s Northwestern province
of Jujuy and the town of Yala where he was born in 1929.3 He started attending school
around the age of nine (Gilio 44) and learned shortly thereafter how to read and write.
Just a few years later his stories were being published in the local newspapers. The
vignettes he wrote as an adolescent marked the beginning of his literary career that today

includes more than a dozen novels and collections of short stories. Tizon’s works have

 

' Its publication, however. did not occur until 1984, after democracy was
reestablished in Argentina.

2 “No quise seguir viviendo entre violentos y asesinos . . .” (175)

3The provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Catamarca, Tucuman and Santiago del Estero form
the area denominated as Northwestern Argentina Woroeste Argentine. NOA).

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been translated into a number of languages, and he has received accolades from the
Academia Nacional de las Letras, Consagracion, and the Gran Premio 2000 del F ondo
Nacional de las Artes, to list only a few. By profession he is not only an acclaimed
author, he has also served as a diplomat, a lawyer, and currently he presides as judge to
the Supreme Court of .lujuy.4

Until relatively recently, the literature produced by Argentine writers who lived
beyond the parameters of Buenos Aires was negatively stigmatized as ‘regionalist’ by
publishing houses located within the capital. Originally used as a term to classify
nineteenth-century literature reflecting the so-called exoticism of the country side, it later
became associated with provincial writings. The utilization of terminologies that divided
Argentine literature according to geographical location, where that from Buenos Aires
was associated with the ‘center’ or the ‘nation’ and that beyond its borders was
considered ‘regional,’ demonstrate an historical reality of inclusions and exclusions
within the Argentine national construct that date back to the times of Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento (i.e., ‘la civilizacion’ versus ‘Ia barbarie’-city against countryside), and include
such other dichotomies as South-North, urban-rural and white-mestizo(lndian). l-Iéctor
Tizon, like other writers from the provinces, addresses these dualities and provides a
space and voice for the second of the hyphenated elements, while never ignoring the

demands of an audience beyond the local milieu. For a variety of reasons. including the

 

4 In an interview Tizon confesses the economic need that led him to search beyond
the vocation as writer in order to survive: “Los que viven de la literatura son los editores.
y no todos. Para seguir sobre el nivel de flotacion hago lo que puedo. Y no me quejo”
(Encuesta 370).

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artists’ treatment of universal themes, the creation of such groups as La C arp a’ and the
journal M, publishing houses in Buenos Aires in the 1960's finally became more
accepting of these authors and began to publish them alongside those from the capital.7
But, even as these writers consciously addressed the universal. embedded within their
narratives are images, geographic spaces, and traditions pertaining to the provinces from

which the Northwestern writers received their inspiration.8 In Hector Tizon’s fiction.

 

5 In the 19405 intellectuals from Tucuman, organized a group known as La Carpa
with the objective to revolutionize the traditional literary aesthetic produced by the
interior. They declared an official break from the folkloric tendencies of their
predecessors: “... proclarnamos nuestro divorcio con esa floracion de ‘poetas folkloristas’
que ensucian las expresiones del arte y del saber popular utilizandolas de ingredientes
supletorios de su impotencia lirica.”(Prologo a la Mueslra colectiva de poemas, Tucuman.
La Carpa, 1944. Cuademo numero 3. Reproducido en David Lagmanovich. La literatura
del noroeste argentino, Rosario, Editorial Biblioteca, 1974.) Tizon joined the movement
and participated in the 1955 journal, Taria, which received the collaboration of writers
from the provinces representing all genres of literature.

6 Thejoumal Talia survived for six years (1955-1961 ). During that time it
socially denounced the secondary status relegated to the interior regions of Argentina by
the centralized government in Buenos Aires. They strove to reintegrate their cultural
image into the national construct by publishing texts written in indigenous languages
(quechua) and fictionalizing figures common to the social fabric of the Northwestern
region such as, “el indio,” and “el changador.” (Poderti 249).

7 The fear of being categorized as a writer of ‘regionalist’ literature however. was
a common sentiment among authors from the provinces. Tizon explains: “Queria huir.
yo también, de aquello que despue's sefialo Arguedas: del peligro del regionalismo que
contamina la obra y la cerca o engrilla y acota...Yo queria ser un cronista de mi pueblo.
pero narrar con un instrumento universal” (Las palabras 509).

8 In the Gama} first publication the authors promulgated a direct connection
between the earth and literature: “Creemos que la poesia es flor de la tierra. . . ”
(Lagmanovich 80).

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inspiration is found in the Argentine Highland of the Puna.9

Tizon’s status as an author who writes beyond the capital in the province of .lujuy
(2000 km from Buenos Aires) and the fact that he and the Northwestern people
historically have had a stronger connection to Peruvian culture'0 than to that of Argentina.
incline him to feel doubly marginalized within his own country: “Pero es mas; yo
siempre me senti un exiliado dentro de lo que se llama la Argentina. Yo
fundamentalmente me considero, y soy, un escritor de los bordes, un escritor de frontera”
(Buchanan 42 ). Given the historical and political context of the Northwest, it becomes

clear that Tizon writes from a borderland space that belongs to two cultural traditions. in

 

9 The Puna is Argentina’s Northwestern highland that reaches between 2000 and
4500 meters. It is part of the Andean Altiplano, stretching into western Bolivia, southern
Peru and eastern Chile. The climate within Argentina’s Puna is harsh and desertic. Its
sparse rainfall and drastic fluctuation of temperatures limit vegetation to primarily grains
and cacti.

The inhabitants of Argentina’s Puna are primarily mestizos and indigenous
peoples. During the Inca Empire the native Apatama, Casabindo and Cochinoca adopted
the traditions and language (Quechua) of their conquerors (Hernandez 125). Today an
estimated 20,000 people in Jujuy and Salta speak Quechua and Aymara (Klein 15) and
approximately half of the Northwestern Amerindians are bilingual speakers of Spanish
and an autochthonous language (Klein 1).

'0 During colonialism, Argentina’s Northwestern territory became central in the
route to and from Lima, the nearest city from which Spain would conduct its trade and
business with the southern viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. Historically. Spain formed
this fourth and last territory in the Americas by dividing the already existing Peruvian
viceroyalty in half, creating a new area that would include modern Argentina, southern
Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay. Tizon elucidates the consequences of this political act by
the Spanish government for the peoples of Argentina’s Northwest: “nos partio a nosotros.
trazando un limite caprichoso y meramente administrativo, como lo son casi todos los
limites politicos, y desde entonces, los que nacimos en esa zona, nos preguntamos a cual
cultura pertenecemos” (Equivocos 120). His personal response to this question of
identity is the, “cultura alto-peruana, no . . . la cultura del resto del pais o pampeana.”
(Ibid, 121).

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a land where dualities coexist, though not necessarily in harmony.

For Tizon, the exile he experiences at home would later become physical exile
with the military coup of 1976 when he and his family resided in Spain, until the
restoration of democracy in 1983. Just a year before being exiled, in an interview with
Maria Esther Gilio he explained how difficult it was for him to write away from his
home, “Me resulta dificil escribir fuera de aqui en México 0 Paris porque no les veo las
caras a la gente ni escucho como habla. No me cruzo con mis personajes” (94)."
Accustomed to writing within the borders of his own land, writing beyond them proved to
be a formidable task; during his six-year exile, though he wrote a number of non-fictional
essays. he produced only one novel. In a 1999 interview he recalled the creative process
of L cas vi n

Recuerdo que pensé que no iba a poder volver nunca a la Argentina y que
tampoco podia convertirrne yo en espafiol. Senti que mi destino era no
escribir mas. Pero pense' tambie'n que no podia irrne asi, que tenia que
despedirrne. Entonces, como quien cuenta la historia de un hombre que se
exilia y para poder hacerlo recorre todo su mundo, conté Ios lugares que
fueron mios, Ios de mi infancia y mi juventud. Le fui diciendo adios a
todo. Eso fue lo que después se llamo La casa y el viento. No f ue cl
ultimo libro sino el comienzo del fin del exilio y la recuperacion de mi

lugar, que es éste. (El viajante 5)

 

" Quoted from Adrian Pablo Massei’s book, Hector Tizén: Una escritura desdc cl
margen.

