The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures 1498596487, 9781498596480

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The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures

The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures Beatriz Rivera-Barnes

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949621 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction: The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature PART ONE: THE IBERIAN WORLD

1 15

1 Dark Alchemy: Celestina, or the Hatred of Love

17

2 Intimate Haters, Difficult Literatures

37

3 Odium Dei: Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez 53 PART TWO: DIARIES OF THE AMERICAS 4 With Hate Leading the Way: Pieces of Aguirre and Other Doomed Expeditions

67 69

5 Hating Crows: The Travels of Concolorcorvo! and of Ernesto Guevara 83 6 The Curse of Ham, the Malediction of Changó: Nature and Terror, Mackandal’s Brood

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7 Madness and Hatred: Rivera’s Inferno

121

8 Canaima, Ecophobia, and the Anthropocene

133

9 Yes, It Isn’t (What Cannot be Said): Self-Hatred in Poetry from Guayama, Puerto Rico, to Loisaida, New York

145

10 Biophilia, Ecophobia, Eco-Odium: A Coupling with the Nonhuman, Extinction, and a Loop of Vampiric Mosquitos Threatening the Anthropocene

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v

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Contents

11 Is There a Caliban in this Narrative? The Cooking and the Eating of Hate

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Bibliography 201 Index 217 About the Author

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Introduction The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature

In Rage and Time, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk asks if one should attenuate, curb, and repress rage—the most horrible and human of affects—or avoid it as often as it announces itself; and always sacrifice it to what he refers to as the “neutralized better insight” (1). If neutralized better insight were an option, and if one could unravel the vortex of hate from the beginning of the word, thus interrupting its continuity, the result would be a new garden of earthly delights. Biblical characters, as well as Celestina, Lope de Aguirre, François Mackandal, and even Miguel de Unamuno’s Joaquín Monegro would be depicted in the process of attenuating, curbing, and repressing their hateful passions. A happy ending? Not so, according to Sloterdijk. The best days of hatred are not behind it, on the contrary. In fact, Sloterdijk avers that hatred is a basic force in the ecosystem of affects. Hatred even has its apologists. William Hazlitt, who wrote a treatise on the pleasure of hating, asserts that nature is made up of antipathies, that without something to hate, life would turn into a stagnant pool. “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal. Do we not see this principle at work everywhere? Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport” (85–86). Such an apologia harkens to Petrarch who wrote, “Sine lite atque offensione nihil genuit natura parens.” (Without struggle and offense nature has created nothing.) Fernando de Rojas, who quotes Petrarch in the prologue to the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, adds a comma after natura and writes, “madre de todo” (mother of all). Rojas then goes on to explain how a male serpent must put its head inside the female’s mouth in order to impregnate her, how the female squeezes his head until he dies, how the vindictive firstborn of this coupling tears through the mother’s groin, thus allowing all the other serpents to be born, leaving the mother dead, the father’s death avenged (78–79). In 1

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just a few lines, Rojas resumes the dichotomies that existed and still exist between God and nature, and culture and nature, and the role that hate/hatred/ struggle/rage play in this dichotomy. More recently, Simon C. Estok argued in a 2009 essay, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” that contempt for the natural world must be recognized as a definable discourse and that ecophobia must be included in any analysis of our environmental situation (203). In that same essay, Estok writes, “Ecocriticism needs a very broad scope for the term ecophobia. Clinical psychology uses the same term to designate an irrational fear of home; in ecocriticism, the term is independent of and in no way derived from the manner in which it is used in psychology and psychiatry. Ecophobia is an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world, as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism” (209). In other words, psychology and psychiatry limit ecophobia to a fear of home; Estok proposes a definition of ecophobia that encompasses not only a fear of nature, but also a fear/hatred of whoever is considered the Other. In fact, such a definition could also be added on to the already existing definitions in psychiatry and psychology, the Other being both an external an internal Other to be hated. But what is hate, and what is hatred? Dictionary definitions seem to weaken the words instead of strengthening or explaining them. According to Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, hate is defined in terms of intense or passionate dislike, unwillingness, extreme aversion, while hatred is defined as the feeling of one who hates. Hate can be either a noun or a verb, whereas hatred is only a noun, and the word hate is used in the definition of the word hatred. As to the synonyms, never perfect, always partial, they include the verbs: loathe, execrate, despise, abhor, abominate. Compared among themselves, according to Webster’s dictionary, hate is the simple and general word that suggests passionate dislike, whereas abhor expresses deeprooted horror, detest implies antipathy and disdain, and abominate expresses a strong feeling of disgust. There seems to be no defining hate and hatred without repetition of the word. Moreover, here are two terms that can almost be used interchangeably if one believes in tautologies or in perfect synonyms, which one should not because, “the language, through its speaking subjects, feels the uselessness of two or more names for the same thing and this is why it eliminates the redundant name, keeping only one” (Iordan 43). If Iordan’s statement is correct, either the English language has opted to keep two words for the same thing, or these are not perfect synonyms. Consequently, I turn to examples and to negative definitions. The nature of hate: neither hate in its weakened form, as in disliking or loving less, nor hate in its righteous form, as in “I hate hatred,” rather hate in its primal form as

Introduction

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told and conveyed in so many culturally influential Bible stories. There is, for example, God’s hatred, or wrath, in Genesis. Sloterdijk writes that two concepts are necessary to appreciate God’s rage—glory and hell—before adding that wrath is the most embarrassing of God’s qualities (72–73). Indeed, after creating the Garden of Eden and two naked people to dwell in it, God asks without expecting an answer, “Where are you?” He knows that he has been disobeyed, and for that, Paradise must pay. Immediately, Adam blames Eve, and in Genesis 3:14, God turns to the serpent and says, “Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of this life.” Even the poor cows are damned by this angry God. But what is hate in comparison with anger, envy, and fear? Sternberg and Sternberg interpret Aristotle’s definition of hate in comparison with anger as hate being directed at groups, and anger at individuals, anger appearing in connection with pain, and hate being painless for the hater (16). The God of the Old Testament is a combination of the two, hate and anger. No possibility of redemption, the earth is cursed for the disobedience that caused no harm other than to God’s ego. To Eve, God says in Genesis 3:16, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Again, no possibility of pardon, the hatred swears to be eternal. Lastly, in verse 17 the Creator says to Adam, “cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” Perhaps this is where the word gluten started to sound abject, “and it is found in wheat,” Timothy Morton writes in Dark Ecology, “agriculture as sin, just like Genesis says” (40). The wrathful hatred has no bounds, woman, man, animals, and earth forever cursed beyond forgiveness, all because of a bruised ego. “So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword.” No possibility of return to Paradise. The result is nature laid fallow, abandoned, hating and hated. Just as God asked what have you done? to Eve, God poses the same question to Cain in Genesis 4:10. Like the maker of his makers, Cain knows hatred and aims at destroying the object of his hatred, the source of his unhappiness. “What hast thou done?” an enraged God asks. “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” In verses 11–12, God promises eternal hatred again, “And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength.” The ground has been cursed. “Hate arises from stories” (78), Sternberg and Sternberg write. As the stories progress and unfold, the wrath of God grows. To Noah in Chapter 6 of The Flood, “The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled

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with violence through them; and, behold I will destroy them with the earth.” The earth needs to die for the sins of man. According to Sloterdijk, this God of Exodus combines the traits of a theatrical weather demon with those of a furious, unrestrained warlord (76). Unhappy with his creation, he curses the earth. Noah, in turn, inherits this hatred from the God who spared him, but instead of cursing his own son Ham who saw his nakedness and failed to cover it, Noah cursed Canaan, his grandson, the son of Ham. There is also Hagar who despises Sarai in Abraham 16:4. “And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived: and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.” Hagar’s hatred was so intense that she fled from Sarai, only to have God call her back. In Abraham 16:10 the Lord makes a promise to Hagar, “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude.” The Lord is either rewarding or compensating Hagar for submitting herself to Sarai and enduring the hate. When Amnon confesses to Jonadab that he loves his half-sister, Tamar, his brother Absalom’s sister, the scheming Jonadab urges him in 2 Samuel 13:5, “Lay thee down on thy bed, and make thyself sick: and when thy father cometh to see thee, say unto him, I pray thee, let my sister Tamar come, and give me meat, and dress the meat in my sight, that I may see it and eat it at her hand.” In 2 Samuel 15, after having raped Tamar, “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.” Consumed by hatred and disgust, Amnon called his servant in 2 Samuel 17 and said, “Put now this woman out from me, and bolt the door after her.” Such a reaction does not seem to fall under any of the categories of stories leading to the development of hate listed by Sternberg and Sternberg. Tamar is neither an enemy, nor a controller, nor a faceless foe, nor an enemy of God, nor immoral, nor barbarian, nor a criminal, nor a destroyer. Here is an example of sudden hatred turned toward the victim. Then again, by having been ravished, Tamar suddenly became impure or contaminated, or at least judged this way by Amnon. Sternberg and Sternberg write that in some societies it was enough for a woman to be raped for her elimination to seem necessary. “The woman now is no longer viewed as pure and therefore may be seen as having ceased to serve her purpose” (86). It is not Tamar who feels hatred after the rape, it is Amnon. The hate conveyed in many of the Bible stories existed before Satan even had a name. In their book titled The Birth of Satan, Wray and Mobley see the God of the Hebrew Bible as complicated, inscrutable, and mercurial. They believe that this truth may be an important factor in the birth of Satan. “Recall, for example, that it is Yhwh, the frenetic artist, who creates all forms of life in the first two chapters of Genesis, only then to destroy his flawed

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masterpiece in a catastrophic flood” (29–30). Sloterdijk, in turn, asks for the silenced and slaughtered creatures of God, “Why did you create me in such a way that you needed to reject me?” (79). It isn’t until Exodus 12:23 that there is reference to a destroyer (Mashit) that Wray and Mobley consider to be Yhwh’s Terminator-like accomplice (42). The authors also point out that while the story in 2 Samuel 24 begins, “And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel,” a parallel account in 1 Chronicles 21 written several centuries later begins, “And Satan stood up against Israel” Wray and Mobley conclude, “Here he is, directly in our sights, Satan, hassatan, the Adversary, being given responsibility for an action that the Bible had previously attributed to the Lord” (44). According to medieval Sephardic traditions, it was in Biblical times that Jews arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. The historian Jane Gerber points to certain myths and legends that relate to the beginnings of Jewish life in Spain such as the designation “Sepharad” mentioned in the biblical book Obadiah that was considered to be identical with Ispania or Spain, and also the legend that some of ancient Jerusalem’s aristocratic families resettled on the Spanish shore. What Gerber sees in these traditions a form of self-defense. As antiSemitism intensified in the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, Gerber writes that it was as if the Jews in Spain were proclaiming that they could not be blamed for killing Christ because they were nowhere near Palestine at the time of the crucifixion (3). Gerber also sees these efforts to separate Christianity from Judaism as a complex process. “After all, the church had emerged directly out of the synagogue in the first century, and Christianity would never totally disassociate itself from its Jewish origins” (6). By the late fourteenth century, hostility toward Jews had intensified throughout Europe where Jews were considered the Antichrist and, according to Joshua Trachtenberg, “not quite human” (50). In fact, there was doubt in Spain as to whether baptism could bring about any real change since it didn’t even alter the peculiar odor of the conversos. Jews were also accused of being poisoners and concocters of brews that included Christian blood, human flesh, sacred hosts, spiders, and frogs. Trachtenberg adds that one of the important causes adduced for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was the accusation that they drank Christian blood (134). Poisoning was yet another charge, and Christians were even told to be wary of Jewish physicians. Trachtenberg writes that the Siete Partidas allowed Christians to take medicine provided by Jews only if a Christian physician was acquainted with the contents (97). Jews were also accused of kidnapping and murdering Christian children with the intention of crucifying them or drinking their blood, especially around Easter time. Obviously, the Jews were even blamed for the Black Death that swept through Europe in 1348. Thus viewed, Jews fit well into many (if not all) of the stories leading to the development of hate listed by Sternberg and

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Sternberg. Just a few examples from Sternberg and Sternberg pages 85–91: In The Stranger Story the hated enemy is a stranger; in The Impure Other story the hated enemy is impure or contaminated; in The Enemy of God Story the enemy is not only your enemy but also the enemy of God; in The Greedy Enemy Story the hated enemy is exceptionally greedy. An anti-Jewish campaign was launched by Ferrant Martínez, a prelate in Seville who proposed to alleviate the Jewish problem by destroying the city’s twenty-three synagogues, confining Jews to a ghetto, ceasing all contact between Jews and Christians, and removing Jews from all positions of influence. As a result, the Jews of Seville were attacked on June 4, 1391. Jane Gerber writes that although estimates of the total Jewish population in 1391 range widely, there is general agreement that when the order was restored a year later, perhaps 100,000 Jews had converted, another 100,000 had been murdered, and yet another 100,000 survived by going into hiding or hiding in Muslim lands (113). Américo Castro sees in these killings, the expulsion of the Jews, and the destruction of many aljamas (an Arabic term serving to designate the self-governing communities of Moors and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula) a convergence of coherent reasoning and blind iniquity. The great affluence of the new Christians perturbed the old Christians and strengthened the animosity against the synagogue. “Hubo un entrecruce de odios verticales, horizontales y zigzagueantes, y muchos conversos se hicieron inquisidores para así fijar claramente su posición social. Entre tanto, los cristianos viejos absorbían y daban matiz cristiano al ilusionismo y mesianismo judaicos, e iba tomando forma el casticismo de la limpieza de sangre” (38–39). (There was a crossroad of vertical, horizontal, and zigzagging hatreds, and many converts became inquisitors to clearly establish their social position. In the meantime, the old Christians were absorbing and giving a Christian hue to Judaic illusionism and messianism, thus the purism of clean blood began to take shape.) The Spanish Inquisition was born on November 1, 1478 (and dismantled in 1834). Its objective was to cleanse Spain of religious diversity. Jews were held responsible for the crucifixion and therefore persecuted as heretics. A heresy was considered any questioning of the word of God, or threat to the Catholic faith, which included matters of sex. Catholicism condemned sexual promiscuity and sex out of wedlock. As a result, characters such as Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina were in demand, to restore virginities with a few prayers to Pluto, pig bladders,1 and yarn. Gustavo Correa writes that Celestina’s condition of being a sorceress ties her to the mysterious and unknown world in Nature (10). Celestina conjures Pluto who has all the characteristics of Satan himself, but who is not Satan himself, rather nature, earth, and fertility. In fact, because he ruled the deep earth, Pluto could be credited for the harvest, since the deep earth contained the seeds necessary for the harvest.

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The bitterness of having to live a lie is a constant throughout La Celestina. Lida de Malkiel writes that only once does Rojas lift the mask to pour out the bitterness of a convert persecuted by the Inquisition. “As a converted Jew, whose family had been persecuted by the Inquisition, and as a jurist, Bachelor Rojas well knew how much heavier was the hand of the so-called Holy Office than that of ordinary civil justice” (13). It is in Act VII that Celestina plays on the dual meaning of the word justice, “Calla, bouo! Poco sabes de achaque de yglesia e quánto es mejor por mano de justicia, que de otra manera. Sabíalo mejor el cura, que Dios aya, que, viniéndole a consolar, dixo que la sancta Escriptura tenía que bienauenturados eran los que padescían persecución por la justicia, que aquellos posseerían el reyno de los cielos” (Keep quiet, you fool! You know little about how the church punishes, and how better off you are being taken in the hands of justice rather than some other way. The curate was well aware that the holy scripture had it that those who were persecuted by justice were blessed compared to those who possessed the kingdom of heaven) (94). Lida de Malkiel writes that had Rojas refused to live as a Christian, he would have gone directly to the stake. Christian rites had to be observed even at death, otherwise Rojas’s family would have paid dearly. “True, Fernando de Rojas, the convert who was not beyond suspicion in 1525, was buried in the Franciscan habit. But an old Spanish proverb says: debajo del sayal, hay ál” (5). This can be loosely translated into judge not a man by his frock. However, there is a play on words here, under the sayal (the frock), there is ál, ál being part of the word sayal. In old Spanish, ál means something else, but I believe it can also be a reference to the Arabic article al that can be found in so many Spanish words. In other words, under the frock (Christian Spain of pure blood), there is the foreign element, either Jewish or Moorish. Hatred and stories of hatred would cross the Atlantic; there is continuity in hatred just as there is continuity in childless hymen-mending old whore and go-between Celestina who, according to Roberto González Echevarría, has a brood, quite a paltry brood. Who crossed? Celestina’s brood did, even if her brew, meant to let loose the demons, worked against the brood (Echevarría 10). “The metaphoric association between patched up hymen and literary text. [. . .] But Calixto and Melibea do not die because there is no one to mend the latter’s hymen, but because in Celestina’s world (and text) fiction is based on the destruction of others and the reduction of all values to their sheer material representation” (Ibid. 26). There were several crossings, several waves. First, a brood of conquerors, discoverers, expeditioners. They were later followed by heretics, poisoners, murderers, spawns of Satan, more haters. What did the haters find on the other side? In the beginning there was nature, and nature had to be appropriated and conquered. Each time, nature

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Introduction

was an enemy worthy of hatred and of stories leading to the development of hatred. There was nature as the hated enemy with no face and few distinguishing human characteristics (Sternberg and Sternberg 87). There was nature as torturer, as seducer, as animal pest, as thwarter/destroyer-of-destiny (Ibid. 90–93). “What kind of land is this?” Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca asks, hating nature with all his being. The year was 1528 and the Spanish nobleman/explorer was stranded in the Florida Everglades. Sharae Deckard observes that the rise of capitalism after 1450 was generated by an ecological revolution in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature that was made possible by an epochal shift, “that tore across the American hemisphere, devouring forests, mountains, and soils, flora, fauna, and humans” (4). The new technics that ensued, “construed nature as external, space as flat and geometrical, and time as linear and rational, thus rendering the uncommodified natures of the Americas ripe for appropriation” (Ibid.). Deckard adds that this appropriation is an ongoing catastrophe which radiates from the Columbian moment to our present. As a result, Jennifer French explains that if the foundational discourses of Latin America are dominated by a rhetoric of nature, it is because nature was to be henceforth the economic basis of this area (13). The more nature resisted, the more it was hated; the resistance, however, can also be considered hatred. In fact, the history of Latin America could very well be told in terms of resistance and insistence, commodities and exploitation: Gold, Labor, Tropical Hardwoods, Meat, Coffee, Sugar, Bananas, and so on, all at the root of the environmental crisis occurring today. Mark Anderson writes, “As natural as it may seem, much of the landscape we know as Latin America today is actually the result of catastrophic land cover changes wrought through the dispossession and genocide of millions of indigenous people and the implementation on a massive scale of extractive colonial land-management practices such as large-scale mining, sugarcane monoculture, and cattle ranching” (x). Deforestation, pollution, species extinctions, habitat loss, erosion: the hatred of nature and nature’s hatred. The hatred of nature can mean repugnance toward an uncharted and dangerous wilderness, toward blood, relentless swamps, headless cadavers, cannibalism, parasites, putrefaction, filth, birth, death. Hatred also calls for reciprocity; something hated will not be loved in return; therefore the idea of nature hating man in return calls for some analysis and consideration. Besides coming from stories, hate has story-like properties with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, as well as plots, subplots, and themes. “Why do we even create stories about hate?” (Sternberg and Sternberg 83); a question that will go unanswered. This ecocritical approach to Hispanic literatures will explore the dark places of the Hispanic soul and landscape, always staying close to the story, from when nature was formidable and worthy of

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hate, to the pity of today. On the River Thames, Joseph Conrad’s Marlow says, “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth” (5). He meant that it was no more. “We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!” he added. “But darkness was here yesterday” (Ibid.). Is there no hope, nothing but a destiny of hate and destruction? Américo Castro cites Hugh Trevor-Roper, a History Professor from the University of Oxford, who asked if some peoples had a national love of destruction. Having given the example of the Germans, the Professor added, “Señor Américo Castro has detected in Spain the same fierce hatred of life, the same inner emptiness, the same nihilism of the spirit. We see it in the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of the Moors and Jews, and the fearful episodes of the recent Civil War” (25–26). Castro’s reaction is that without showing this ferocious hatred of life and the spiritual nihilism of the Spaniards, he could not have elaborated upon his positive vision of Spanish culture. Consequently, material and moral misery are a prerequisite to the establishment of something worthwhile. “Sin las horribles situaciones existentes por bajo de las grandezas del imperio español de Carlos V, muchas de las creaciones de dimensión universal (comenzando por el frenético impulso para buscar honra en tierras ajenas), no estarían hoy ante nosotros” (Without the horrible situations existing under the grandeur of the Spanish Empire of Charles V, many of the creations of a universal dimension would not exist today (including the frenetic impulse to seek honor in foreign lands)) (27–28). Addressing the nature of hatred and the hatred of nature in the title of this study, in other words, approximating nature and hatred, I often opted for the word hatred instead of ecophobia that Dan Brayton considers to be an ungainly neologism, confrontational, brazen, and accusatory (205). Obviously, the words hate and hatred are not even remotely decorous either. Iris Ralph suggests that perhaps using more sedate term than ecophobia might persuade society to embrace ecocentrism and reduce anthropocentrism. Then again, “because the term is brutally honest, and confrontational, shaming, judgmental, and accusing, using it judiciously stands to productively contribute to the effort to mudge and haul society out of the rut of habitual abuses of the nonhuman ecogenic other” (402). The same goes for hate. However, as Ralph notes, critically engaging with the term might not bring about the end of what it names. But the focus of this study is not the end of hate or the elimination of hate. Part One, “The Iberian Wold,” focuses more on the nature of hate to better grasp hate and the deeply rooted origins of hate. Part Two, “Diaries of the Americas,” initially addresses the hatred of nature in its dual meaning, and eventually the dual focus: the nature of hate and the hatred of nature.

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Introduction

PART ONE: THE IBERIAN WORLD. Chapter 1, “Dark Alchemy: Celestina, or the Hatred of Love,” focuses on the nature of hatred in Fernando Rojas’s Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (or La Celestina) and more specifically on the hatred of love that can also be love’s hatred. While the courtly tradition sees La Celestina as an example of courtly love, this reading focuses on the hatred inspired by love and analyses this hatred. There is a continuity of hatred from the Old Testament to 1499, publication date of La Celestina. This is a psycho-philosophical reading where hatred is seen as a driving force, and La Celestina as a moment in time in that continuity, a moment that will either stay in Spain or cross the Atlantic and continue to develop. La Celestina points to societal and to religious hatred as well as to an absence of choice that inspired resentment and hatred and that would ultimately make some of Celestina’s descendants cross the ocean in search of the other side. “¿Havíame de mantener del viento? ¿Heredé otra herencia? ¿Tengo otra casa o vigna? ¿Conócesme otra hazienda, más deste officio de que como y bevo, de que visto y calço?” (Was I to live off the wind? Did I inherit some other inheritance? Do I have another house or vineyard? Do you know of me having another house, and an occupation other than the one that gives me food, drink, clothing, and shoes?) (141–142). Such is Celestina’s hatred justified, explained, excoriated. In chapter 2, “Intimate Haters, Difficult Literatures,” I will again be addressing the nature of hate by focusing on two biblical plays of Lope de Vega, La creación del mundo (The Creation of the World) and El robo de Dina (The Rape of Dinah) that Lope labels comedias famosas but that are the most tragic, as well as one play that Lope also labels a comedia, Fuenteovejuna, and one tragedy, El castigo sin venganza (Punishment without Vengeance). I see a continuity from Genesis, to Celestina, to Lope’s plays, and beyond. El castigo takes us back to Genesis and Lope’s Biblical plays. Intimate haters; can the two words be juxtaposed? The answer is yes, and for there to be hate there must be intimacy. Chapter 3, “Odium Dei: Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez” focuses on the nature of hate and at the same time introduces the hatred of nature. This chapter revisits the story of Cain and Abel, a story of hatred and envy, and of a hateful God/Creator who fomented the first murder. The Bible tells the story of the two brothers, but in very little detail, thus I turn to Unamuno and Lord Byron to find a voice for the characters involved in this tragedy and uncover the hatred of God and God’s hatred. Abel was a shepherd and Cain was a farmer. The God of the Old Testament much preferred the shepherd’s burnt offerings to the farmer’s crops. Cain offered the fruit of his harvest to the Lord who rejected it (for no reason at all). As a causal result of God’s disdain, Cain killed Abel, and the enraged Lord cursed nature when he said

Introduction

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to Cain, “When thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength” (Gen. 4:12). In the prologue to the 1902 edition of En torno al casticismo, Unamuno remarks that the first murder was a fratricide, the sedentary farmer killed the errant shepherd, and that the farmer who killed his brother the shepherd was also he who built the first city and consequently established the duality/ opposition of the city versus the country: Cain (the tiller of the soil) representing the city, the country’s double, and Abel (the shepherd) belonging to the country, the city’s double (274). “El odio mismo del castellano al morisco,” Unamuno adds, “era el odio de los hijos de Abel a los de Cain, porque también los abelianos odian y envidian” (The Castilian hatred of the Moor is the same hatred as those of the children of Abel toward those of Cain, because Abelites hate and envy as well) (276). PART TWO: DIARIES OF THE AMERICAS Chapter 4, “With Hate Leading the Way: Pieces of Aguirre and Other Doomed Expeditions,” addresses the hatred of nature through an analysis of either real or imaginary texts left behind, fragments of texts, or texts erased or destroyed before they were written, texts reinterpreted and re-created by novelists and film makers. After having stabbed his daughter to spare her the fate of being the daughter of a traitor, the much hated and hateful Basque conquistador Lope de Aguirre was captured, executed, and chopped into pieces. Pieces of Aguirre were sent to towns that he had conquered and pillaged. The pieces of Aguirre set the tone for this chapter that explores Aguirre’s search for El Dorado, Cabeza de Vaca’s foundering in the Florida Everglades, either ill-fated or cruel efforts at spreading Catholicism, and attempts to grasp these moments in time as depicted in films such as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, Carlos Saura’s El Dorado, Roland Joffé’s The Mission, Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca, and even Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse, Now. I will be considering these films alongside texts such as the Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” Rivera’s La vorágine, and Horacio Quiroga’s stories set in the jungle. Chapter 5, “Hating Crows: The Travels of Concolorcorvo! and of Ernesto Guevara” is a reading of Alonso Carrió de La Vandera’s Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes de Buenos Aires a Lima (The Lazarillo of Blind Walkers or Guide for Inexperienced Travellers from Buenos Aires to Lima) alongside Ernesto Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries and Otra vez (Once Again). The eighteenthcentury and the twentieth-century autobiographical trajectories are surprisingly similar, the further Carrió and Guevara venture into the Latin American landscape, the more they will hate. The autobiographical voices and the

12

Introduction

writers themselves, in turn, are hardly comparable to each other; one is a young man ready to hate humanity because of his love for humanity, the other is an embittered bureaucrat who hates the Latin American landscapes and its inhabitants about as much as he hates his countrymen for having put him there. This reading explores these autobiographical trajectories, the shedding of the blindfold, travel and discovery that ultimately foment hate. The more the travelers and the guides see, the more they hate. This chapter addresses the nature of hate: hate in the name of humanity, in the name of injustice, hate inspired by a plundered people and their landscape. This angle comes as close as possible to righteous hatred. In chapter 6, “The Curse of Ham, The Malediction of Chango: Nature and Terror, Mackandal’s Brood,” three twentieth-century Hispanic writers, one Cuban, Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), and two Columbians, Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920–2004) and Enrique Buenaventura (1925–2003), turn their gaze and their pens toward eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, vodou, terror, the events that led to the 1791 rebellion, the pact at Bois-Caïman, and the making of Haiti. Theirs is a creative effort to revive a forgotten preterit, a stagnant hateful trauma, and reconstruct a history/story that begs to be revisited and perhaps even retold, rewritten, re-hated. This chapter explores the nature of hate, and sheds light on the hatred of nature and nature’s hatred. Chapter 7, “Madness and Hatred. Rivera’s Inferno,” explores psychiatric debility and the relationship that it may have with the natural world, in other words the hatred of nature. In his progressive descent into madness while in the jungle, José Eustacio Rivera’s character Arturo Cova pronounced the phobia of nature, that same phobia that the philosopher Simon C. Estok termed ecophobia in his 2009 essay, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” Although Estok concedes that this phobia did at times function to preserve our species, it also served growth economies. It was Rivera’s intent to denounce these growth economies, all the while having Arturo Cova descend into madness in the quick of the denunciation. “While literary madness and real madness are entirely different things,” Estok writes, “the literary mad linger with us and resonate in our consciousness long after we shut the book” (2018, 123). Chapter 8, titled “Canaima, Ecophobia, and the Anthropocene,” pursues this exploration of madness and hatred. Nature as evil, satanic, a green hell inspiring antipathy; it is in the jungle that Romulo Gallegos’s character Marcos Vargas will unhinge and capitulate to madness. What Simon Estok would read in this description of the natural entity Canaima, who is one with the jungle, is an ecophobic representation of nature as an opponent that hurts, threatens, or kills us. Estok adds that the question is whether nature is evil and if it can be naturalized and concludes, “Surely the answer to both these questions is simply no. This goes right back to Augustine’s notion that evil