154

As professed by Tizon, this novel contains a certain amount of autobiographical
information (both narrator and author are lawyers who leave their homeland as a
consequence of the increasing violence, they both recur to the written word to record their
experiences, and they both share a number of Tizon’s own memories), but by creating a
fictional rendition of exile, the exiled author not only potentially liberates himself from
directly recounting the trauma of his own personal exilic experiences, the
historical/factual becomes transcended through the medium of art.

The innominate narrator makes his journey north to the province of J ujuy where
he was raised as a child, for like so many others before him, he too, left the North in
search of a better economic future in the South, '2 (namely, Buenos Aires). returning to
his roots before what he believes will be a permanent'3 departure from Argentina. The
narrator’s journey to the border is one without premeditated direction or specific itinerary:
“Hacia donde voy? Mis pies lo sabran” (94). Utilizing various means of transportation:
train, bus, cart, car, mule, and his own feet, the narrator makes what could be a short and
efficient crossing of the border, a much longer trip that lasts over a month", involving the

approach and subsequent retreat from the border to areas south of it. The narrator begins

 

'2 The loss of the young to the allure of a better economic life in Buenos Aires, as
presented in the novel, affects the Northwest in myriad ways, particularly the disruption
of the local communities and their communal knowledge.

'3 At the beginning of his journey he writes: “No regresaré. me dije. No volvere
nunca mas. . .” (32).

'4 Because the narrator does not keep a precise account of the time period spent at
each leg of his journey, I have approximated a month for his travels, though it could be
longer, but not much shorter.

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the account of his travels at the train station in J ujuy. He moves north to Humahuaca.
then northwest to a nameless mine and lake in the area of Rinconada, then farther north to
Casira (about 5 km from the border to Bolivia). He glides the Argentine-Bolivian border
moving east to La Quiaca and back west to Casira again. His brush with the other side is
interrupted when he decides to “deambular” (stroll) south passing through the following
desert towns: Acoite, Abra de Quera, Cerrillos, and Pozuelo. Afterward he returns north
to Yavi, a bit east of La Quiaca, and from there he continues north (“rumbeando”) until
he finally crosses into Bolivia, where the story about his exilic journey suddenly stops."

Although the narrator intentionally travels through the Northwest, with the
objective of eventually crossing the border, he does so, as explained above, without any
specific route in mind."’ Why then does he on numerous occasions feel as if he has taken
the wrong path, “el camino equivocado?” By having decided not to continue living in a
land of dictatorship, he takes the path less traveled, on a route that separates him from
those who stay behind. It’s a decision that he questions to the end and one that deeply
concerns him because he believes that leaving “es un acto de desamor” (147). The
narrator, like all exiles, must somehow reconcile the act of abandoning his own land with
the love he still feels for it.

In much of the literature about the exilic experience the exiled character has

already crossed the border. Tizon’s novel, in contrast. explores the very initial stages of

 

'5 From the epilogue we Ieam that his final destination is one of a cold climate by
the sea, but the narrative does not explain how, why, or when he arrived there.

'6 For example, he only stays in Humahuaca because a fellow traveler on the train
asked him if he would be staying there.

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the exilic experience involving the time period before the physical crossing ofthe
geographic threshold of the native land into the unknown. What the reader might
construe to be the most difficult of first steps has already been taken by the narrator: he
has abandoned his home and village, knowing, or at least believing, that he would never
see them again.'7 In contrast, however, the narrator of La casa y el viento finds it even
more difficult to be torn from his physical and social environment, particularly that of his
childhood in the Northwest, producing thus, the procrastination of his departure. As time
passes, he searches for excuses to prolong his joumey- “win no estaba madura la partida”
(76), he needed to accumulate more facts, experience more rendezvous with old
acquaintances, and fill in certain personal gaps in order to “conformar el inventario de mi
adios” (76-77).

This ‘inventario’ is recorded by the narrator in a travel diary (“testimonio” as he
designates it on page 152), which in turn represents the corpus of the novel for the reader
(chapters 1-4). Its order and arrangement are decided by the narrator once he crosses the
border. From the new land he writes three additional pieces: the fifth and last chapter
entitled, “Desde lejos,” a prologue that lacks a title, and the initial page of the novel that
contains two epigraphs-one alluding to the winds of history that can easily blow away

one’s home and the other referring to an unconscionable homeland that ejects those who

 

'7 Often he imagines what his neighbors will think of him once they realize he is
gone: “Muy pronto todos hablarian de mi desparicion como una fuga hacia la frontera”
(32). Leaving, therefore, may be construed as an act of cowardice; only toward the end of
his travels does he refer to his departure as an ‘exilio’ (152).

157

love it.‘8 In the 2001 edition by Alfaguara, which claims to provide the ‘dcfinitive
edition’ of the novel, an addendum entitled “La casa a lo lejos,” written by Tizon in the
year 2000, is included just after the epigraphs. One would expect it to be included before
the epigraphs, and so the question must be asked about its placement, as with the fifth
chapter, a type of epilogue, that was grouped within the travel diary section.

The narrator as we have seen thus far, lives his last days within the borderlands of
his native province, where he crosses over into cultural and psychological zones of the
self that his fellow compatriots do not regularly explore or perhaps are not provided with
the opportunity or interest to do so. As a consequence, the organization of the novel
reflects the narrator’s (and the author’s) own experience of movement with respect to
traditional borders. By placing “La casa a lo lejos” after the epigraphs the novel contains
two subsequent prologues, one belonging to the original text and this a posteriori
addendum juxtaposed right before it. In reality though, even the chapters that take place
within the homeland, as mentioned above, are organized and reedited by the protagonist
from exile, and therefore the inclusion of the fifth chapter among the previous four,
accentuates the a posteriori assembling of the novel as a whole. In this sense the external
structure complements the unplanned, goal-less uncertainty and anxiety of this agent of
the exile experience.

Writing and Denouncing
In the prologue the narrator writes about his traveling intentions: “Pero antes de

huir queria ver lo que dejaba, cargar mi corazon de imagenes para no contar ya mi vida en

 

'8 The epigraphs are by Louis Guillaume and Salvador Espriu respectively.

158

afios sino en montafias, en gestos, en infinitos rostros; nunca en cifras sino en ternuras. en
furores, en penas y alegrias. La aspera historia de mi pueblo” (16). In order to facilitate
recalling details about the homeland once away from it. the narrator records information
about himself and his people, penetrating into the private spaces of the homeland and
enjoying the warmth of his compatriots’ homes and their conversations.

The memories that he wants to take with him beyond the homeland will
eventually become “convertida[s] en palabras porque es en las palabras donde nuestro
pasado perdura” (174). The transition to paper is a small but difficult step that the
narrator recognizes early on. While critics have noted that, “la escritura de la memoria es
una necesidad para la supervivencia” (Martinez Gutierrez 327), choosing what to write
and how to read these memories becomes an issue for the narrator who realizes the
impossibility of fully rendering memories and the realities from which they emanated to
written discourse.

Only a fragmented reality can be translated to paper and realizing this. the first
time the protagonist makes reference to the act of writing, he explains: “Sé que lo que de
noche escribo en estos cuademos no es la verdad. 0, al menos, no es toda la verdad. sino
retazos, trozos de la vida aparente, de mi vida y la de los otros, que de pronto vuelven a
narrarse. gPero acaso la historia no es eso?” (105). Only ‘trozos,’ pieces of reality can be
reconstructed in his notebook, because writing about the past requires a process of
selection that then depends on the subjectivity of the individual writing it. He discovers
not only the difficulty in reflecting truth via written discourse, but the writing process

itself involves frustration (“tampoco pude escribir un solo parrafo”) and attentive

159

organization that at times he fails to conquer.” His words “se borran o confunden” and
what was no longer is. His words written in pencil disappear and with them the past.
Given the deceptions embedded within the written word and the impossible challenge to
depict reality in its entirety, the narrator eventually believes that truth can be found only
in the body (129).