Introduction

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is a human construct, one relative to our imaginations. Imagining badness in nature and marketing that imagination—in short, writing ecophobia—is such a multifaceted affair that it is difficult to know where to begin” (2009, 210). Chapter 9, “Yes, It Isn’t (What Cannot be Said): Poetry to Guayama, Puerto Rico to Loisaida, New York,” delves into poetry from Guayama, Puerto Rico, the hometown of Luis Palés Matos, to Loisaida, a Spanglish name for the Lower East Side of Manhattan and home to Nuyorican poetry. Yes, it isn’t about race, as Palés Matos infers, and yes, it isn’t about an aspect of self-hatred that can only be explained through poetry because it calls for saying less and for new words. This chapter explores the nature of self-hatred in the Puerto Rican countryside and in concrete constructs, Nuyorico (the New York City of the Puerto Ricans) and Loisaida (the Lower East Side of Manhattan). Chapter 10, “Biophilia, Ecophobia, Eco-Odium: A Coupling with the Nonhuman, Extinction, and a Loop of Vampiric Mosquitos Threatening the Anthropocene,” explores four novels set in a place, local and nonlocal, the jungle, a hyperobject, four novels that have everything to do with speaking, language or lack thereof, knowing, unknowing, impossibility of knowing, four novels that take the form of a strange loop that Timothy Morton would consider to be “weirdly weird” (5). These four novels are Henán Robleto’s novel Una mujer en la selva (1936) (A Woman in the Jungle), Mario Vargas Llosa’s El hablador (1987) (“The Talker” translated into English as The Storyteller), Mayra Montero’s novel Tú, la oscuridad (1995) (You, darkness), and Rafael Bernal’s Su nombre era muerte (1947) (translatable as His Name was Death. However, Su could also mean Her or Your). This chapter explores both the nature of hate and the hatred of nature. Chapter 11, “Is There a Caliban in this Narrative? The Cooking and the Eating of Hate,” that will serve as conclusion, delves into what Timothy Morton labels dark ecology, ecological awareness that is dark-depressing, yet also dark-uncanny and dark-sweet (2016, 5). To the question, What thinks dark ecology? Morton replies, “Ecognosis, a riddle. Ecognosis is like knowing, but more like letting be known. It is something like coexisting” (Ibid.). Juan José Saer’s El entenado has everything to do with assimilating and coexisting, this time with hate. “Is there a Caliban in this Narrative? The Cooking and the Eating of Hatred” is about the cannibal ready for a meal, but certainly not Stephan Palmié’s vision of cooking as the gesture of throwing the subject of knowledge into the same pot as his or her object (29). Here, to cook is to use heat, to boil, to bake, to roast, to sauté, to start from the raw, to cut, and not simply end up with something hotter, but to set off a chain of chemical reactions, to burn, to kill: anthropophagy versus anthropemy, (Lévy-Strauss 387–388), assimilation versus rejection, self-hatred, hatred of the Other, hatred as Other. There are, in fact, many Calibans in Juan José

14

Introduction

Saer’s narrative, El entenado, that draws inspiration from a seventeenthcentury doomed expedition. Saer’s unnamed narrator is captured by an indigenous tribe that practices cannibalism once a year in order to be reminded of their human condition. If indeed, cannibalism to be a form of great hatred as Hans Staden considers it to be, then this cycle of hatred, instead of being broken, must be relived, assimilated, and remembered.

Part One

THE IBERIAN WORLD

Chapter 1

Dark Alchemy Celestina, or the Hatred of Love

Sir George Ripley’s 1591 Compound of Alchymy describes six stages or gates that must be passed through to enter into the Philosopher’s stone or the quintessence: “Calcination” (the reduction of a solid to a fine powder), “Solution” (powder dissolved into liquid by means of a solution called menstrue), “Separation” (dispersal of the four humors or bodily fluids via a caustic solvent), “Conjunction” (separated elements fused into one, the marriage bed of argent-vive and sulfur-vive), “Putrefication” (a fine powder black as a crow’s bill resulting from the coital embrace of the fourth stage), and finally “Coagulation” (a pearlescent matter, an altered substance) (Glover 320–321). For J. F. Burke these six gates represent “la boda química de los alquimistas” (the chemical wedding of the alchemists). In her hatefulness, in her incapacity to forgive the world around her, Fernando Rojas’s character Celestina will act as the catalytic intermediary, the negative quintessence, the toxic loop that will generate the chemical action (1977, 129). Before conjuring Pluto, the roman god of the underworld but also the god of the harvest, Celestina asks Elicia to go to the attic and find the snake oil, the rope she brought from the country, and the sheet of paper with words written with bat blood. She also urges Elicia to go into the balm or ointment room to find the goat’s blood and the few strands from its beard, and to search for the she-wolf’s eyes in the black cat skin. These are the ingredients, the elements for the cauldron, Celestina’s alchemy. The result will create a disunion; it will be a destructive coagulation, the end of the lovers and of love. By reading the hatred of love into La Celestina, many different interpretations of this work of literature will converge. I will not be delving into the courtly tradition, authorship, and the literary sources, my interest lies in both the Christian-didactic and the nihilistic schools. While the Christian-didactic school presents an example of what not to do in matters of love, and acts as 17

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a warning against love, a textbook that can be either handled or mishandled, a teaching that renders love hateful, repulsive, disgusting, and dangerous, as when the servants parody the lovers, and Celestina makes a career of restoring virginities, the nihilistic school does the same by mocking and debasing everything in society that could be of any value to society, including love. The tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea is the hatred of love. My approach is psycho-philosophical; it sees hatred as a continuity, a driving force, and La Celestina as a moment in time in that continuity, a moment that will either stay in Spain or cross the Atlantic and continue to develop. “The burden of the Spanish past is undeniable,” Américo Castro cites a May 24, 1964, article that appeared in the New York Times. “For in fact it is becoming increasingly clear [. . .] that the Spanish Golden Age was a time of intense struggle between the converted Jews and old Christians—won by the latter at the cost of establishing a nearly totalitarian society, and of driving the brilliant Jewish intellectuals of the time either to prison or to seek a fortune in America or to mysticism in a monastery” (24). Among the opposing views of Fernando de Rojas’s Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea,1 Ciriaco Morón considers the four most important schools of thought to be Américo Castro’s and Stephen Gilman’s existentialist school, Bataillon’s moral school, María Rosa Lida’s psychological approach, and finally Otis Green’s interpretation, halfway between Bataillon’s and Lida’s. “Green acepta la intención moral de la obra, pero creo que Bataillon olvida demasiado las convenciones de la tradición cortés” (Green accepts the moral intention of the work, but I believe that Bataillon is too quick at forgetting the conventions of the courtly tradition) (14–15). Dorothy Severin narrows these four views down to two: the Judeo-pessimist and the Christian-didactic (23), and observes that while the Judeo-pessimist viewpoint focuses on Rojas’s Judaism and the fact that as a convert he felt rejected by society to the point of nihilism, the Christian-didactic school of thought sees Rojas’s work as a critique of courtly love and of exacerbated passion, as well an effort to dissuade others from making the same mistakes as Calisto and Melibea. The Christian-didactic stance therefore implies that only Calisto’s and Melibea’s actions matter. Although the servants lie, cheat, steal, and indulge in food, alcohol, and excessive passion, their ejempla are not to be used for didactic purposes. According to Bataillon, if the servants are cynical, it is not because of their masters or of society, but rather, “parce qu’ils sont vils de naissance” (Because they are vile from birth) (142). In this sense, there is no nurture, only nature; the servants are incapable of redemption and useless as ejempla. They will uniquely serve as external forces propelling love in its fatal course. In fact, Calisto and Melibea could easily be devoid of interest without the servants. Proof enough is in the immediate replacement of Sempronio and Pármeno by Tristán and Sosia once Sempronio and Pármeno

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are dead, as if the love story could not happen without the pilot fish, the servants and the prostitutes. Bataillon even uses the verb couver, which means to sit on eggs, to brood, to incubate, when weighing the servants and the prostitutes against Calisto and Melibea. “Mais l’auteur et ses lecteurs, eux, ne semblent pas aspirer à faire émerger les amours de Calisto de de Mélibée hors de l’atmosphère infâme où ils on été couvés” (But the author and his readers do not seem to want to see Calisto’s and Melibea’s love flourish outside of the infamous atmosphere that produced them) (135). With couver, Bataillon suggests that the servant and prostitute milieu not only hatched, but they sat on (like hens) and produced these lovers. Again, the lovers pale without their comical enablers, abettors, caricatures, creators. No matter how caricatural, however, the servants and the prostitutes make tragedy possible. They are comical in the Aristotelian sense, as in Book II of the Poetics where Aristotle deals with the objects of imitation which are men in action, either of a higher or of a lower type. While the higher type is depicted in Tragedy, the lower type appears in Comedy that serves therefore to show the baser characters. Celestina’s prostitutes and the servants were expected to behave the way they behaved, thus providing the comic element to this tragicomedy, men of a lower type in action. They may not be interesting in themselves, they are of interest because of the ravages they inflict upon their masters. Furthermore, Marcel Bataillon finds it strange that what constitutes the greatest originality of La Celestina—Celestina, the servants, and the prostitutes—was once considered to be an accessory of doubtful taste (133). Only those of noble blood or of the higher economic classes, the tragic characters Calisto and Melibea (although they are often comical and Melibea’s parents were once Celestina’s neighbors), will serve as examples of what not to do.2 As to Celestina herself, she will remain a pure contradiction, neither tragic nor comic, or both, a literary feat. Of the nihilistic school, Stephen Gilman insists that La Celestina must be approached as something other than an example of medieval morality or an allegory of the seven deadly sins (3–4). It is tempting, however, to read the deadly sins into the Tragicomedia and the alchemist wedding, the seven deadly sins as seven gates or ingredients for the cauldron. “Although often beautiful-to-look-upon soberuia was, no doubt for theological reasons, formally recognized as the most heinous, cobdiçia-auariçia, lean and hungry, was in practical matters by far the greatest trouble maker, the most despised, the most prevalent and powerful of the sins, the mother of all the others” (Clarke 1968, 105). Clarke proceeds to list the sins and to explain how soberuia and yra are a fitting choice for Melibea, and also for Elicia whom she judges to be a Melibea contrafecha (Ibid.). In Calisto, Clarke sees pride leading to a mild form of ire subdued by pereza; in Sempronio ire deriving from covetousness without pride, in Pármeno, mild ire resulting from frustration

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and also envy, and in Celestina greed-avarice combined with pride-ire, moribund lust, and a touch of bibacity (106). June Hall Martin observes that the dreamer of Le Roman de la Rose sees painted on the outside of the garden walls ten grotesque figures representing: hate, felony, villainy, covetousness, avarice, envy, sorrow, old age, hypocrisy, and poverty.3 In contrast with Gilman, Hall Martin writes that, “It should be fairly obvious that the figures painted on the outside of the wall of the Jardin d’Amour correspond to Celestina and the servant-prostitute milieu in which she operates. Hate is described as malignant and base, cause of quarrels and jealousy, possessor of an evil passion, with a face marked by spiteful rage, much as the faces of Sempronio and Pármeno” (86). As to the murder of Celestina, it belongs to felony, Celestina herself belongs to villainy and old age, while covetousness belongs to everyone including Melibea who is caught in a hyperbolic interiority, the vortex of her times. However interesting the reading of the deadly sins into the Tragicomedia may be, it is dead according to Gilman because La Celestina was not written by its race, nor its milieu, nor its moment; it creates its times rather than the other way around. Not being written by its race can be interpreted as not being a product of the Judeo-Spanish or not being a converso product. However, Gilman does affirm that the creation of La Celestina was made possible by the converso situation, not just a way of being to oneself but a way of being with others. “Biographically speaking, he [Rojas] was a member of a caste subject to intense scorn and suspicion, forced into a marginal position” (19). These were the Jews that chose to remain in Spain and to convert, whose life Américo Castro describes as full of insecurities, anguish, lack of trust, always expecting the unexpected and the excessive (18). This is a Spain where nature had been, if not conquered, as least tamed. Nature was contained within walls, as in the garden where Calixto and Melibea first meet. Outside these walls, a town that could also be a walled or fortified town, keeping the despised Other out and the hatred within. La Celestina puts the reader in this unbearable marginal position. Examined individually, each one of the characters (except Melibea’s parents, Pleberio and Alisa), regardless of the position he or she holds in society, is representative of social decay, exclusion, and marginality that foments (or Bataillon’s couvent) hate. “¿Cómo era aquella tension existencial?” Américo Castro asks. “Pues sencillamente la originada por la angustia de no saber a ciencia cierta lo que uno era; no cabía ya ser español judío, aunque la gente señalase como tal al Cristiano nuevo. ¿Qué escapes había para el oprimido?” (What was that existential tension like? Simply put, it originated in the anguish of not knowing for sure who one was; it was no longer possible to be a Spanish Jew, even if that was what the people called the new Christian. What options did the oppressed have?) (67). There were various possibilities,

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either to join a religious order, to become an Inquisitor, or to use the culture acquired in Salamanca to create imaginary worlds, in other words to write, as Fernando de Rojas did. The result is the Tragicomedia with all its characters, this literature of the “estrujados and the recelosos” (literature of the crumpled and of the envious) (Castro 69). Living indoors, periodically allowed outside, to an outdoors enclosed by high walls, Melibea waits, she does time, a prisoner of either the orchard or the church4 where she encounters Calisto. I will not speculate as to how Calisto made it through those high walls in search of his falcon. I will not wonder if there ever was a falcon, and if it was indeed in a church that the lovers first met,5 if Melibea was as beautiful as Calisto thought she was, and if she was Jewish. It is interesting to note that there is speculation as to whether Melibea was Jewish, but not Calisto. Being Jewish would have been enough cause for marriage to be out of the question, and that would answer the question why there was never mention of marriage. There is also allusion to the fact that Melibea’s parents and Celestina were once neighbors. This would mean that Mellibea was of a lower class. On the other hand, Calisto appears as fleeting as his first appearance, out of nowhere. June Hall Martin even suggests that Calisto was of the middle class (74). When Calisto first approaches Melibea with his excessive passion, Melibea abides by the courtly textbook.6 She rejects Calisto’s lack of measure and refinement. “¡Vete, vete de aý, torpe! Que no puede mi paciencia tolerar que haya subido en coraçon humano conmigo el ilícito amor comunicar su deleyte” (Go, go away, clumsy oaf! My patience cannot tolerate illicit love communicating its lust through a human heart) (87). Perhaps Melibea is being sincere in her rejection of Calisto, or it could very well be that she is reading her lines, saying what she was supposed to be saying, playing the courtly game, and that this initial rejection was expected of her. “What does Melibea look like?” (1956, 56), Gilman asks. “The real truth is that Melibea has no fixed appearance, no objective reality apart from or beyond the dialogue.” The same question can be asked of how Melibea really feels when she first sets eyes on Calisto. Whatever the case may be, very soon and without resistance, she will fall under the spell of bad love, love hatefully conjured by Celestina. A constant in this tragedy from beginning to end are objects that bind and tie, much like religio and captio: the thread, the cord, the suggestion of a cursive text, and finally the chain that will cost Celestina her life. Celestina weaves the thread into a piece of cloth, conjures Pluto, then goes to sell the thread to Melibea. Initially, Melibea is distrustful of Celestina and scolds her for not being more direct. This is the second time she displays her anger. Again, it could very well be that Melibea is already in love with Calisto and simply playing the role of the maiden. Finally, Celestina first asks for a prayer

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to soothe Calisto’s toothache, and then immediately and surreptitiously for Melibea’s cord. “Assimesmo tu cordón, que es fama que ha tocados [todas] las reliquias que ay en Roma y en Hierusalem” (Your cord as well, for it has touched all the relics that there are in Roma and Jerusalem) (164). This petition could very well have disappointed Melibea. Were she to be in love, she would have been expecting a declaration of love through this gobetween. All she got was news of a toothache and a request for her cord, not because it had touched her, but all those relics in Jerusalem. Melibea offers Celestina the cord wrapped around her waist willingly and berates Celestina for having equivocated for so long. “Por qué luego no me lo espresaste? ¿Por qué me lo dixiste por tales palabras?” (164). In a footnote, Severin cites the critic Spurgeon Baldwin who dedicates an entire article to these words uttered by Melibea, and notes that this is the moment when comedy becomes tragedy (164). The conjuring of Pluto seems to have been successful; Melibea transformed, she starts to waver in her resolve. Soon, she is regretting her initial lack of patience with Celestina, and even urges her to return the next day, in secret. Suddenly, not only is Melibea unsure of herself, she is even ready to betray her parents. Severin considers Melibea to be the only potentially tragic character in La Celestina, her only true defect being generosity (35). I would like to add that not only is Melibea covetous, but she is quick to betrayal and appears to have little regard for those around her unless they will be instrumental in the satisfaction of her lustful passion. In fact, she could very well be “Elicia contrafecha” as Clarke suggests (105). Upon examination of the four young women in the Tragicomedia (Melibea, Areúsa, Elicia, Lucrecia), Gilman observes that Elicia purposefully limits herself to the immediacy of impulse and “finds an answer to femininity in the violence and sensual delight which determine her dialogue from instant to instant” (1956, 62). Considering the dualities into which Gilman divides the cast of La Celestina, Elicia is Melibea’s poor counterpart (poor as opposed to rich). Both are impulsive, both reject domesticity in favor of sensual love, and both are quick to anger. Unlike Melibea, however, Elicia is envious, particularly of her rich counterpart, “que si algo tiene de hermosura es por buenos atavíos que trae. Ponedlos a un palo, también dirés que es gentil. Por mi vida, que no lo digo por alabarme, mas creo que soy tan hermosa como vuestra Melibea” (If she has any beauty it is thanks to her clothes. Put them on a stick and it will also look good. On my life, I am not bragging, but I think I am as beautiful as your Melibea) (226). While Elicia compares herself to Melibea, and however envious she may be, she is pale in comparison to Areúsa who says that for a maiden Melibea’s breasts are those of a woman who had given birth three times and from the look of her breasts that look like big pumpkins, her stomach must be as flaccid as that of an old woman of fifty. “unas tetas tiene para

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ser donzella como si tres veces oviesse parido; no pareçen sino dos grandes calabaças. El vientre [. . .] tan flojo como vieja de cinquenta años” (228). Just as envious, but timidly so according to Gilman (1956, 62), is Lucrecia who “rejects her own life but dares only in imagination to substitute another for it.” Gilman concludes that, never faced with a moral choice, all four of these women in one way or another fail to provide for their feminine incompletion. Melibea does not return until Act 10 when she has totally succumbed to the spell. Lida de Malkiel very aptly describes this scene, “at times almost comical, at times singularly lyrical, which elaborates upon the revelation of love through the name of the beloved, she finally declares her passion and grants a rendezvous through closed doors for the following night” (62). Talking to herself, Melibea is disarmed, plaintive, sorrowful, hysterical, burning, and jealous. She calls herself a wretch, an unfortunate maiden, and frets that Calisto has perhaps already set his eyes upon another (238). She then turns to Celestina and exclaims, as in pain, “Madre mía, que me comen este coraçon serpientes dentro de mi cuerpo” (Mother of mine, the serpents inside my body are devouring my heart) (239). In an aside, Celestina says to herself that this is exactly the way she wanted it. Many times, Melibea asks Celestina what she is mumbling; she also asks for a remedy for her disease that comes from the heart that deprives her of understanding, and troubles her sight, her stomach, her sleep. It is well worth delving into the question why there is never a prospect of marriage. Both Calisto and Melibea are of age. Melibea’s parents even agree that it is time for her to wed and her father suggests that she choose a man for herself instead of having one chosen for her. Romeo and Juliet cannot wed because their families are sworn enemies, but they marry in secret. Lancelot cannot marry Guinevere because she is already married to King Arthur. Tristan and Yseult cannot wed because Yseult is betrothed to King Mark of Cornwall and later married to him. Oedipus should not have married his mother, but he marries her. Tuberculosis separates Hans Castorp and Claudia Chauchat. Besides, Claudia does not take Hans seriously enough, and she is already married. But what of Calisto and Melibea? What keeps them from marrying? Certainly, there would be no Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea had Calisto gone to Pleberio and asked him for his daughter’s hand. A date would have been set, preparations soon underway, all the servants put to work, and this would have been a novel-in-dialogue about the prospect of the happily-ever-after. But the answer must be other. Marriage seemed to be totally out of the question. Not ever mentioned, marriage is not even a remote possibility, a sigh, a wish, a dream, a clue to an obstacle. Why did this love have to be illicit? Was it because Melibea’s parents were once Celestina’s neighbors?

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Javier Herrero writes that by the end of the fifteenth century in Spain if the diabolical beast was getting the upper hand in the fight between good and evil, the cause of this victory was the success of the witches who continued the work the devil started in Paradise: corrupting love through lust and causing the first couple to fall (343). While Adam and Eve fall from grace, Calisto and Melibea also fall, literally this time, and from the top of high walls. In tragedy, the higher the victim, the greater the fall. This love had to be illicit because of what Herrera calls Melibea’s bewitching or philocaptio that he defines as, “an inordinate love of one person for another that can be caused either by concupiscence or by direct intervention of the devil” (345). Several times, while complaining of her disease, Melibea begs Celestina to refrain from naming her disease, and when Celestina does utter Calixto’s name, Melibea faints, the name being more than she can bear. Normally, to name is to master and to possess, but not in this case where the mere utterance of the name makes the name deadly. “¡O por Dios, que me matas! ¿Y no te tengo dicho que no me alabes esse nombre, ni me le nombres en Bueno ni en malo?” Melibea exclaims (Oh for God’s sake, you are killing me. And did I not tell you to refrain from ever saying that name, for good or for evil?) (243). By exclaiming “¡O por Dios!” Melibea is breaking the commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” (5 Deut. 11). She also appears to be frightened of the name, as if it were the name of God or of a demon. However, religious folklore has it that exorcists can control a demon by knowing its true name. There is also the tetragrammaton, or the four-letter biblical name of God, YHWH, that should not be pronounced other than in prayer, much less written, should it be destroyed or defaced. Melibea’s fear and reverence of Calisto’s name is suggestive of this reluctance to pronounce. In this sense, after having spoken the Lord’s name in vain, she is again committing a heresy, much like Calisto before her by insinuating that he was not Christian, rather Melibean. “Thou shalt have none other gods before me” (5 Deut. 7). Melibea asks Celestina to put a name to her pain. “¿Cómo dizes que llaman a este mi dolor” (244). Celestina’s reply, “amor dulce,” gladdens Melibea who then asks for the name of a cure for her pain, “¿Cómo se llama?” This time, Celestina replies that she does not dare tell her. When Melibea insists, Celestina utters the name of Calisto. Herrero writes that Melibea’s remedy, according to Celestina, is surgery. “Melibea, finally, surrenders completely. She has understood; she will give away her chastity” (349). Deyermond writes that Melibea’s psychological and emotional trajectory is of utmost interest and that the sudden hatred-turned-into-love for Calisto is quite credible. “Se trata de una mujer de emociones violentas, que pasa directamente de la emoción a la acción apropiada, sea la interrupción de la plática de sus padres, sea la entrega de sí misma a Calisto, sea el suicidio”

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(This is a woman with violent emotions who goes directly from the emotion to the appropriate action, be it the conversation with her parents, be it her giving herself to Calisto, be it suicide) (307). In contrast, Deyermond finds Calisto to be the least interesting of the characters, “porque no obervamos verdadera crisis en él” (Because we observe no true crisis in him) (307). Calisto seems to have no past, no family, no friends; he appears out of nowhere, a simple gaze, a whirlwind of lust conforming to the original and conventional intention of Act I: Comedy. For Castro, while Celestina is a public person, Calisto is symbolic of extreme solitude (141). Again, this is a comedy that turns to tragedy, but one of the main characters, Calisto, no matter how solitary, refuses to leave Act I, he does not evolve beyond frenetic love. If there is soul searching, it is circular and worthless, and there is no questioning love, in fact there is no love, only gozo, thus the absence of crisis. Severin writes that the character Calisto had already been invented and that Rojas turns him into a burlesque Leriano from Cárcel de amor. In Act II, Calisto chooses Sempronio over the loyal Pármeno, and in Act VI he puts all his blind faith in Celestina (30). If one is to agree with Gilman that Rojas created lives of a sort which never lived before in literature, Calisto would not be part of this new human nature. Hardly announcing his arrival in the walled garden, Calisto utters abruptly, “En esto veo, Melibea, la grandeza de Dios” (Here I see, Melibea, the grandeur of God) (85). No introduction, no small talk, they know each other’s names the moment they first set eyes upon each other, unless of course there were words uttered outside the text. Immediately, and without the need for potions or external forces, Calisto is excessive. His passion is exaggerated and heretical, no way to describe it without bringing God into the picture, as in swearing to God, as in God as witness, as in proof of the existence of God and of his grandeur because God gave nature the power to create beauty that takes away from the divine itself. Ciriaco Morón observes that with these words Rojas paints nature as an autonomous force, independent from God (23). As is said throughout the Old Testament, God is an angry and jealous God; this is an opportunity for him to turn against his competition, nature. While Américo Castro also considers this first scene to be essentially un-Christian nature-philosophy, Otis Green sees Natura-Naturans (Creating Nature), “It is to God, not Nature, that glory is due” (II, 92). Correa observes that when Calisto sees Melibea for the first time he sees in her God’s grandeur, but that he is not praising God, rather nature for having created her (8). This qualifies as a heresy, the idea of Nature as a creative force capable of creating a creature of the same quality as one made by God. Calisto also glorifies physical beauty and sensual love. He deifies Melibea not because of her soul, but rather because of her physical beauty which is not meant to last, and perhaps this explains why there is never any question of

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marriage. The sense of the divine that Calisto sees in Melibea comes through the eyes, not the mind, it is only the mortal body that is involved. Nature ceases to be subordinated to the Creator. “Por cierto, los gloriosos santos que se deleytan en la visión divina no gozan más que yo agora” (Certainly, the glorious saints have no more pleasure contemplating the divine than I do now) (86). Calisto’s hateful and envious servant, Sempronio, will warn Calisto that in his praise of Melibea he is sounding like a heretic. Perhaps there is no mention of Christ, but Sempronio does ask, “Tú no eres cristiano?” (Are you not a Christian?) (93). Calisto’s reply is heretical, he is not Christian, he is Melibean, he adores Melibea, he believes in Melibea, and he loves Melibea. “¿Yo? Melibeo só, y a Melibea adoro, y en Melibea creo, y a Melibea amo” (93). Had Calisto not been described in the Argumento as of noble blood, gentle disposition, and good upbringing (82), the reader/listener could have concluded that Calisto was in fact not a Christian, not even a converso, rather an atheist ripe for the Inquisition. And who brought him up? Melibea’s parents are always nearby, making up for the absence of friends. Likewise, Calisto seems to have no friends. His servants are his only confidants. He is never surrounded by peers and his only interiority is the quasi-comical one disclosed in two soliloquies. James Burke believes that in setting Melibea as an object of vision, “the author(s) allude at the start of the work to sight, the sense that for ancients and medievals had always been the most important among the five” (33). Burke’s opinion is that Calisto does not see Melibea as signaling the power of God or as an object worthy of courtly devotion, rather, “He views her in terms of earthly delight, as a creature of flesh and blood, whose body can satisfy the needs of all his physical senses” (37). Consequently, Calisto will move from an act of perception, “(involving the highest of senses) at the beginning of act 1 to a plane of much lower physical reaction in act 19 where he expresses himself in language associated with the grossest of the physical sensations, touch and taste” (Ibid.). At the rendezvous in Act XII, Melibea pretends to have qualms. She reminds Calisto that her honor is at stake. Calisto’s reaction is excessive and overflowing with self-pity. He rants about going through walls and doors and breaking barriers; he feels comically sorry for himself for having been mocked by his servants and Celestina. Finally, Melibea succumbs, as if she were talking to God, she says, “ordena de mi tu voluntad” (Your will be done) (261). Calisto, in turn, wonders if he is worthy enough to, “gozar te tu suavíssimo amor?” (enjoy your tenderest love) (Ibid.). The verb gozar is a constant. The Real Academia Española’s definition of gozar: 1. Cuando significa “sentir placer a causa de algo,” es normalmente intransitivo y se construye con un

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gerundio o con un complemento introducido por de o con: «Moctezuma gozaba bebiendo chocolate» (Fuentes Espejo [Méx. 1992]); «Salieron a gozar de los árboles centenarios» (Serrano Vida [Chile 1995]); «El nene goza con las tonterías de su papá» (Santiago Sueño [P. Rico 1996]). Más rara, pero también válida, es la construcción transitiva: «No puede dejar de gozar su cautiverio». (Castillo Bolero [Ven. 1990])