However, in a dictatorship even that which the body experiences and what the
senses perceive is disavowed by the military juntas: “News reports failed to mention the
escalating number of disappearances that occurred daily throughout the country. The
make-believe world ...became the official version of reality and was relentlessly
transmitted through the media” (Taylor 98). The narrator’s words then reclaim what the
body, both personal and collective, knows to be true under the dictatorship. Although he
writes about his own travels, the images he records in his diary are tainted with injustices
and discriminations inflicted against those deemed perilous to the establishment. He
documents the infiltration of dictatorship into both the public and private spheres and he
personalizes examples of the terror and violence, under which people are forced to live.

The narrator of the travel diary keeps an account of his travels through the Puna.
which includes his reflections and experiences, and the dialogues he engaged in with the
mostly indigenous peoples he encountered. He records the stories of the lives of two
mythic figures, Belindo and the ‘foreigner’ in Yavi (to be examined below). which

exemplify the richness of the oral discourse of the Puna. However, he barely provides

 

'9 The narrator’s experience is contrasted to that of Don Placido’s (Yavi’s
commissioner) who sets time aside for organizing his papers.

160

any information about his own personal relationships. Only very late in the narrative does
he even mention an immediate family. In Yavi he indicates that he was once married but
not until page 127 does he makes reference to his children which emerges as he recounts
a story about a friend of theirs who was tortured by the military and who by some miracle
lived to tell the story. Sixteen pages before the ending of his travels. he alludes to the
death of his wife and one son, but he does not explain how they died?"

Most of the stories told about the narrator’s life pertain to the time period of his
early childhood. Certain people might trigger a memory, the owner of a prostitute house
who looks much like a friend of his father’s, or the ‘foreigner’ in Casira who reminds him
of the childhood stories that taught him to fear strangers who supposedly steal little
children from the Puna. The weather itself might even lead to remembering such events,
as the loving touch between his father and his school teacher on a thunderous afternoon.
Introducing these memories sometimes occurs without any formal transition or
introduction in the narrative. The reader must continue reading in order to realize that the
information pertains not to the present, but rather to the narrator’s past. In these ways. the

narrator weaves a story of past and present that together becomes both a diary of memory

 

’0 He then awakes from a nightmare in which his wife committed suicide. but. of
course, the reader does not know if his dream reflects the reality of her death. or not. The
lack of information about his family may seem to be consciously omitted by the
protagonist in order to avoid the highly emotional sentiments of having lost them. His
journey after all is taken alone, without any family members. Another possibility for
being reticent could be to protect his family from any harm that might come to them
through the discovery/reading of his notes by agents of the dictatorship, which could
occur either by confiscating his notes while within the borders of Argentina. or potentially
through their publication (it seems likely that the narrator’s organization of the notes into
the format of a book is done with the intention that they become public).

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and one of travel.

The narrator of the prologue and epilogue writes these particular sections from
exile in an effort to contextualize the travel diary. Through them we learn that the
narrator did indeed cross the border, to a land where he now feels at peace with himself
and his surroundings (171). Even with the pain of displacement, he tries to remain
positive: “...he abandonado una forma de vida que no recobraré jamas, pero no he roto
mis lazos con los seres humanos. Desde este mismo dia me he dispuesto a pensar y aun a
sonar, si es que esto es posible, en cosas sencillas gqué mas es la vida?” (172). In other
words, years of exile have not made the experience any easier, but “este mismo dia” he
decides to make an effort to change his outlook, realizing that while “un soplo desvanecio
mi casa... ahora sé que aquella casa todavia esta aqui, erigida en mi corazon” (175). a
statement that brings the epigraph by Guillaume full circle. In Julia Kristeva’s Strangers
W, she categorizes two types of foreigners as those “who waste away in an
agonizing struggle between what no longer is and what will never be...they are not
necessarily defeatists, they often become the best of ironists,” and “those who transcend:
living neither before nor now but beyond...they are believers, and they sometimes ripen
into skeptics” (10). Tizon’s protagonist, a believer, seems to fall into the second
category, perhaps like Tizon himself who confessed that writing M helped him
“quitarmela [la casa] de encima... y empecé a estar seguro de ello cuando estuve
convencido de que nada vuelve, que el regreso no existe” (prologue 13).

Writing serves many functions, many of which are contradictory (upholding the

status quo versus challenging it, elevating the soul or debasing it). In addition to the

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personal catharsis mentioned above, the narrator fulfills another significant function-
reclaiming a public and political voice from exile that was denied him within the borders
of his own country. By literally naming the atrocities committed by the dictatorship and
the climate of fear suffocating those who live under it, the narrator defies the dictatorial
silence imposed upon his people. The military recurred to both covert and overt
operations in purging the country of ‘subversives,’ making sure that the political
heterogeneous body within the country was muffled to the point that only the
dictatorship’s own voice could be heard, utilizing horrendous methods of torture.
disappearances, and assassinations in order to obtain their objective, to which TizOn’s
protagonist makes clear and poignant reference.

One way to impugn the dictatorship would be to self-impose one’s own
disappearance, as enacted by Tizon’s narrator, before the system does. By vanishing
though, the narrator becomes a fugitive of dictatorship, and his fear entices him to hide
from others even if he has done nothing wrong. Wrongdoing. however is arbitrarily
determined by the dictatorship and might be construed as something as simple as owning
a map, like his friend Rogelio who was arrested by the police and never returned home.

-Vinieron ellos y revisaron por aqui, la casa y la oficina; urgaron por todas
partes y se llevaron un monton de papeles y libros. El era muy leido y
tenia todo eso; y un mapa.

-g,Un mapa?

-Si. Del mundo.

La mujer dijo:

-Por algo sera, pues. (40)

Rogelio, a literate man, who happened to own a few books and a map, has suddenly

disappeared. No one seems to find this occurrence much out of the ordinary. The empty

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explanation of approval expressed by the female interlocutor who believes this man’s
arrest must be just, exemplifies the extent to which the discourse of those in power could
actually become inculcated within the minds of its subjects. She, like many others.
becomes a model for the regime as one who does not question the questionable but
instead simply accepts an upside-down world for one the military would have all believe
is right-side-up.

Writing becomes the only weapon of defense for an innocent people who have
been erased from the body politic, be it through expatriation, like the narrator, or through
other annihilations within the country’s own borders." 'I’izon’s novel refrains from
naming people or political parties in describing a dictatorial milieu that transcends local
geography, but the specific references to the Northwest definitively root the novel in
Argentina. In this dual manner, Tizon addresses those elements of dictatorship that
plague not only his own land, but possibly, any nation.

Through his writing the narrator also contests the dictatorship’s idea of nation.
which is predicated on the suppression of diversity, exclusions, and eliminations of
‘otherness.’ Tizon shatters this perverse creation of reality by bringing to the forefront
the excluded bodies of Argentina. In this manner. the peoples of the Puna, central to La

9W Counter the regime’s imposed artificial homogeneity.22

 

2| u
C

(152).

. . que un pequefio papel escrito, una palabra, malogra el suefio del verdugo”

22 About the subject of nationality within dictatorships Amy Kaminsky writes.
“Thus, far from proposing a native-bom inhabitant’s natural connection to nation.
repressive regimes such as Videla’s in Argentina and Pinochet’s in Chile enforce their
own perforrnative, and often racialized, versions of who belongs to the nation. and by

164

At the initiation of the narrator’s journey he describes an asphyxiating atmosphere
of terror. At a provincial train station waiting for the next train that will take him away
from home, he observes, “sobre el muro de la estacion, entre dos puertas, hay un cartel
que comienza con la palabra DENUNCIELOS. El cartel tiene los colores de la bandera
nacional” (19). Although the poster continues with more words than those recorded in
the travel diary, the message of this one word in bold letters atop the colors of the
national flag, suffices. The colors of the flag are not specified and by this time the reader
has not been provided with enough information to deduce the precise locale of the novel.
The flag of any nation with such an ominous imperative exemplifies the intentional
creation of a national division of its people, “us” versus “them.” The authorities must
contend with all those who do not fit within the standards of the inclusive group and they
would do with these ‘others’ as they saw fit. Unification of the nation under the military
regime depends then on a homogeneous construction of acquiescent, submissive citizens.
Under such a system families and neighbors are coerced into becoming suspicious of each
other, fomenting a society of mistrust and apprehension. as evidenced earlier with the
female’s response about Rogelio.