According to this definition, the verb gozar is usually intransitive, and rarely transitive, as in the last example, no puede gozar su cautiverio. (He cannot enjoy his captivity.) When Calisto and Melibea use this verb, they are using it as a transitive verb, and constantly referring to enjoying each other. There is more sexuality here than sensuality or affection. Gilman is also of the opinion that the gozo of the lovers is founded on uninhibited physical desire and consummation (1972, 388). The fact that their attraction seems purely physical could very well be one of the reasons why there is never a question of marriage. This is an exemplum of purely carnal love that does not seek marriage, even if Calisto does say that he is sure that Melibea is pure of blood and of deed (something that would be of importance if there were a question of marriage). Having noted this description of Melibea by Calisto in Act XII as possessing, “limpieza de sangre y hechos,” Gilman adds, “The real ironical dig here may be at the meaningless purity of her sangre, given what we know about the impurity of her fechos” (1972, 366). Américo Castro also wonders if by “limpieza de sangre” Calisto is referring to Christian or to Jewish blood, or if Calisto is simply being ironic (106–107). Whatever the case may be, since there is never a question of marriage, simply of consuming love, it is not clear why Calisto feels that he needs to assert that Melibea’s blood and her intentions are pure. According to Gilman, indeed, her intentions are not pure, so much for her blood! “Las puertas impiden nuestro gozo” (The doors keep us from consuming our love), says Melibea before cursing those doors (262). Upon hearing that Sempronio and Pármeno have been killed, Calisto wants to know how, and why, and if he is in any way implicated since barely four hours have elapsed since he last saw them on his way back from his rendezvous with Melibea. Instead of grieving for his servants, he is worried about his honor and much prefers to die than to lose his honor, especially when he hears that his servants were killed by the police for having murdered Celestina because of the gold chain he had given her. “Todo será público, quanto con ella y con ellos hablava, quanto de mí sabían, el negocio en que andavan. No osaré salir ante gentes. ¡O pecadores de mancebos, padecer por tan súbito desastre; o mi gozo, como te vas disminuyendo!” (Everything will be public, as to my having talked to her and to them, as to what they knew about me, as to their business dealings. I will no longer dare go out to meet people. Oh, sinful young men, to suffer such a

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sudden disaster, oh, my pleasure, how you are dwindling!) (281). Not once does Calisto utter Melibea’s name. He is simply worried about what people will say or if everyone will hear about his love affair. The verb gozar and the noun el gozo are uttered again and again, in between Calisto’s sighs, regrets over his imperiled reputation, and fretful fearfulness. After much groaning and moaning, however, he decides to go on with his plan and to meet Melibea the next evening. “gozar deste sabroso deleyte de mis amores” (enjoy the delicious pleasure of my desire) (282). In Act XIV, climbing the wall that separates him from Melibea, Calisto exclaims, “Mora en mi persona tanta turbación de plazer que me hace no sentir todo el gozo que poseo” (There resides within me such turbulence in anticipating pleasure that it does not allow me to feel all the pleasure that I possess) (284). Melibea replies, “Goza de lo que yo gozo” (Take delight in what I am taking delight) (Ibid.). Calisto, in turn, is surprised that his shameless hands now, “gozan de llegar a tu gentil cuerpo y lindas delicadas carnes” (take pleasure in touching your sweet body and your delicate pretty flesh) (285). According to Gilman, Rojas’s treatment of gozo demonstrates that Rojas cannot only be understood as, “an alienated and ironical converso revenging himself artistically against the society in which he lived [. . .] in addition to his almost vicious use of erotic compulsion to expose the animality lying beneath social pretense, Rojas was also deeply and necessarily a part of the thing he made” (1972, 389–390). After the consummation, Calisto begins to lament once again, wondering what he has done, fearing for the potential loss of his honor for such shortlived pleasure, and referring to the frozen blood that was burning only yesterday, “agora que está elada la sangre que ayer hervía” (299). Yesterday, Calisto’s boiling blood was making Sempronio grow impatient. Retracing steps, like Jonadab who plots with Amnon against Amnon, Sempronio did the same and suggested that Calisto take his unrequited love to Celestina who could surely conjure the powers and make Melibea love Calisto in return. This scene is uncannily reminiscent of Jonadab devising a plan to bring Amnon and Tamar together by having Amnon feign illness.7 Like Celestina, Sempronio mutters words of mockery, hatred, truth, and doubt under his breath, and then turns around and becomes manipulative when asked to speak up. These parenthetical exclamations take the reader into the servant’s interiority, an interiority that Calisto does not appear to have. Immediately, the reader knows that Sempronio is cowardly, inconstant, devoid of trustworthiness, greedy, and in love with Elicia (89–90), while all he knows about Calisto is that he has fallen madly and comically in lust. In fact, it is only between parenthesis and through Sempronio that the reader

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gains insight into Calisto’s superficiality. “(No me engaño yo, que loco está este mi amo),” Sempronio utters. (I am not lying to myself, this master of mine is mad) (92). Soon afterward he adds, “(No basta loco, sino herege)” (Not only mad, but a heretic) (Ibid.). It is as if there were no Calisto without Sempronio: “(¡Ha, ha, ha! ¿Oýstes qué blasfemia? ¿Vistes que ceguedad?)” (Ha, ha, ha! Did you hear the blasphemy? Did you see the blindness?) (95) “(¡O pusillánime, o fi de puta! ¡Qué Nembrot, que magno Alexandre . . . !)” (Oh coward! Oh son of a wench! What a Nemrod, what an Alexander . . . !) (Ibid.) “(¡En sus trece está este necio!)” (This idiot is standing his ground!) (101)

The servant even appears to be better read than the master. When Sempronio refers to Nemrod and to Alexander, Calisto asks him to explain, which he does. Likewise, when Sempronio refers to Adam, to Solomon, to David, to Aristotle, to Virgil, Calisto shows very little knowledge of them and asks about that Adam, that Solomon, that David, as if he were not well acquainted with them (98). I concur with Deyermond who writes à propos of Sempronio, “el criado corrompido carece de crisis al igual que Calisto, pero los mátices de su carácter vienen pintados con gran habilidad” (the corrupt servant lacks crisis just as Calisto does, but the nuances of his character are painted with great ability), but I do believe the critic does not do the servant enough justice (307). Sempronio is a picaro whose entire life has been a crisis, and if he appears to lack depth it is because he has never had time for anything other than immediate survival. He does not lack depth as Calisto does; he is too adept in grasping others with just a few words. Furthermore, he is defective in his lack of empathy and distrust. For example, when he arrives at Celestina’s house and Elicia is upstairs with a client, he is quite rapidly convinced by that the footsteps upstairs belong to a girl destined for a friar (106). Either he trusts, or he has no choice but to trust, or he is hatefully in love, or his mind is elsewhere, for example in the profit he can make now that Calisto is burning, “arde en amores de Melibea” (107). Sempronio is burning as well in this world where love is more harmful than hate. I am not implying that hate is the opposite of love, simply that hate was a better fortress. The moment they love or desire they are distracted and disarmed: Calisto, Sempronio, Melibea, Pleberio, even Celestina who lived to hate and will die for loving a gold chain. Having warned Calisto that he could very well end up hating Melibea as much as he loves her, Sempronio suggests that they go and consult Celestina whom he describes as, “una vieja barbuda que se dize Celestina, hechicera,

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astuta, sagaz en cuantas maldades hay. Entiendo que passan de cinco mil virgos los que se han hecho y deshecho por su autoridad en esta ciudad” (a bearded crone who calls herself Celestina, a sorceress, sly, an expert in evil. I hear that some five thousand virginities have been done and undone by her in this city) (103). Deyermond has much more consideration for the servant Pármeno than for Sempronio. “Se trata de un criado leal, con la determinación de elevarse por encima de sus origenes miserables” (He is a loyal servant determined to put himself above his miserable origins) (307). Bataillon, on the other hand, sees in Celestina’s conquest of Pármeno merely a reconquest, “une reabsorption dans ce monde infâme auquel il appartenait de naissance” ( a reabsorption into the infamous world in which he belonged since birth) (139). There exists, however, an initial effort on Pármeno’s part to separate himself from what once defined him. This is translated by his initial scorn for Celestina. When Calisto asks Pármeno who is knocking on his door Pármeno replies, “Sempronio y una puta vieja alcoholada” (Sempronio and an old, alcoholic whore) (108). It does not take him long, however, to waver in his resolve. To Celestina, Pármeno finally admits, “Por una parte, téngote, por madre; por otra a Calisto por amo. Riqueza deseo, pero quien torpemente sube a lo alto, más aýna cae que subió. No querría bienes mal ganados” (On the one hand, I have you as a mother; on the other I have Calisto as a master. I desire riches, but he who climbs awkwardly, falls from high. I do not desire riches badly earned) (123). We are still in Act I, Pármeno admits to feeling loyalty toward Celestina and interestingly, the tragic hero must fall from high, but Pármeno does not wish to do so. In contrast, Pármeno’s final words before his death are addressed to Sempronio at the end of Act XII. “Salta, que yo tras ti voy” (Jump, I am right behind you) (275). According to Gilman, Pármeno’s trajectory goes from initial moral conflict to becoming a carbon copy of Sempronio (1956, 73). Before appearing in Act I, Celestina is announced by Sempronio as a “vieja barbuda, hechicera, astuta” (a sly bearded crone and a sorceress) who could possibly solve Calisto’s predicament and make Melibea desire him in return (103). There is speculation as to the meaning of Celestina’s name and the author’s choice of this name as opposed to any other name. Severin indicates that the anonymous author of Celestina comentada wrote that Rojas composed this name from the Latin scelere meaning betrayal or evil, while Corominas defended the theory that the name was derived from the Latin caelestis (103). Celeste is blue, the color of the firmament, as in celestial. Carol Salus traces the pervasive, intense blue in Picasso’s 1904 oil on canvas Celestina to a variety of possible psychological, artistic, and literary sources. She cites Frederick Wight who wrote that blue was the color of the Virgin in all Catholic painting, and notes that Picasso’s use of this color to depict

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Celestina is ironic, as is Rojas’s choice of the name Celestina, “little celestial one” (78–79). Salus also analyzes Manuel da Costa Fontes’s study of Celestina as an antithesis of the blessed mother, how Fontes points out that everyone in town calls Celestina mother just as the Virgin was regarded as mother. Another of Salus’s examples of the elevation of Celestina is when Pármeno informs Calisto in Act I that anything capable of producing a sound (animal, instrument, rock) calls her a puta vieja when she passes by and agrees with Fontes who writes that this is a parody of Psalm 48 where everything in Creation is exhorted to praise the name of the Lord (Salus 2015, 79). Comparing the images of Celestina portrayed by Picasso and Rojas, Salus observes that Rojas’s Celestina was gray-haired, seventy-two according to Pármeno, with a face distinguished by wrinkles, a scar, and whiskers. Picasso’s visualization differs in the sense that he portrays a fairly goodlooking, middle-aged woman who is blind in one eye. Vividly aware of the importance of the visual in La Celestina, Burke writes that the individual who looks must remember that his or her gaze is not the only one; someone else is always looking back (10). In Picasso’s painting, one eye gazes, and the other eye is looked at. Celestina’s piercing gaze can also be associated with the evil eye, and to the superstitious belief that the tuerto (one-eyed person) was to be feared. I see two different gazes in Picasso’s painting and consider the blind eye to be just as penetrating as the seeing one. The blind eye can also be suggestive of Celestina’s weakness, greed, to which she will eventually sacrifice her life. Upon hearing that Calisto is burning with love for Melibea, Celestina says that she is glad to hear such news, just as a surgeon would be knowing someone is injured (107). To Calisto, Pármeno explains that Celestina had six trades, seamstress, perfume maker, cosmetician, restorer of virginities, procuress, and sorceress (110) and describes in detail everything that can be found in her laboratory. Referring to Le Celestina, Américo Castro writes that this work owes its literary substance to the destructive-constructive animation continually underlying it (97). This same animation, or anima, can also be taken to the character Celestina. When Pluto is god of the harvest, the seamstress dresses her clients, the perfume maker allows them to smell good, the cosmetician who is also a pharmacist, helps them look and feel better, the restorer of virginities gives maidens several chances, the procuress provides some with a living wage and others with sex, and the sorceress gives people what they want. Celestina is independent and empowered, she can offer beauty, and take it away. When Pluto reigns over the underworld, however, Celestina gives health only to take it away, love to take it away, hope to take it away, life to take it away. “Que no solo lo que veo, oyo y conozco, más aún lo intrínsico con los intellectuales ojos penetro” (Not only what I see, what I hear, what I know, but also the intrinsic that my gaze can penetrate)

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(117). Celestina’s only blindness is greed and the belief in the omnipotence of money. “Todo lo puede el dinero” (143). Just as she can cure and poison, money gives her power, and love of money takes her power away. Just as greed allowed Celestina occasional wealth, success, talent in the crafts, and the respect she inspired despite being called puta vieja by anything that could produce sound, the hubris that ended her life. More greedy than hateful, Celestina, the spinner of webs, conjures Pluto, who is not the devil himself, but a Roman god of the underworld.8 Below is the conjuring of Pluto that just about every critic has cited either to comment on the little importance that magic has in Rojas’s work (Menéndez Pelayo, Américo Castro, Maria Rosa Lida, Stephen Gilman), or on its vital role (P. Botta, A. Bonilla). “Conjúrote, triste Plutón, señor de la profundidad infernal, emperador de la corte dañada, capitán soberbio de los condenados ángeles [. . .]” (147), thus Celestina summons Pluto in Act III. “Yo, Celestina, tu más conocida cliéntula, te conjuro [. . .] por la áspera ponçoña de las bívoras de que este azeyte fue hecho, con el cual uno este hilado; vengas sin tardança obedecer mi voluntad [. . .] hasta que Melibea con aparejada oportunidad que haya lo compre” (148). (I conjure you, sad Pluto, Lord of the infernal depth, emperor of the damaged court, arrogant captain of the condemned angels [. . .] I, Celestina, your best known client, I conjure you [. . .] on the coarse poison of the snakes that made this oil, to which I join this thread, to come without delay to obey my will [. . .] until the opportunity arises that Melibea buy it.)

Juan Manuel Escudero notes that the disagreements when it comes to the role that magic plays in La Celestina are not accidental. The fact that the critics have never come to a coherent solution clearly demonstrates Rojas’s artistic ability. “Rojas nos deja a nosotros, lectores, en la incertidumbre de otorgar verdadero valor al elemento mágico. Nos movemos en la penumbra de un fenómeno que puede ser leído como causa necesaria o causa complementaria” (Rojas leaves us, the readers, in doubt as to the value we should give to magic. We are uncertain whether a phenomenon should be interpreted as a necessary or a complementary cause) (113). Escudero adds that nothing can be more removed from our modern sensitivity than the relationship that Rojas’s contemporaries had with magic and sorcery. This was a society that fervently believed in witchcraft. I concur with Escudero who sees magic as a central theme. No need to choose between magic and causality; causality can be interpreted as magic, and magic as causality. Magic does not take character away from the characters or power away from Celestina. Magic is in fact one of the main characters of the Tragicomedy. Celestina would not be possible without her hateful laboratory and all the random natural elements

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inside it regardless of whether they possessed any intrinsic power. If there is paraphernalia, there is magic. In her study of Picasso’s many renderings of Celestina, Carol Salus analyzes a 1903 ink drawing titled Celestina Knitting that portrays Celestina involved in one of her six trades, seamstress or garment maker, a cover for her other businesses that allows her to enter homes under the pretense of selling thread. “Her motions of linking and knotting strands of yarn or thread together through her needles can be interpreted as symbolizing her plots” (47). The needle, in fact, has many uses: a weapon, a plot, a garment, another chance. According to Herrero, “The needle does become, in Celestina’s hand, a form of diabolic sacrament: it erases the wagers of sin; it restores the recipient to a state of desirability which prepares her again for new lustful initiations” (345). Furthermore, the needle is the conduit of the thread. The Spanish verb tejer and the word text share the same root. When Celestina conjures Pluto, she asks for a piece of paper with a text and everything else having to do with thread, and lines, and the serpentine. To write is to put the thread of the written word onto the paper, cursive is a thread. Celestina also needs the hair of a goat, and serpent oil to bond the spell. Celestina even threatens Pluto should he fail to quickly do as she asks. She will scar Pluto’s sad prisons with light, and even sully his name (148). How does one sully Pluto’s name, especially when he is likened to the devil himself? Such hubris will in fact lead Celestina to her own downfall. When Sempronio asks for one-third of the total gains, Celestina immediately challenges him, asks him to leave her house, and goes as far as to threaten him with blackmail (274). Until that moment, when Sempronio draws his sword, Celestina has never once doubted her power, or even considered the possibility of the servants turning against her. When she realizes that she is about to be murdered, she cries for her neighbors and for justice, and she asks for confession when she realizes that she is dying. I repeat, she asks for confession, a dying wish that the critics Finch and Eesley consider to be sincere.9 This would imply that Celestina believed in God, and she indeed had to, since she either believed or pretended to believe in the Devil for too long. Even after Celestina’s, Sempronio’s and Pármeno’s deaths the hatred lives on in Elicia and Areúsa who blame the lovers for the deaths, and in Centurio whom Marcel Bataillon considers to be a delectable creation for Rojas’s contemporaries, “les prostituées, toujours bien vivantes, continuent à poursuivre les amants de leurs haine ignoble, et suscitent contre les félicités nocturnes un grotesque croquemitaine, qui est le plus lâche des souteneurs” (The prostitutes, still very much alive, will continue to pursue the lovers with their ignoble hatred, and they unleash on their nocturnal delight a grotesque bogeyman, the most despicable of procurers) (134). This bogeyman is certainly

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Centurio whom Bataillon considers to be a delectable creation. It is as if the lovers could not survive without this whirlwind of hatred that fomented their passion from the onset. Calisto and Melibea had to return to a Garden similar to the one where the first couple fell from grace, yet another enclosed garden since, after the fall, “he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way” (Genesis 3:24). In the turbulent flow, the vortex of Lucrecia’s voice comes closer to the axis and sings about vicious flowers, new colors being seen, a clear fountain also being seen, with thirst. No matter how dark the night, sight will continue to take delight in what it sees, just as the wolf when it sees cattle, and baby goats when they see a teat (320–321). The eye becomes evil eye, delight takes great leaps, Centurio arrives and does not even have to enter the enclosure. He simply comes and goes, this is what his love for Areúsa can do, and Calisto falls. Melibea will soon follow. Before leaping from the top of a tower built by her father, she laments, “tan poco tiempo poseydo el plazer, tan presto venido el dolor” (Pleasure for such a short time had, pain having come so quickly) (328). She also regrets, “¿cómo no gozé más el gozo?” (Ibid). (Why did I not enjoy pleasure more?) After she leaps to her death, her father exclaims, “nuestro gozo en el pozo” (Our pleasure in the well.) (336). In other words, their pleasure, their daughter, was gone. Severin notes that such a dramatic moment is altered by an expression that is quite risible. Gozo, delight, rhymes with pozo, the well. In the Garden enclosed in an unnamed city, the second fall, the delectable bogeyman’s love, childless Mother Celestina’s brew, the pharmakon, poison and cure, announcing the open future of hatred. Dark alchemy. But wasn’t alchemy already dark? I would liken it to dark ecology that Timothy Morton defines as ecological awareness: dark-depressing, darkuncanny, but also dark-sweet (2016, 5). NOTES 1. I will be referring either to The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea or to La Celestina, the two titles are interchangeable. It was not Rojas who changed the title to La Celestina, but rather the editors themselves in order to increase sales (see Deyermond 1994, 306). As to the spelling of the name Calisto, I will keep the s instead of the x that Stephen Gilman opts for. 2. See Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy: “tragodia mimesis praxeos spoudaias kai teleias, megethos echouses, edusmeno logo, choris ekaekasto ton eidon en tois moriois, dronton kai ou di’apaggelias, di eleou kai phobou perainousa ten ton poiuton pathematon catharsis” (Hardy 1977, 36–37). Tragedy is therefore a mimesis of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished (by rhythm, harmony and song) . . . found in separate parts of the play (these separate parts being either verse or song) [. . .] in the form of an action, not of narrative;

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through pity and fear (eleou kai phobou) effecting the proper purgation (katharsis) of these emotions (Ibid.). 3. These are not the deadly sins per se unless sorrow, old age, and poverty are deadly sins. June Hall Martin’s interpretation does, however, resemble Clarke’s. 4. According to Martín de Riquer, the setting was not a garden but rather a church in the original version (389) (as in Gerado Vera’s 1996 cinematographic rendering of La Celestina). 5. There is debate as to where the lovers first met, and whether it was in Melibea’s garden or in a church. 6. I am using Dorothy Severin’s edition of La Celestina, the Zaragoza 1507 text. Severin opted for it because it is the first version of the Tragicomedia that appeared in Spain even if she does not consider it to be a very good or complete version because it was printed a year of plague. “Para suplir los pasajes de que adolece, ha sido necesario utilizar la Comedia editada en Toledo, en 1500, y la Tragicomedia de Valencia 1514” (To make up for the passages it is missing, I am also using the Comedia edited in Toledo in 1500 and the 1514 Valencia Tragicomedia) (45). 7. Castro asserts that to fully understand La Celestina, one must read it alongside the Old Testament (1965, 106). 8. Critics such as P. Botta believe that there is no doubt that Pluto is Satan in disguise. “La Lozana andaluza, entre cita celestinesca y segunda redacción.” In, “Modelli Memoorie Riscritture” (Naples, May 10–12, 2000), G. Grilli, ed. 9. Eesley, Anne. “Four Instances of ¡Confesión! In Celestina.” Celestinesca, VII, November 1983. Pp. 17–19; Finch, Patricia. “Religion as Magic.” Celestinesca, III, November 1979. Pp. 19–24.

Chapter 2

Intimate Haters, Difficult Literatures

After the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors in 1492, many chose to remain in Spain, convert, and make do in a society that rejected and disdained them. Those who stayed, however, were not only Jews and Moors, but also those born without honor, the lower classes, conniving servants, Lope de Vega’s villanos and labradores (whether rich or poor), the pícaros, the vagabonds, the idle. Despite the hardships and the humiliations, the marginal peoples remained in a society that felt what Américo Castro denounced as “un odio feroz por la vida” (a ferocious hatred of life) (1965, 26). Tied to this ferocious hatred, the Spanish social dynamics, the three castes that divided Spanish society, the Spanish, the Moorish, and the Jewish. Much of the Spanish identity was a result of this rejection of the other, as were the Moorish and the Jewish identities. Castro touches upon being castizo, of good lineage, and sees the Golden Age as a time of hatred between the Old Christians and the converted Jews. Juan María Marín takes a more economistic approach to this deep divide in his introduction to Lope de Vega’s Peribáñez. Rooted in the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century Spanish social pyramid had the royal family at the top, the king being a vice-God or God on earth, and laborers and artisans at the bottom. Marín writes that the divine character of the monarchy gave them absolute power and no responsibility. Next in line were the nobles, a caste that Marín divides into three groups: high nobility or ricoshombres, middle nobility or the caballeros, and low nobility or the hidalgos. The ricoshombres were the nobles with a title who lived in the country, while the caballeros and the hidalgos had no money and no titles. All three groups were of clean blood (limpios de sangre) (18). Next in line was the bourgeoisie that had accumulated wealth through industry, commerce, and finance, activities disdained by the Christians (18–19). “La burguesía, en consecuencia, fue, como clase, mal 37

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vista tanto por la nobleza, como por el bajo pueblo, parapetados unos y otros trás su condición de cristianos viejos” (The bourgeoisie was therefore, as a class, disdained by both the nobility and the lower classes, protected as they were by their condition of Old Christians) (Ibid., 19). Spain was a country peopled by intimate haters. Hate seemed to regain its biblical intensity during the Spanish Golden Age, that revered century of grandeur that produced so many examples of difficult literatures that González Echevarría (66) refers to when writing about R. E. Kaske’s “prodigious feats of interpretation,” one in particular that “he performed at a symposium on difficult literature where Lope’s El castigo would surely have been at home” (Ibid.). Hate entered through the eyes and the ears, and exited through the hand, the quill, the ink, lost honor, betrayal, lost illusions, love lost. Those who produced the difficult literatures hated their peers and created intimate haters, their characters. In these literary wars Miguel de Cervantes hated Lope de Vega, Lope hated Cervantes, Luis de Góngora hated Francisco de Quevedo who called him a Moor, Lope was Góngora’s enemy and detractor, and Quevedo hated Góngora who called Quevedo and Lope drunks. Cervantes’s peers considered him to be an angry envious liar, and Lope was deemed a malady rather than a cure (the Spanish word for curate being cura which also means cure). I will not be delving into the presence of hate, its intimate presence, in the works and the hearts of all the haters listed above. Rather, I will be focusing on two biblical plays of Lope de Vega, La creación del mundo and El robo de Dina that Lope labels comedias famosas but that are the most tragic, one play that he also labels a comedia, Fuenteovejuna, and one tragedy, El castigo sin venganza. In his analysis of Lope’s and Cervantes’s hatred for each other, Tomás Tómov cites Lope who wrote, “Yo nací en dos extremos que son amar y aborrecer, no he tenido medio jamás” (I was born in two extremes, love and hatred, I have never been in the middle) (618). At one extreme, there was a friendship that lasted from 1583 at least until 1604 with Lope’s publication of El peregrino en su patria. On the cover on the book figured a statue of Envy with the caption, “Quieras o no quieras, Envidia, Lope es o único o muy raro” that provoked Cervantes’s indignation according to Tómov (Whether you want it or not, Envy, Lope is either unique or exceptional) (618). In response, Cervantes wrote a sonnet criticizing all of Lope’s works except the theatre. Lope in turn, wrote Cervantes a letter where he does not spare him the most vulgar epithets, “Puerco, buey, potrilla, baladí, culo, muladar” (Tómov 620). Puerco, buey, potrilla: Lope calling Cervantes a pig, an ox, and a mare. Baladí means trivial: Lope referring to Don Quijote. Culo meaning ass, “de culo en culo por el mundo va” (from ass to ass he roams

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the world) (he being Cervantes). Finally, muladar, meaning garbage dump. “En muladares parará.” (He will end up in the garbage dump) (he being Cervantes). Tómov attributes this hatred to the character differences between Lope and Cervantes. “son dos naturas completamente diferentes, como son diferentes sus talentos y genios, sus concepciones y las vicisitudes de su fortuna” (They are of two totally different natures, talents and genius, as well as mindsets and fate) (621). While Lope had blind ambition, Cervantes questioned the price to be paid for success. Indeed, these differences existed, but hatred came from the similarities and both writers took a good amount of pleasure (mixed with pain) from the literary ferocity. “N’est pas méchant qui veut,” wrote the philosopher Jean-Marie Monod in La Férocité littéraire, a book that demonstrates that behind every literary success there is, if not a great crime, at least a good war. “La littérature est un lieu où chaque chose, en s’écrivant, se sublime et se transfigure: ainsi va pour les passions mauvaises, tel étant l’avers d’une médaille dont l’effigie figure moins souvent les muses que «la discorde aux crins de serpent»” (9). (Not everyone can be cruel. [. . .] Literature is a place where everything, while being written, sublimates and transfigures: as do negative passions, the other side of the coin whose effigy is not so much muses, as discord with serpents for a mane.) The same Lope who hated Cervantes also took several biblical stories to the stage, thus provoking the hatred of seventeenth-century theologians who called him “a lobo carnicero de las almas” (wolf, butcher of souls), and accused him of inventing love affairs such as Jacob’s and Rachel’s, intrigues involving Tamar, the rape of Dinah, tall tales concerning David, and as a result, “mil vicios y mil impropiedades en esos enredos fabulosos” (a thousand vices and a thousand improprieties in those fabulous intrigues) (Cotarelo y Mori 225). Whatever the case may be, Lope gave a voice to many of the Bible’s silent and silenced characters. In La creación del mundo y primer culpa del hombre (The Creation of the World and First Fault of Man), Lope lists the “Personas que hablan en ella” (Characters who speak in this comedy), most of whom have very few lines, if any, in the Bible. They are: San Miguèl, Tubal, Eva, Adàn, Lamet, Abèl, Luzbèl, Seth, Cain, and Musica. Musica is heard first on the first day, while San Miguèl and Luzbèl argue. San Miguèl calls Luzbèl, “atrevido, necio loco” (daredevil, stupid, crazy) for saying out loud that he is the creator’s equal and perhaps even his superior. Luzbèl, who hates the creator, argues, “èl me hizo, è yo me hice con mas libertad despues. Igual le soy en poder, igual en naturaleza” (He made me, and I made myself with more freedom later. I am his equal in power and in nature) (1–2).