The novel both commences and ends with disappearances. The day before the
narrator makes a decision to cross the border, the police enter the schoolhouse where he is

staying and out of panic he hides.23 It turns out that they are looking for another man. a

 

reciprocity, to whom the nation belongs” (27).

23 This is not the first time the narrator hides out of fear. He did so once before in
an open market believing that he was being followed. His actions reveal the extent to
which fear had controlled the actions of people living under dictatorship. In the narrator’s

165

trucker named Amadeo, who happens to be amorously involved with the school teacher
there. When they are leaving she asks them again:

«(A quién dice que buscan?

El oficial ya se iba.

--No importa-dijo-.En realidad, ya lo cazamos ayer. 8610, de paso,

queriamos echar un vistazo por aqui. Ya volveremos.” (167)
No information is provided as to the reason for detaining Amadeo, and no questions
about his detainment are asked. Protest is silenced through fear of reprisals. The police
forcefully impose their presence without permission, and they likewise investigate the
premise, informing her that she must comply with subsequent intrusions that will occur at
their disclosure. Tizon demonstrates again here the extent to which dictatorships
intentionally invade not only public spaces but the private spaces of one’s home.
Nowhere can one escape the dictatorial omnipresence that invades even the most rural.
desolate and intimate of areas. As shown here, once the authorities have taken someone
into their custody, the particular individual loses his/her identity and becomes part of a
collective, disposable and nameless enemy. Before the protagonist loses anymore than he
has already lost, early that next morning, before sunrise, he crosses the border.
The Other Within
Th n ci u l’ ’ of ‘Oth r’

One’s sense of self is not constructed in isolation; it comes into being through a

process of interactions with one’s environment-social, environmental, political and

historical. From the private confines of the home to the public sphere beyond. identity is

 

case, it certainly affected his decision to leave Argentina, though he curiously does not
directly refer to it.

166

forged not only in the way we see ourselves but also in the way others perceive us (Taylor
92). In the case of exile, identity becomes an issue, for no longer can the exile depend on
the homeland from which s/he is now severed, to reinforce his/her concept of self. As
such, the exile’s identity comes into question within the new environment. especially one
that imposes such ostracizing classifications as ‘marginal,’ ‘other,’ or ‘foreigner.’ With
respect to the narrator of Lama, his sense of self comes into play already within his own
homeland. As he journeys toward the border he finds himself in a liminal state between
the old self as defined by what he is leaving behind and a new self, not yet formed.

The narrator represents every person who loses his/her identity as a consequence
of deraeination. Stripped of his old identity, (he‘even lacks a name), he no longer belongs
to any particular group, but as such, he begins to empathize with people who have been
figuratively exiled within the country he is about to flee.

While still in Argentina, however, the narrator is distraught about his identity: he
recognizes that he changes and that on occasion he becomes someone not quite himself.
one who he denominates as the ‘other.’ Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves, makes the
case that, “the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space
that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder” (1). This
‘other,’ this foreigner, “comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises” (ibid).
which for the exile occurs precisely upon realizing that s/he will no longer form part of a
former group, society, or nation. Indeed, in the first paragraphs of the narrator’s prologue
he acknowledges the fact that his decision to leave his country would be “un acto

irreparable” (15) and it certainly is with respect to his identity. Once the ‘other’ within

167

becomes unleashed, so to speak, he cannot configure his identity to return to its former
‘natural’ state. Particularly curious in Tizon’s novel is that the protagonist refers to his
exile as a ‘fuga,’ that he is a ‘fugitivo,’ a fugitive not only of a dictatorial state that
represses and strangles the plurality of voices from within its borders, but also, I believe.
a fugitive of himself, from the ‘other’ within, of whom he is frightened and perplexed. but _
who nevertheless becomes a part of his identity.

The first time he consciously enunciates the acknowledgment of the possible
manifestation of his ‘otro’ occurs in a foreign environment while-alone in the room of a
Humahuaca hotel, named Numancia, a name that recalls the mass suicide of the
Numancians under Roman occupation in Spain, and which is fitting here because the
protagonist’s sense of self as understood until now has died. From his hotel room he goes
out to the balcony and almost gives into the temptation to become an-other by spying on
his neighbors: “En la soledad siempre podemos ser otro” (31). He did not, on this
occasion, allow the ‘other’ to manifest itself, but it is significant in that he is completely
aware that the ‘other’ within the self not only exists but it can dominate one’s familiar
identity under certain circumstances. He chooses here not to succumb to this ‘other.’ for
he is able to consciously control it; in other cases, however, it will happen almost
involuntarily.

The first time the narrator is actually aware of the ‘other’ taking over his
customary self, he is at a lake shooting ducks with his friend Juan. The narrator missed
every shot he took at them, and later with Juan when he vents his frustration at the birds

(“Estos patos de mierda” 45) he felt that he had become an-other (“era otro” 45). J uan. a

168

man of mixed Indian and white blood, represents the union of man with nature; each time
he contemplates his environment it is as if it were the first, and each time he kills he does
not want the animal to die. In the past both men were usually successful at shooting
game, but this time Juan believes that his friend failed because he wanted to kill the birds.
a clear explanation that the narrator begins to feel the disruption of the relationship with
the natural environment of which he will soon no longer be a part.

Already at the beginning of his journey his exilic state begins to take form and he
finds himself out of touch, as much with the external natural forces, as with the internal
ones. At night, after a celebration, confrontation and peaceful resolution between
villagers and a foreigner staying among them in Casira, the narrator approaches an
indigenous woman named Rosa, to whom he finds himself suddenly attracted. This was a
new experience. He had shared her company before, but no such feeling arose. lle lifts
the comer of the straw mattress covering her as she sleeps. Surprised at his own actions.
he wonders: “Pero yo mismo puedo, tan pronto, ser otro?” (73).

The narrator’s ‘other’ manifests itself a third time in a house of prostitution in La
Quiaca.” He converses for a while with the owner of the establishment, but when the
latter leaves to respond to a phone call, the ensuing silence propitiates the manifestation

of his ‘other,’ “Quedo otra vez solo, pero ya soy otro” (85). Being an-other encourages

 

2" The owner of the prostitute house/bar is based on a real figure and place. In an
interview Tizon explains: “Una vez conoci a1 duer’io de un burdel en el que habia un cartel
con letras de neon que decian: ‘Recuerdos del 37.’ ‘Pero recuerdos de que, como eran?’ le
preguntaba la gente. El siempre contestaba lo mismo: ‘Aaaahhh.’ ‘Si, pero, a ver,
cuenteme', gpor qué del 37?’ Y él repetia: ‘Aaaahhh.’ Algo muy estupendo le habia
pasado ese afio, pero nadie supo, salvo él, qué habia sido.” (Clarin 1999).

169

him to follow one of the prostitutes upstairs. Once in her room however, he suddenly
feels ridiculous, perhaps due to the return of his usual self, and he decides to leave.

- What the narrator covertly expresses through the ‘other’ in the previous two
examples is a man detached from his own sexuality.25 In this case, being an-other brings
him in touch with those aspects of the self that have hitherto been denied by the subject.
Though at times the encounter with his ‘other’ is a negative experience, it provides him
with the opportunity to explore aspects of the self that otherwise would have gone
unexamined. However, no dialogue occurs between the self and his ‘other,’ and no
reflections are made as to the reason(s) for the ‘other’s’ appearance.