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Before disappearing, Luzbèl exclaims, “Caì, pero no vencido” (I fell, but I have not been conquered) (2). Immediately, Luzbèl reappears, dressed as the Devil, angry that God has created man to retaliate against him. The seven days of the Creation are described by Luzbèl, before the backdrop changes and becomes a Garden, soon to become a Garden of Hatred. God’s revenge, Adam and Eve, are destined to be the Devil’s revenge. Luzbèl urges Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and, once she does, he tells her that she must convince Adam to partake as well. Suddenly, the silent Eve of the Bible speaks in Lope’s rewriting of the Bible. She is no longer made in God’s image, but rather in Luzbèl’s who has stolen her from a God who never speaks. Like Luzbèl, Eve feels she is God’s equal. Once she eats the forbidden fruit, she is aware of herself, she thinks. She coaxes Adam, who resists at first, invoking a God who remains absent and inaccessible. Finally, Adam succumbs and immediately feels that nature has turned against him. Instead of addressing God, it is nature that Adam addresses, “Árboles, no le negueis las hojas a mi verguenza” (Trees! Do not deny my shame your leaves) (9). The earth that once gave flowers now gives thorns. The birds, who once produced a sweet song, now screech in the night. Even the stones are rising against Adam. Nature could very well be this mute God’s revenge for this first sin committed against him. God’s ire and hatred speak through the natural world, the Garden. Here is the first manifestation of God’s wrath that Sloterdijk considers to be the most embarrassing of his qualities (73). Forty years later, on the second day, Adam and Eve, all clothed, are the parents of two sons. Adam, who has apparently never stopped regretting his past transgression, attempts to enter the Garden, “por ver si Dios se ha desenojado, pues su amor, para lo hacer, es mayor que mi pecado” (To see if God is no longer angry since his love, by its doing, is greater than my sin) (10). In other words, God is still angry. Paradise lost, Nature abhors man, initially God’s revenge, then the Devil’s revenge, enter the humble Abel and the envious Cain who wonders why his parents live in eternal sorrow. Although he knows he is hated by Cain, Abel asks God to show some pity for his brother (14). No need for the Devil in this situation. By not responding, God is planting the hatred Cain needs to commit murder, and God therefore becomes an accessory to murder. This could very well be vengeance brought upon Luzbèl, rendering Luzbèl useless, depriving him of the pleasure of luring Cain into evil. Does Cain belong to Luzbèl or to God? He seems to fear God instead of Luzbèl whom he does not take too seriously. It is only after the murder that God finally speaks. A voice asks Cain of his brother’s whereabouts; a rhetorical question since God already knows the answer. Cain, who fears God, knows that “aquesta voz es de Dios” (That is the voice of God) (15).

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“And now art thou cursed from the earth. [. . .] When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength,” said the God of the Old Testament to Cain, who responds, “and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me.” But that was not God’s will, “whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken upon him sevenfold” (Gen. 4:11–15). Sloterdijk sees here an interruption of revenge and an ambivalent situation, “although the sign of Cain can be interpreted as the symbol of a universal prohibition against revenge, if this is violated, there exists the threat of excessive revenge” (80). After Abel’s death, Lope’s San Miguèl tries to comfort the bereaved parents by letting them know that God is less angry. To bring comfort to them, he announces Noah, a descendant of Cain (in Lope’s play) who will survive God’s wrath and inability to pardon mankind for attempting to build a tower that would reach the heavens. The first punishment was the loss of the Garden, the second came in the form of the multiplicity of languages, the third was the Flood. In Genesis, however, the Flood precedes Babel. In a comparative study of Lope’s biblical plays, Joan Oleza writes that while Lope strongly adheres to Genesis on the first and second days, on the third day, “buena parte de la materia es inventada, dando vida individual a dos descendientes de Caín, Lamec y Jubal, a quienes la Biblia sitúa en la quinta y en la sexta generación, respectivamente, y que aquí son contemporáneos de Seth, el tercer hijo de Adán y Eva” (A good part of the story is invented, giving individual life to the descendants of Cain, Lamech and Jubal whom the Bible puts in the fifth and sixth generation, and who become here contemporaries of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son) (376). Luzbèl tries to take all the credit for the fratricide. This time, however, he will not wait for God to plant hatred in the heart of Cain’s descendant, Lamech, father of Noah, he will do it himself, so that “muera Cain en las manos de su hijo, por que sean comprehendidos entrambos en la maldición de Dios” (That Cain die by the hand of his son and they both be cursed by God) (22). According to Oleza, La intriga entera de esta obra queda enmarcada en la lucha del arcángel San Miguel con el ángel rebelde, Luzbel, y si al principio presenciamos la sublevación y la caída de éste, al final somos testigos de su pertinaz desafío, y mientras San Miguel nos explica la doctrina del libre albedrío del hombre, que le da opción al premio o al castigo, Luzbel, que aspira a hacer suyo a uno de cada dos hombres, y que en su caída había gritado «caí, pero no vencido», ahora arrebata el cuerpo de Caín y se precipita con él en el infierno. (The entire intrigue of this play is framed in the struggle between Saint Michael and Luzbel, and if in the beginning we witness the rise and fall of Luzbel, in the end we are in the presence of his hubris, and while Saint Michael explains to us

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man’s free will, the choice between reward and punishment, Luzbel, who aspires to make mankind entirely his, and who yelled “I fell but I am not conquered” when he fell, now grabs Cain’s body and rushes into the inferno with it.) (371)

Ten generations after Noah, Abram was begat, and Abram begat Isaac who took Rebekah as his wife, and Rebekah conceived, “And the children struggled together within her” (Gen. 25:22). There were twins in her womb: Esau—who was hated by God for no particular reason— came out first, red; then came Jacob who was loved by God. Jacob took the two sisters Rachel and Leah as wives, and Leah bore Jacob six sons and one daughter, Dinah. (The spelling will be Dinah in reference to the Dinah of Genesis. Dina will be Lope’s Dina.) Chapter 34 of Genesis, titled “Jacob reaps the harvest of his evil years,” tells the short story of Dinah who was raped by Shechem. Dinah went out to see the daughters of the land. And when Shechem saw her, “he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her” (Gen. 34:2). From that moment on, the story is one of revenge and has little or nothing to do with Dinah who never speaks. Although Shechem wishes to marry Dinah and Jacob agrees to the marriage, Dinah’s brothers are intent upon exacting revenge upon Shechem’s entire tribe. After having set the condition that every male be circumcised for the marriage to happen, Dinah’s brothers killed all the men, enslaved the women and children, stole their wealth, and spoiled their city. For their actions, they received no punishment other than Jacob berating them. “Ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land” (Gen. 34:30), says Jacob who is afraid for himself. The brothers’ argument was, “Should he deal with our sister as with an harlot?” (Gen. 34:31). Since Dinah never says a word in Genesis, Matthew Stroud asks the pertinent question having to do with her role in the loss of her virginity. Stroud also asks why Jacob allows his sons to intervene, why all the Hivite men were killed if only one of them raped Dinah, and what moral lesson is to be gleaned from this story of ruthless cruelty that goes unpunished (2011, 234). These are not merely rhetorical questions. In his play, El robo de Dina, Lope de Vega answers all of Stroud’s questions. Lope’s version of the Rape of Dinah has a list of twenty-six characters “que hablan en ella” (that speak in it). The action in this Comedia Famosa begins before Chapter 34 of Genesis, in Genesis 31 to be exact, when Jacob has fled Laban’s house with Rachel and Leah. In other words, the action in Lope’s play begins long before Dina is “defiled.” Unbeknownst to Jacob, Rachel has stolen her father’s household gods. “With whomsoever thou findest thy gods, let him not live” (Gen. 31:32). In the beginning of Lope’s play, Laban expresses his hatred and desire for revenge against Jacob, his son-inlaw who has disappeared with his daughters and his goods. But an Angel appears to Laban in his sleep, an Angel who claims to be, “el Dios de Jacob”

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(Jacob’s God) (69), and who tells Laban, “Guárdate de hacelle mal” (Guard yourself from hurting him) (72). Consequently, Laban renounces hate and seeks to reconcile with Jacob. Not once does Dinah speak in the Bible. In Lope’s play, Dina speaks on the first day. “Bien sé quien los tiene, yo” (I know very well who has them) (221). She is referring to the household gods that her aunt Rachel has stolen. Immediately, the servant Bato urges her to keep quiet and alludes possible lack of dignity. “Calla, aunque eres mujer, Dina, y un imposible ha de ser: serás Dina en ser mujer, más serás de Dina, indina” (Keep quiet, even if you are a woman, Dina, and something impossible: being a woman makes you Dina, but of Dina you are indignant) (228–230). Here, Bato is playing with the name Dina, and the word indina (indignant) as well as answering Stroud’s question having to do with Dina’s role in the loss of her virginity. The second time Dina speaks in Lope’s play, she offers to approach Esau on behalf of Jacob because she is confident that she can quell his hatred and desire for revenge against Jacob and his family (393–395). To this Simeon responds, “Di que respete tu belleza” (Tell him to respect your beauty) (396). Dina has not yet been raped, and her brother is announcing that because of her beauty she runs the danger of being disrespected. The third time Dina speaks, it is to pay tribute to Esau who is ready to let go of the hatred he feels for his brother Jacob (518–520). Esau pays Dina little attention. When Dina appears again, she speaks to Zelfa, Leah’s slave who bore Jacob a son, Aser. Unlike the Dinah of Genesis who is little more than what Matthew Stroud considers to be a “token of symbolic exchange between men, a placeholder who possesses no content of her own” (242), Lope’s Dina is curious about “la ciudad” (the city), determined to go there and meet the women whose beauty, customs, dances, music, wardrobe and songs so impress her (820– 830). Dina also tells Zelfa that Bato loves her. She seems to know about love, so much so that she says to Bato, “quien ama no teme, que cuanto se intenta amando, prosperamente sucede, camina, que esto es amor” (Who loves does not fear, when one tries loving, one succeeds, walk, for this is love) (899–901). Dina’s last line in Act 1 is, “¿Este es Siquén?” (971) (Is this Siquén?). Siquén is the prince who will rape her in Act 2. This means that she already knew who is Siquén well before he raped her. This knowledge, combined with the fact that she assures Bato that he who loves does not fear, could explain why she ventured into the city without a male escort. She was sure that her venture would be successful, so she kept walking, because it was for love. No need to explain, Lope’s Dina herself tells the spectators about the role she played in the loss of her virginity. Leví suggests that Astarté is the goddess of love. In Act II, Dina is in disguise in the feast of Astarté, feeling the intense

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pleasure of nature, the flowers, the Springtime, her body that wants to dance like a gypsy. In line 97, Dina even says to Zelfa, “no soy dama” (I am no lady.) Soon, Dina grows weary of the festivities, but Siquén/Shechem urges her to stay. She hesitates but in an aparté she utters to herself, ¡Oh, príncipe, mi Señor!” (Oh, prince, my Lord!), referring to Siquén/Shechem. She also says to her suitor, “Despues veremos los dos si me agradáis o cansáis” (Later we Will see if you please me or bore me) (371–372). Perhaps Lope is suggesting that she was not even a virgin and this was simply a way to explain the loss of her virginity. It is also hard to believe that Siquén is a rapist since he does warn Dina, “robarte y gozarte intento” (I intend to take you by force and rape you) (688). He could have indeed expressed his love and desire in a kinder way, but by announcing the intent to rape he gave Dina a choice to run away. Dina’s reaction is “Señor, tu eres rey” (Lord, you are the king) (688). There is much ambivalence in Dina’s comments and reactions, I therefore fail to see in El robo de Dina what Elaine Canning considers to be, “the exploitation of the female body, the literal theft of Dinah’s virginity by the active male and the establishment of the male (subject) v. female (object) dichotomy” (153). When Canning evokes the overbearing male presence conveyed by the title and affirms that it is a male-oriented text, I believe she is alluding less to Lope’s play and more to the story in Genesis where, “Dinah’s views on the rape and her emotional responses are absent” (Ibid.). Lope never fails to give Dina a voice, the Dinah of Genesis never utters a single word. The rape takes place behind the scenes halfway through Act II. Referring to what has occurred, Dina calls it, “mi infamia” (my infamy) (808), and later expresses her desire for Siquén to be punished. When Siquén asks her to marry him, she refuses, and even says, “os aborrezco, y me mata con veneno vuestra vista” (I hate you, and the sight of you kills me like a poison) (876). This does not resemble the Dina who not so long ago was sending mixed messages to Siquén. When she tells her father about what happened, she fails to mention her presence at the party, her interactions with Siquén, and his offer of marriage. Stroud remarks that Jacob’s hesitance to see Dina as a completely innocent victim and Siquén as a purely evil perpetrator leaves Dina dumbfounded. “Her anger even prompts her to challenge his honor and his manhood; if he will not avenge her dishonor, her brothers will” (2011, 241). Now to Stroud’s question as to why all the Hivite men were killed and the moral lesson to be drawn from this story. Lope appears to see the slaughter of the Hivites, “as an overreaction by Simeón and Leví, thus providing sufficient evidence for those in the audience who wish to see Jewish treachery in this play” (2011, 243). Stroud adds that by choosing a Biblical heroine of such marginal importance, Lope might have been providing further evidence

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of a further Christian attempt to “take certain aspects of Jewish culture and religion and turn them around to use as proof that the Jews are everything the Christians in early modern Spain thought them to be. At the same time [. . .] there is no atrocity that will condemn one if one acts in the name of God” (2011, 244). Jacob and his sons acted in the name of God, as did Catholic monarchs. Rape takes on another dimension in Fuente Ovejuna. While it is somewhat difficult to trust Dina, to keep from hating her, to believe that she was in fact raped, and to establish that Siquén was a rapist, the reader/spectator and even an entire village sides with all the women who were so brutally assaulted by the Comendador. The haters in Fuente Ovejuna, the intimate haters, are no longer Old Christians who hate converts, this time the hatred is internal, it involves only Old Christians. That which separates them can either be rank, or social class, or wealth, or honor. The Commander of the Order of Calatrava, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, despises his superior, Rodrigo Téllez Girón, the Grand Master of the Order of Calatrava. Gómez de Guzmán also despises the villanos, the townspeople, and anyone he considers beneath his rank. Being born with honor was synonymous of being born with a title; not necessarily with wealth although some Comendadores did have wealth. In contrast, the villanos could have wealth, but had no title and no honor. As a result, the Comendadores felt that the villanos, the village people, were at their mercy; they were pawns or toys, and their women were there for the taking. The Comendadores were tyrants, given a world in which to play. Fuente Ovejuna falls under the genre comedias de comendadores, and if I am analyzing it in a chapter on hatred it is because of the hatred that Fernando, the Comendador in this story, inspires the townspeople, as well as the reader or the spectator. Juan Marín asserts, “La violencia que pone fin a la vida del Comendador se justifica por el simple derecho natural; son los propios actos inmorales del tirano los que ocasionan la catástrofe y le acarrean la muerte” (The violence that puts an end to the life of the Commander is justified by natural law; the immoral acts of the tyrant bring about the catastrophe and his death) (1994, 38–39). In other words, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán deserved to die. His death assuages the hatred that the spectators, the readers and the townspeople felt. Before the murder, Esteban yells, “¡Muere, traidor Comendador!” (Die, treacherous commander!) (1893). After the murder, Pascuala yells, “¡Moriré matando!” (I will die killing!) (1917). The musicians sing, “Mueran los tiranos!” (Death to the tyrants!) (2030). Frondoso also sings, “Y mueran los tiranos!” (Death to the tyrants) (2042). Marín suggests that there is a right to kill a tyrant if that tyrant has become a tyrant by abusing his authority and failing to respect or to listen to his vassals (34–35). That is the reason why the Commander was so hated, and his violent death was experienced as a delight.