The narrator’s ease in becoming ‘el otro,’ manifests itself in a different manner in
the town of Yavi. During his stay there, the narrator learns about a foreigner who had
arrived decades before trying to make his fortune searching for gold. Two sisters.
physically similar to each other, fell in love with him, and he eventually chose one for
himself. When he died in a house fire. apparently started by the sister he rejected, the
other sister went mad and was taken to the South. The one who lives in Yavi entertains
the narrator in her home a few times. After hearing the details from the villagers about
the two sisters and the foreigner with whom they fell in love. the narrator falls ill. loses
weight, and physically becomes like this man from the past (“Soy ahora, también. un

hombre flaco y macilento”)-using the same adjectives to describe himself as were used by

the villagers to describe the foreigner.

 

2’ The death of his wife conceivably helps the reader to understand this change in
behavior.

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Indeed, it is in Yavi where for the first time in his own words he becomes. “casi
un extranjero” (81), taking on the physical characteristics of the only other foreigner he
could identify with. In Casira he learns about the repercussions of acquiring this status.
though the people there do not consider him to be a foreigner. Instead, they vent their
anger on another man labeled an ‘extranjero’ who, “ni siquiera ha dicho su nombre este
jodido” (54)- a statement that could precisely be directed at the innominate narrator. The
physical attack by the villagers of Casira on the ‘extranjero’ serves to warn the
protagonist of potential difficulties he will have to confront once he crosses the border.

In another incident in Yavi, the narrator sees someone imitate his exact
movements when walking in the fields; if he speeds up so does the other, if he slows
down. the other does as well. Unable to speak with the man repeating his actions. the
narrator finally turns around to go his own way, but when he looks back. in the man’s
place is now an old sheep.

With respect to the example that takes place in Yavi, past and present merge.
neither ‘foreigner’ lasts in this town; both die-one literally, the other (the protagonist)
figuratively begins to die to his old self. In the second example. in a more optimistic
manner, though the narrator may leave the Puna. the Puna will continue to follow him in
its many forms, wherever he goes.26
Th nc nsci an n med Dictatorial ‘Other’ Within

Although the narrator refuses to continue to live any longer under the reigns of an

 

3" He ends the novel by writing that he knows his ‘home’, “esta aqui erigida en mi
corazon” (l 75).

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oppressive dictatorship, another authoritarian-dictatorial ‘other’ manifests within himself.
but about whom he makes absolutely no declaration as being an ‘otro.’

The more subtle forms of dictatorship are curiously emulated and documented by
the narrator (spying, eavesdropping and lying) in his travel diary, though he does not. at
least formally, recognize the connection between his own actions and those of the regime.
If the military used the same discourse as the liberals to defend human rights while at the
same time burning books and assassinating people (Osvaldo Bayer”), then the protagonist
in an inverse situation, rejects dictatorship as he utilizes its tactics in the process of
fleeing from it.

A primary task for the dictatorship became that of locating delinquents within the
country and castigating them for their so-called crimes. Obtaining information about the
nation’s people and eliminating those who might possibly question the establishment
became possible through both overt and clandestine efforts of espionage. including
eavesdropping.

Whereas at the beginning of the narrator’s journey he rejected the idea of spying
on his neighbors, toward the middle of his journey at a hotel in La Quiaca, he decides to
capitulate to this desire and eavesdrop on the people who entered the room adjacent to his
own. What he listens to is an intimate conversation between a man and woman who fear
for their lives as they are in the process of escaping from Argentina. They are on the run

to the border, though they too have done nothing wrong, save, according to them. “no

 

37 For more information see his article, “Pequefio recordatorio para un pais sin

memoria” in RepLesiQ'n y reconstmggig’n de una cultura; El case argentino. Ed. Saul

Sosnowski.

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estar de acuerdo con ellos” (80). A difference in ideology with the dictatorship literally
meant risking one’s life. The private words between this couple are recorded in the
narrator’s travel diary, and although in the general scheme they represent the terror that
all Argentine people experience under the dictatorship, the narrator, in effect by writing
about them and in particular, by including one of their names (transcribed from their
conversation), potentially incriminates the couple, as would occur if for some reason the
police were to interrogate the narrator and confiscate his papers. More importantly
though, he crosses into the personal space of his neighbors’ room without their
knowledge and makes public their words of intimacy.

The narrator’s first night away from home is spent with the merchant, Sanroman.
who sat next to him on the train to Humahuaca, where they share a room at the Hotel
Numancia. During their time together, the narrator becomes conscious of the fact for the
first time that the possible manifestation of his ‘other’ is fomented when alone. and
though he is tempted to spy on his hotel neighbors when Sanroman goes for a walk. as
explained above, he decides not to. What he does decide, however, is to spy on
Sanroman: “Sanroman era demasiado locuaz, y lo habia visto entrar en el cuartel de la
gendarrneria” (32). Suspicious of the fact that Sanroman had visited the police station. he
searches through his suitcase looking for possible clues that might reveal Sanroman’s
identity, who did confess to once being a politician. He finds nothing in the suitcase that
could possibly incriminate Sanroman as a governmental agent. The narrator’s own action
though are akin to one.

Like the dictatorship that penetrates into the private spaces of the nation’s

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citizens, here too, the narrator emulates this behavior by disrespecting his roommate’s
privacy. He leaves a visible trail of his steps by leaving the contents of the suitcase
disorganized. Sanroman makes no reference to this fact later on, but actually reveals even
more personal information about himself to the protagonist, possibly because he realizes
the connection between the narrator’s unease and his own visit to the police station.
Sanroman explains to him that he has a daughter in Humahuaca who is dating a
policeman, hence his visit there. She does not know that he is her father, but Sanroman
believes that if he were to tell her the truth: “Ella no seria mas feliz. No le falta nada
ahora, y en eso de los sentimientos a veces es mejor lo que parece que lo que cs” (37).
These words could also apply to the narrator, whose appearance seemed “mejor”
than the man he demonstrated he was: a man who’s ends justified his means, even against
one who trusted him enough to share a hotel room without knowing the narrator’s name.
False appearances occur again with the protagonist when he lies to the school teacher
with whom he stays almost two weeks, by telling her that he is a philologist. or by letting
others believe that he is a merchant or a coal miner (149). At the school house he notes
how the teacher automatically trusts him solely on the basis of his physical appearance:
“Ella no me pregunta nada; confia en mis modales, en el color de mi piel, dc mi barba. de
mis ojos, 0 en la calidad de mis botas; en la historia acumulada de las imagenes” (153 ).
The dictatorship also depended on creating a false appearance of normalcy to an
international community that was beginning to ask questions about human rights in the
country. In response, Argentina began for example, to emphasize women’s rights by

increasing their salaries, and admitting Vietnamese refugees into the country (Sheinin).

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all the while causing the disappearance of Argentine citizens, most of whom were in their
early 20's.
Reading Dictatorship

During the- dirty war, and really under any type of dictatorship. those in power
realize that language, especially as expressed in written discourse. has the potential to
rouse and galvanize large populations, both literate and illiterate. The published word.
given its permanency, and its potential to question and oppose the establishment.
becomes then a primary target of censorship. The obligatory reading materials of
society’s most young and pliable minds are vigorously controlled, as the narrator observes
during his stay with a school teacher who received a letter from the government
mandating her to incinerate certain books that have been officially black-listed. She is
liberated from this task only because the school does not own any of the books cited in
the missive. Indeed, she informs the protagonist that it had been a number of years since
the school received any new publications for the children. With this example Tizén
demonstrates how the inhabitants of the interior are unequally treated by the
governmental system; they do not receive the same teaching materials for their young as
for those from Buenos Aires, whose school books were now considered objectionable by
the military. Even the schoolteacher, a non-native to the region, pejoratively refers to her
pupils as “animalitos,” (154) when the narrator suggests that the children might help him
in his field work as a philologist.

The narrator is unique in that instead of reading the one book he takes with him on

his travels, he ends up writing one. the one we readers read. He does however. provide

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himself with the opportunity to read while on hisjoumey to the border, if even his
numerous attempts to do so prove unsuccessful. During his last days in his native land.
no book seems capable to compete with the profound magnetism he feels toward his
surroundings, the images and sounds of the Northwest that he does his best to record for
future reference in exile.

Curiously, he does not provide a title to the book he carries with him nor does he
admit to a questioning stranger’s knowledge about it. Yet. when Don Fe'lix. an elderly
peasant, asks him if the book he owns is the same one “que leen los curas” (60). he
replies that it must be (“ha de ser el mismo”). In order to discover what book the
narrator really carries with him we must jump ahead to the only clue he dispenses about
it. Toward the end of his travels, while staying at the school house, be con fesscs to
having deliberately chosen a particular book before leaving home and he quotes from it
one line: “F erox gens nullam vitam rati sine annis esse” (155). This Latin phrase comes
from an historical treatise about the Roman Empire written by the Roman historian. I_.ivy
(Titus Livius). The quote from Livy’sThe Dawn of the Roman Empire (Ab U rbe
Gamma) refers to Marcus Porcius Cato’s bitter military campaign in securing Spain from
revolt by forbidding the inhabitants from bearing arms. Livy attests: “The Spaniards were
so humiliated by this that many took their own lives -they are a headstrong people.
feeling a life without weapons to be meaningless” (157, the italicized section is the
English translation of the Latin quote). In other words, Livy asserts that the Spaniards
preferred death to a life without the means to wage war. His text exemplifies the age-old

tradition of the victors’ writing and recording history in their favor. just as in the case of

I76

Argentina under the dictatorship. However, it seems highly probable that like in the later
cases of Numancia and Sagunto the Iberians committed suicide not because of their
obstinacy or disillusionment of living a life without war, but rather, because they
preferred death to accepting life under the rule of foreign intruders. The Roman Empire
flourished by means of cooperative alliances: “In exchange for ‘cooperation,’ the Romans
offered protection and self-rule. Those who remained loyal and contributed the most aid
were given the highest privileges; those who wavered or deserted were punished or
annihilated” (Greer 91). On the other hand, those peoples who preferred their
independence saw the Romans simply as destroyers of liberty. If the narrator affimis that
Don Félix’s assumption that his own book and the Bible must be the same, it is with
respect to the fact that Christianity, like the Roman empire expected its members/subjects
to relinquish their hitherto respective spiritual and political liberties.

Those who preached the word, expected their new followers to adopt cultural
changes in accordance with the particular religious institution they represented. When the
Spaniards initiated their evangelization of Latin America, they considered it necessary to
“borrar [del indio] todas las creencias de su medio cultural para inculcarle con firmeza la
verdad de la fe en Jesucristo. Se usaria entonces el me'todo de ‘tabula rasa.’ es decir. se le
iniciarr’a en la doctrina como si en el indio no hubiera habido ninguna revelacion del
Sefior y como si él no tuviema ninguna verdad que le fuera propia.” (Liboreiro 27). Over
500 years later, Tizon’s novel addresses the continued struggle between the traditions of
the indigenous peoples that were never completely eradicated by the Spaniards (still

relatively newcomers to the Church in comparison to Christian Europe) and the Catholic

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Church. The Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 again reiterated the Church’s rejection
of syncretism and its favoring of mainstream Catholic teaching and practice at the
expense of popular ‘folk Catholicism.’ Of course, the degree of tolerance for accepting
certain traditions of native cultures within Catholicism depends at the local level on the
particular representative of the Catholic Church, especially at the level of the priesthood.”
In La casa y el viento, the townspeople of Yavi explain to the narrator how in the past a
particular town priest had prohibited his parishioners from listening or playing music,
lighting bonfires or donning traditional indigenous clothing worn for Catholic religious
festivities. Their lack of acquiescence led the priest to finally abandon his post. taking
with him a number of precious material items belonging to the town church. Once the
villagers caught up with him, they retrieved the town’s possessions and left him alone in
the paramo to fend for himself. In a scene akin to W. when the bishop
ordered an investigation into the manner, no one claimed to know anything about the
incident. The solidarity of the community defeated the oppressive rule of one
representative of the religious establishment, but in many of the communities visited by
the narrator, churches are empty and some towns even lack priests. In the novel. these
men of the cloth are avaricious and unkind, interested only in their own well-being: they

blame the natives for the inclement weather and for their own poverty, and they steal

2’ In Eduardo Galeano’s OW he explains syncretism

with respect to the Maya-Quiche culture and the Catholic Church upon the arrival of the
conquistadors: “The Catholic religion assimilated a few magical and totemic aspects of
the Maya religion in a vain attempt to submit to the Indian faith the conquistadors’
ideology. The crushing of the original culture opened the way for syncretism” (50).

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from their indigent, including the orphaned (Den Félix’s case)” and the ill. The
narrator’s own deraeination leads him to question the Almighty: “No, Dios no era el buen
padre, sus denes eran siempre incongruentes y caprichosos. Senti que odiaba el poder...”
(44-45). What is admirable about Don Félix, however. is that even with the affirmation
that the narrator potentially carries with him a document that he finds oppressive to his
people, he nevertheless demonstrates a level of tolerance, acceptance and even friendship
that, at least in the novel, was never reciprocated by those representing the Bible toward
their parishioners.

The narrator commences his journey with one book, but later on he acquires a
second, offered to him as a gift by Yavi’s commissioner, Don Placido, who sarcastically
tells him. “Lle’velo..Aqui ya nadie lee... Esta prohibido” (139). Even though those from
the town of Yavi have access to a public library, none of the inhabitants utilize it. While
in principle the library is open to the public, no one can enter it without the
commissioner, who holds the key to its building. When the narrator’s efforts prove
fruitless in finding information about a saint whose sculpted image adorns the local
church, Den Placide immediately blames the natives: “Quizas se lo llevaron hace mucho
tiempe, cuando este estaba abandonado y buena parte de les archivos, asientos de

bautismos y casamientos fueron robados para encender fuege. 0 para otros uses vulgares”

 

2” The narrator’s host in Casira, Don Fe'lix, as a child lost his father. Before the
father died he informed his son that the local priest has had in his possession their
milking cow for three years, “en page de unas misas que me le dara a mi alma mientras la
vaca dure” (68). When Den Fe'lix approaches the priest to retrieve the animal the latter
replies that said cow had died, assuring him that, “Esa que estas viendo de lejos es solo
parecida” (69).

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(124). It must then be noted that the natives of Yavi did discriminate among the works
and by burning the baptismal and marriage records. as well as a good portion of other
archives, they destroyed a substantial record linking the people of the community to the
C athelic Church, and the civil state. Their desire for independence from these two
oppressive forces, resonates profoundly. But, through these actions, like the narrator. one
could say that they emulate the tactics of the dictatorship, for both the military and the
natives make those documents of interest to them disappear (just as they did with the
priest above).

Though it is clear that arneng the natives they knew exactly what information they
were burning, Den Placide’s comment about the locals’ lack of interest in reading still
overlooks the educational and economic hardships of his fellow villagers. The highest
rates of illiteracy in Argentina are concentrated in the Northwestern provinces. where
both high percentages of rural and indigenous peoples live.” In Jujuy alone, 24% of the
population is illiterate. (Padua 65). Over 60% of schools in the interior are privately
owned and those that belong to the state are few and far between. (Padua 61). La casa y
el viento portrays a people of great determination to educate their children. even if their
young must walk many a mile to reach an educational institution. Regrettably. under a
gevemment that takes no active role in reducing the levels of illiteracy in the provinces or
increasing the number of schools there, learning how to read is a feat many natives are

unable to conquer. Instead, representatives of the government, like Don Placido blame

’0 However, it should be noted that Argentina has one of the highest rates of
literacy in the world, 94-96% (Padua).

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the victims for the govemmcnt’s failures. If no one reads from the library it just may be
because few are actually literate and of these, perhaps they refused to use this ‘public’
institution (only available via Don Placido) in protestation against the centralized
govemment’s policies toward them.

Translations

Translations provide the means to understand a system foreign to one’s own. be it
cultural, linguistic or otherwise. The narrator expresses the necessity for this transaction
for the first time after quoting Livy’s text, when he confesses to having taken with him on
his journey a Latin dictionary, should he require it in translating the historical treatise.
Toward the end of his travels he spends his mornings “en cama y prefiero traducir a leer:
e leer traduciende” (157).

The innominate narrator can be compared to the dictionary he carries with him,
for he becomes for the reader of his diary, a translator (due primarily to his liminal
status), not of a written text, but of his own homeland, of its Northwestern peoples. and of
the exilic experience. Of the written text, that is Livy’s quote, he provides no translation.
By refusing to do so he negates the victor’s version of historical events. For what
remains unacceptable is the manipulation of words by the victors, like the Latin quote
cited by the narrator, in order to create a univocal and distorted version of history. The
Latin quote serves as a reminder to the narrator that he must continue translating his
experience and that of his peoples’ in order to substantiate an alternative version to that

provided by the ruling military. In this manner, though the protagonist abandons his

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country, he does not abandon his country’s polyphoneus voices."

The protagonist provides a space for the indigenous peoples by walking among
them and recording his experiences with them in his diary. He presents a dual
perspective of the native cultures of the Northwest by both observing how the outside
world responds to them and how they respond to it. In the novel the “indies” are objects
of prejudice and negatively stereotyped; even a soap salesman (Sanroman) whose clients
include the indigenous peoples, claims that they are ‘dirty’ and ‘unclean.’ Don Placido
finds them to be “mezquinos y jodidos,” and as seen earlier the school teacher claims her
students are “animales.” Society tends to objectify and dehumanize the indigenous
peoples. by both educated and ignorant alike. In his travels, the narrator also encounters
two children, who, when asked what town they are from, respond “ Don Sixto Tolay.”
that is, not a place, but a person, the same man who owns the cows they tend.32

In comparison to the natives’ treatment by the society at large. those natives the
protagonist encounters in his travels always share with him their homes and what little
provisions they own. Far from creating of them models of the ‘bon savage.’ Tizon
depicts their human nature, at their best and at their worst. As seen earlier, the natives.

just like the narrator, also resist the dictatorship/oppression. but on occasion emulate it as

 

3' I disagree with Celina Manzeni who writes, “F uera de la tradicion religiosa.
aunque probablemente marcada per ella, la posesion del libro. come fetiche de la
ilustracien, conserva el prestigio del saber, de la tradicion. del conocimiento de los que
han side” (34). With the translation of the quote from the author and book I provide
above, the possession of said book represents the exact opposite.

’2 Tizon might base this scene on his own childhood experience: “Y J ulian. un
mulato de mi edad, compaflere de juegos a escondidas, cuando él Iograba escaparse de la
vigilancia de su patron, un terrateniente déspeta” (Encuesta 366).

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well (for example the woman in the mining town who thought that a disappeared man
must have done something to deserve what happened to him; the indigenous peoples
create the disappearance of a priest and they intentionally burn documents). In another
example, a foreigner staying as a guest in Don Fe'lix’s home, is physically attacked by
members of the community. Fear of the ‘other’ afflicts any and all groups of people. not
just the majority or dominant race against a minority, but vice-versa as well. When a
voice of reason intervenes, like Den Félix in the case above. the foreigner is finally given
the opportunity to speak. Communication between foreigner and native breaks the barrier
of difference and the two sides begin to acknowledge instead their similarities. Although
the protagonist’s skin color could classify him as a foreigner as well, it is curious that no
one in the community feels threatened by his difference in appearance. As one
experiencing liminality, he moves in between the dominant and minority cultures. as he
does with respect to oral and written discourse.

All humans are united by our desire and need to communicate with others, but in
order to understand the peoples of the Puna, the narrator realizes that he must search
beyond the written word to find meaning within orality. In the journey from home to
border he moves from a written culture to an oral culture. But, in order to preserve the
history of the oral culture he must return to the written culture’s writing system. Writing
centralizes the marginality of the Nerthwestem peoples of the Argentine Puna, but
writing can at times be a double edged sword. His primary intention entails the act of
rooting through words the memories of his homeland before leaving it. However. the act

of writing, as explained before, can not fully render reality, as one observes it. Further

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complications arise when taking into the account one’s audience. Like the exile.
Ramirez, in chapter four, the narrator fears that “lo que uno escribe no es lo mismo que
los demas leeran” (148). Unlike Ramirez who denies the prison notes he wrote while
incarcerated in Argentina as his own, the narrator of La casa y el viento continues writing.
even if his words might be misunderstood.

In representing the oral discourse of the indigenous Quechua speakers of the Puna.
Tizon innovatively constructs linguistic phrases that incorporate Quechua into Spanish
syntax. such as, gCuya seria la llamita que nos cornimos? (71 ), instead of De quien seria...
Tizon, in the tradition of Arguedas and Rulfo, expands the Spanish language by
addressing linguistic realities common to its oral use.

The Chilean writer Elicura Chihuailaf utilizes the term “oralitura” to explain the
literature of oral cultures that exists despite the lack of a written discourse normally
associated with literature per se. The second of four chapters in La casay el viento.
entitled “El verso perdido” cencems the narrator’s search for the missing pieces to the
story and mysterious death of an illiterate poet from the Puna, named Belindo. No
written record about this character, real or not, exists and therefore the narrator depends
entirely on the collective oral memories of the communities and individuals he comes
into contact with in order to construct a cohesive, albeit at times contradictory and
fragmentary account about the poet. Why the protagonist suddenly expresses a desire for
learning about this figure stems from the last scene of the previous chapter. where he had
been hunting ducks with his friend Juan. The disjunction between the narrator’s old self

and the new self that manifests itself on occasion as he begins to experience exile. serves

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as an impetus in unraveling Belinde’s story33 who spent his adult life searching for a lost
verse that with its discovery he believed would convert him into an-other, ‘en otro.’ The
protagonist loses a part of his old self as a consequence of exile and the search for the lost
verse, represents the opposite search of Belindo’s. The narrator has already become an
‘other,’ what he would hope for is a way in which to hold on to and remember his old
familiar identity before crossing the borders of his native land. The words of the verse
however remain a mystery and all that the narrator is left with are the phrases and images
of the Northwestern culture, that without written discourse he too could easily forget.
Tizon’s representation of the spoken word in the Puna mirrors that of the sparse
land that these peoples inhabit. That is, there is a certain economy (28) with respect to
language, as there is with respect to the vegetation. The narrator explains that for the
people of the Puna words “son un peligro mayor que el propio vacio” (41).
Loquaciousness manifests itself only under the condition of abundance in one’s
immediate environment with respect to food and fire (51). Under the dictatorship
however, the usual silences of the Northwest, are infiltrated with military marches
blasting on radios that the listeners quickly turn off. In contrast to the music made for
political purposes, the Northwestern people play music, especially that of a particular
flute, the erke, for religious and secular festivities. In Yavi, during the narrator’s stay, a
religious holiday is celebrated and the saint about whom no information could be found,

is taken by the parishioners in a procession through the town. Is the saint an idol of the

 

’3 Belindo, son of an indigenous woman, who bleated as a child and never
suffered the sting of a bee, heard the lost verse by one who stabbed him and then
whispered it in his ear just before dying.

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past? Syncretism seems to exist, another form of liminality (in between two religions)
that Tizon seems to play with in the novel with respect to the indigenous peoples who
have been marginalized by the society as a whole.

Another form of music that they enjoy is the poetry, recited and sung by the
cantores, literally singers, who “desde tiempo inmemorial abundaban en esta tierra” (37).
Their words are remembered from generation to generation, as testified by the narrator
who learned Belindo’s poetry from his own grandfather. If we recognize Walter Ong’s
affirmation that in primary oral cultures words are considered to have magical potency. it
should then not surprise us the difficulty the narrator would have in translating the
oralitura into written discourse.

Conclusions

The narrator’s journey to the border becomes not only an external journey but an
internal journey of discovery about the self. How does dictatorship affect the identity of
the people living under it? Tizon allows us to peer into a world where the victims of
dictatorship both suffer from its atrocities and actually appropriate some of the dictatorial
tactics for their own agenda. One’s home is no longer a sacred space untouched by the
outside word; it has been penetrated by the regime, and it has left its mark on those inside
who have no means of escaping from it, but that of escape itself. Their only hope is for
someone to tell their story. By physically exiling himself, the narrator can write/right his
own story and that of his people who have been silenced. into a space where the
heterogeneity of his nation, including the exiled, will in the future be remembered and

celebrated. Despite the winds of history, home can be reconstructed through the word. by

186

building it anew with the foundations of truth into the land of memory and into the heart

of its owners.

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Conclusion

It has been the objective of this dissertation to explore exile from various physical
and symbolic spaces through the novels of six exiled authors. Whether the exile resides
in the host country or is on the journey to it, s/he experiences liminality upon the
initiation of becoming an exile - which may in fact begin within the homeland.
Liminality expresses the exilic experience of belonging in dichotomies, such as those
with respect to geography (no longer members of the old country and not natives of the
new), time (the past/memories from where they came and the present tense that they
currently experience), language (mother tongue and foreign language/dialect), discourses
(oral and written), and discursive methods of describing the world (historical and
fictional). The novels studied here also represent examples of a ‘liminal genre.’ That is.
these works can not be defined within the constructs of the traditional category of ‘novel’
per se. Elements of two or more genres are incorporated into the creation of one
structurally unique text (e.g., in Moyane’s case the autobiography of the author is
embedded within a fictional construct, a play constitutes a chapter, an allegorical tale
another, and musical notation forms part of the novel’s language). In both the physical
form of the novel and its contents, exile expresses a transcendence of categorization.
crossing over into zones generally demarcated from passage.

The exiles’ particular physical location in space constitutes its own obstacles and
mechanisms of survival that have been delineated in the chapters of this dissertation.
Chapter One studies the difficulty the exile has in penetrating the private spaces ofthe

host land, be it literal or figurative, from the public spaces of institutionalized exile

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(hospital, nursing home and mental asylum). Ramirez’s loss of memory leads to a coping
mechanism of trying to appropriate his native interlocutor’s past history for himself.
Nevertheless, the lack of true intimacy from both parties, as well as the inability to create
a viable identity for himself in exile leads to his own death.'

In Daniel Moyano’s novel, Rolando travels in between two borders by ship l’rorn
the New World to the Old. He has difficulty assimilating his newly acquired identity as
an exile especially given that he was unaware of the fact that he would be parting from
the homeland until the event actually took place. Besides writing. which actually
transpires after arrival to the host land, Rolando copes with his new status aboard the ship
by using his imagination to create another Rolando in his mind whose situation is more
favorable than the one he experiences in reality. Fiction is used not only by himself for
himself but by many in order to explain the unexplainable disasters left behind in the
homeland.2

In Marta Traba’s novel, the exiles who have arrived to a host land in Europe
encounter one major obstacle in that they are hoarded together in an abandoned train

station without privacy or any guarantee from the host government that a home will be

 

' In Manuel Puig’s novel the revolutionary from Argentina becomes transformed
into an unheroic figure without any recollection of his past. Revolutionaries in Rodolfo
Rabanal’s En_etra_p_ar_te and Elmsajeee, like Ramirez, from Puig’s novel, are also not to
be revered but reviled. The manners in which society constructs and destructs its heroes
are questioned here by both authors, as does Mario Benedetti with Santiago in Primavera

2 Daniel Moyano’s novel where imagined and experienced realities cenflate. can
be compared to Edgardo Cezarinksy’s Liege gle Meneel, Veet'r urbane, a novel consisting
of post cards written from Buenos Aires (homeland) and Paris (adopted land). in which
the narrator conflates memories with the present tense so that the two cities become
indistinguishable.

189

provided for them. They have become outcasts and the host country has labeled them as
undesirable ‘others’ who have nothing to offer their society. The manner in which the
exiles survive this unwelcome beginning in another country is by upholding their identity
as members of the same nationality. Still, experimentation with respect to identity takes
place, especially with the women in the novel who are able to create identities of their
own accord and not those based on hegemonic standards.3

Antonio Skarmeta and Mario Benedetti’s characters live in the host lands and
their challenge consists of learning how to survive in a foreign environment once having
obtained a private space of their own from within it. The adults in Benedetti’s novel must
decide whether or not to move forward with their lives in exile, or if this would imply a
disloyalty to the homeland and those left behind. Benedetti’s Don Rafael, and Skarmeta’s
adolescent Lucho, both acquaint themselves with the new land via the native women. and
language becomes the primary vehicle in befriending the ‘other."‘

We have seen in He'ctor Tizon’s novel5 that it is extremely difficult to bid farewell

 

3 This experimentation with gender identity is especially seen in female exiled
novelists, such as Cristina Peri Rossi in W, Isabel Allende in Eve Luna
and Luisa Valenzuela in Neyele negga cen argentinos.

4 The exploration of the exilic experience from this physical space can also be
seen in other novels such as Mempo Giardinelli’s Oee’ seles se geedae Ios muertos:
Gabriel Casaccia’s Lemiliedee , José Denoso’s El iergeie de el lado; Alfredo Bryce
Echenique’s WM, and Mario Goloboff’s C aballos per el fondo de les

5 In Héctor Tizon’s novel the exiled protagonist intently records cultural
information for himself as well as for posterity about the indigenous peoples of his
homeland, something that occurs also in Gregorio Manzur’s (also an Argentine from the
interior of the country) Seleeceeejegeag. The desire to not only remember but honor the
native inhabitants of the countries from which the authors exiled themselves. becomes
evident in other novels as well, such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s El hablader. and Luis

Sepulveda’s Uni/WW
I90

to one’s homeland, and yet, having accepted exile as the only viable alternative to
dictatorship, the protagonist begins to experience a change with respect to his identity
before having crossed the border. He senses that he no longer is the man he once was,
and this uncontrollable other within is disturbing to him. Writing as a means of catharsis
is a survival mechanism that he recurs to, as do Daniel Moyano and Antonio Skarmeta’s
characters. Psychological survival for Tizon’s character entails that of recording on paper
those memories that will remind him of home.

As a consequence of exile, the subjects are separated from their familiar
environments and cast into unknown geographies from which they may never be able to
return home, though they always hope that one day they will. This displacement can be
both crippling and liberating: crippling in the traumatic sense of having lost all that one
has hitherto known and loved, but liberating in that the individuals can experiment with
the crossing of borders as well as with their own concepts of identity.

Unrestricted, unconfined and undefined, exiles trespass into unchartered territories
that cultures have impeded or thwarted its members from normally experiencing. The
exchanges between the exiles and the various environments they encounter express the
degree to which translations are a crucial part in communicating that which is considered
to be ‘other,’ be it with respect to people, cultures, or languages. The act of translation is
common to all people in all comers of the world as Octavio Paz has recognized:
“Translation is the principal means we have of understanding the world we live in”
(Bassnett 2). For exiles however, the translations they engage in so as to understand their

new environments as well as those left behind are not one-sided, nor merely related to

191

linguistic events. Exiles are both subjects who translate their surroundings and objects of
translation by their adopted societies. The liminal status as exiles, however, requires of
them not only to translate the external world but also the internal one as well. F or exiles
the latter seems to lead to the realization of Rimbaud’s assertion that, “Je est un autre.”
The exile literature presented in this dissertation demonstrates that translations provided
by exiles help explain to a large degree how we imagine and define ourselves. own

communities and nations and how we confront that which is unfamiliar and unknown.

I92

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