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When Laurencia rejects him, the Commander’s reaction is, “¿Mías no sois?” (Aren’t you mine?) (603). He is not only addressing Laurencia, however; the verb sois is in the second person plural, so he is speaking to all the women of the village. They are all his. When it is Jacinta’s turn to reject him, the Commander turns her over to his army so that she be gang raped (1270). When she asks for pity, he replies that there is no pity (1274). S. L. P. Aronson remarks that a gang rape took place in Fuente Ovejuna with little or no consequence or moral outrage. More important than the gangrape was the kidnapping of Laurencia and the remote possibility that she was raped. “Strangely enough, Jacinta’s gang-rape does not provoke the village to action nor garner as much critical attention as it warrants. Laurencia’s abduction and rape occupies a privileged position in the drama even though numerous scholars argue against her having been raped at all” (33). Aronson argues for the case of rape by calling attention to Laurencia’s appearance in the village after having been violently abducted, “so physically transformed that her own father does not immediately recognize her” (36). Another argument put forth by Aronson is that loose hair and torn clothing were emblematic of how a rape victim should look. Just by being described as desmelenada (hair in disarray), “an early modern audience would have been able to “read” the unspoken visual semiotic sign represented by her hair” (37). Other critics, on the contrary, insist that Laurencia was not raped and managed to fend off the Commander and his acolytes. It could very well be that none of these critics have stopped to define rape, or that some limit it to the loss of virginity. The truth of the matter is that Laurencia was sexually assaulted by the Commander who is, as Elman asserts, a rapist (449). “The Comendador’s abduction of Laurencia, in itself, constitutes rape when considered from its historical perspective” (452). Elman also asserts that Laurencia’s leadership in demanding revenge against the Commander places her in the “the mirror image of her own violation” (Ibid.). This is internal hatred, within one people, Spaniards hating each other, intimacy multiplied, a Commander and his people, assault, humiliation, tyranicide, a village lying to the monarchs who stood in for God, until God believed and looked away. Who killed the Commander? Fuente Ovejuna did it. Gerstinger explains that purity of race was a first requirement for becoming a member of the nobility (5), undoubtedly the Commander fulfilled those requirements. Therefore, one might conclude that the hatred was between the wealthy and the poverty-stricken villanos with whom the Commander could do as he wished. However, Gerstinger points out that the aristocrat’s wealth was far from being impressive. “Actually, the noble cavalier was often poorer

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than his own underlings” (8). Nonetheless, honor continued to belong to the aristocrat, at least until poor Jacinta questioned it. Before being brutally gang raped, Aronson remarks that Jacinta tells the Commander that honor—her father’s and hers by association—is independent of socioeconomic class and, therefore, independent of the social body (39): “porque tengo un padre honrado, que si en alto nacimiento no te iguala, en las costumbres te vence” (Because I have an honorable father who is perhaps not your equal in birth, but who conquers you by his person) (1260–1262). God created Adam and Eve, God hated Adam and Eve who had two sons, Cain and Abel, and God loved Abel, hated Cain, and Cain hated Abel. Generations later, God loved Jacob and hated his twin, Esau. One day, Amnon fell in love with his sister Tamar, raped her, and then hated her, the victimizer hating the victim he thought he loved. Even if love is not the opposite of hate, it can turn to hate, as in Lope’s tragedy Castigo sin venganza (Punishment without Revenge) where, according to T. E. May, the Duke worships a God made in his own image, “vengeful, cruel, and tyrannical” (168). Upon discovering that his bastard son has seduced his wife that he did not love all that much, the Duke decides that he is being divinely punished, argues that God is going too far in his case by using Old Testament examples, and soon becomes God, “an offended calculating tyrant” who is going to “strike his wife and son outrageously from the dark” (Ibid., 172). More intimate haters, the vicious Duke feeling betrayed by his son whom he loved the most. “porque es Federico, Aurora,/lo que más mi alma adora,/y fue casarme traición” (v. 665668), the Duke confesses to Aurora that he married only because he was feeling the pressure to produce a legitimate heir, but that he loves his son Federico above anyone else. This adoration will turn to hate and the desire to kill when the Duke discovers the betrayal. “pues tantas muertes te diera/cuantas veces te engendrara/¡Qué deslealtad! ¡Qué violencia!” (I would give you death for every time I engendered you. What disloyalty! What violence!) (v. 2530–2533). Intimate haters indeed, a quasi-incestuous triangle, a father, a son, a stepmother. The Duke likens himself to a David who would never have enjoyed Bathsheba or killed Uriah (v. 2520–2521), and Federico to Absalom (v. 2509–2512). According to Everett Hesse, Lope de Vega succumbed all his life to the spell of love, and was concerned with human problems that, when left unresolved, terminated in violence and death (435). But was there in fact the possibility of solving a problem or are Lope’s characters too deep inside the vortex when the action begins? In El castigo sin venganza, the Duke, who is called vicious time and again and has a bastard son whom he adores, is being pressured to produce an heir. Against his will, he marries Casandra. Federico, in turn, is just as concerned with this union that puts his inheritance in peril.

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Casandra’s child will replace him. Nothing has happened yet, but a perversion of love is already present. The Duke is called vicious time and again, as if the reader/spectator needed reminding, and he is not in love with Casandra who soon becomes a woman scorned. The minute Casandra and Federico set eyes on each other, they fall in love. Perhaps this has everything to do with Casandra feeling resentful and Federico being worried about his future. Throw in the servants who suggests to both Federico and Casandra that they would be well matched, and there is no going back. Antonio Carraño sees many biblical parallels in El castigo such as incest and betrayal. All the way back to Genesis, God in the grips of narcissistic passion, God disappointed, regretting his creation, God hating his creation, enough to kill. The title of this chapter—Intimate Haters—refers to a chapter in Roberto González Echevarría’s book Celestina’s Brood dedicated to Lope’s El castigo sin venganza where Echevarría refers to intimate enemies and difficult literatures. By brood, Echevarría points to a continuity of the baroque, of all the facets of the spirit of Celestina. I also see a continuity from Genesis, to Celestina, to Lope’s plays, and beyond. El castigo takes us back to Genesis and Lope’s biblical plays. According to Echevarría, the meaning of El castigo essentially concerns a breakdown in language brought about by contradictions that language cannot contain, contradictions that produce error and violence (68). Otis Green, in turn, sees the contradiction in terms of: no pardon, no heaven, no vengeance, no honor (I, 18–19). The Duke punishes his son as a father. Had he been punishing him as a husband, he would have lost his honor, and it would be revenge. For Hesse, who considers love to be the opposite of hate, the play concerns the failure of true love complicated by the presence of themes such as hate (430). The Duke ends up rejecting love and replacing it with hate. The biblical story that the play most alludes to if that of David and Absalom. As I mentioned before, the Duke likens himself to David and his son to Absalom, David’s son. There is a long line of fathers that goes all the way to God. Let us begin with Samuel1 who anointed Saul king (I Sam. 10) and later regretted it, a regret he had inherited from God. “What hast thou done?” Samuel asks Saul, much like God asked Adam and Eve and later Cain (I Sam. 13:11). For having done foolishly and not having kept the commandment of God, Saul must pay. “The Lord hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the Lord hath commanded him to be captain over his people” (I Sam. 13:14). That man was David. “And the Lord said unto Samuel, how long wilt thou mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel?” (I Sam. 16). Samuel fears that Saul, whom he once anointed king, will kill him. As to Saul, he accepted and loved David until the day he compared himself to David and wondered, “what can he have more but the

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kingdom?” (I Sam. 18:8). Soon, “the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David played with his hand, and there was a javelin in Saul’s hand” (I Sam. 18:10). Carreño affirms that these biblical parallels should not only be established as sources of El castigo, but rather as recurrent motifs or topoi (38). To Carreño’s examples of Amnon raping Tamar then being killed by Absalom who is in turn killed by Joab, I would like to add God preferring Abel rather than Cain, Jacob rather than Esau, Noah rather than mankind, Saul rather than Samuel, then David rather than Samuel, and one day condemning David. Once betrayed by his son, the Duke of Ferrara sees himself as God and as David, father and judge. “Esta fue la maldición/que a David le dió Natán;/la misma pena me dan, y es Federico Absalón” (This was Nathan’s curse upon David, that causes me the same sorrow, and Federico is Absalom) (2509–2511). Immediately, the Duke finds this punishment too hard to bear, too high a price to pay for his past sins. He is a David who never enjoyed Bathsheba and never killed Uriah (2520–2521). The Duke soon decides that “castigarle no es vengarme” (To punish him is not to take revenge) (2546). What led to the bottom of this vortex, so quickly, so innocently, to the point of no return, to the unsolvable moment, was the situational solitude experienced by both Federico and Casandra. “Tragedy is the result of overpowering dark forces in human nature, a kind of negative vision, as powerful as Celestina’s” (Echevarría 71). Much like Calixto and Melibea, Federico and Casandra had only the servants to confide in, and the servants had their own agendas. Lucrecia says to Casandra, “que más dichosa fueras/si te trocaras la suerte” (589–590), in other words that the son would be a better match than the father, and thus opens the flood gates because Casandra immediately takes than possibility into consideration. Batín also tells Federico that Casandra would have been more suited for him. “Bien puedes, con presupuesto/de que era mejor Casandra/para ti” (989–991). Simply by suggesting it, Lucrecia and Batín conjure it, Federico becomes not only Absalom, but also Ham who, “Saw the nakedness of his father” (Gen. 9: 23). Indeed, the Duke would much rather see himself in the mirror of David, rather than the humiliating reflecting of Noah. There is debate as to the meaning of “seeing the nakedness,” and Frederick Bassett believes that seeing points to an offense involving more than just seeing (233). “To see a man’s nakedness means to have sexual relations with his wife. The following parallelisms from Lev. xviii make this abundantly clear. The nakedness of your father is explained as the nakedness of your mother (v. 7). The nakedness of your father’s wife is described as the nakedness of your father (v. 8)” (Bassett 2005, 235).

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Intimate haters, beyond forgiveness, Bassett adds that a son who has sexual relations with his mother or stepmother commits a rebellious sin against his father, since the possession of a man’s wife is seen also as an effort to supplant the man himself (236). But the Duke is not David who, despite the betrayal, warns Abishai and Ittai, “Beware that none touch the young man Absalom” (2 Sam. 18:12). It is Joab who takes three darts and thrusts them through the heart of Absalom whose head is caught between the branches of an oak tree (2 Sam. 18:14). “¡Matalde, matalde!” (Kill him, kill him!) (2996) the Duke orders the Marquis who immediately proceeds to smote Federico before his father’s eyes. Before dying, Fererico asks, “¡Oh, padre! ¿Por qué me matan?” (Oh, father! Why are they killing me?) (2998). The Duke replies that in God’s tribunal they will tell him why (2999). Nor is Federico Absalom even if Absalom lies publicly with his father’s concubines in his effort to supplant him and take over the kingdom. We read “and Absalom went in unto his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel” (2 Sam. 16:22). When he is killed before his father’s eyes, Federico simply asks why. Although ambitious, Federico is also a coward who submits blindly to his father’s will. Carreño writes that by trying to keep his affair with Casandra secret and pretending to want to marry Aurora, Federico simply wishes to maintain the status quo indefinitely (39). Intimate, haters, can the two words be juxtaposed? The adjective suggests proximity, familiarity, warmth, privacy, and confidentiality. Hate in turn, so hard to define with a word other than itself, implies abhorrence, revulsion, aversion, feelings starved for everything that intimacy is not. For haters to be intimate they must live under the same roof, share meals, be twins, brothers, lovers, parents, friends or equals, then strive for distance, anonymity, and the annihilation of the other. Proximity, just to get close enough to kill. Cain the farmer hated Abel the shepherd. They shared the same banished parents, Adam and Eve, everyone closely watched from above by the angry and resentful eye of their creator. It didn’t stop with the first family, the creatures that God created in his own image continued to be a disappointment generation after generation, so much so that God became a “theatrical weather demon” and “an impulsive interventionist” (Sloterdijk 76–77) who brought about a flood to do away with his mistakes. “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them” (Gen. 6:7). Perhaps man was wicked, but what of the poor animals? Were they too natural? Useless punishment or revenge, in any case, since the creatures that remained was no better. Noah’s family, spared from the flood, was also a tangle of intimate haters that God the father hated, sometimes without reason. Referring to the story of Esau and Jacob, Sloterdijk remarks that, God loved one and hated the other one, “It is expected that the person

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who is discriminated against needs to master his affects of humiliation” (79). The answer is yes, the two words can and should be juxtaposed, and for there to be hate, there must be intimacy. NOTE 1. Samuel may have been Saul’s father.

Chapter 3

Odium Dei Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez

The Old Testament is an ellipsis, hence the need to recover the elided material, retrieve the finite verbs, fill in the medial gaps, and hear the voice of the agonists. The first Abel never utters a word; he merely brings the firstling of his flock to God, a burnt offering. Wanting to solve the mystery, Lord Byron gives Abel many lines; Abel, instead of the Lord, is the one who asks Cain why he is angry (161). As to the Cain of Genesis, he has very few lines in this tragedy of tragedies, amongst them: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and “My punishment is greater than I can bear.” Unamuno’s Cain, Joaquín Monegro, describes this insufferable punishment in vivid detail: from hubris to victimization, a confession, fourteen fragments written in the first person, as well as introspective mono-dialogues (a term invented by Unamuno), and stream of consciousness. “Fue una tempestad de malos deseos, de cóleras, de apetitos sucios, de rabia” (A tempest of lowly desires, ire, filthy cravings, rage) (97). This reading of Abel Sánchez will attempt to recover the elided material to better comprehend the first murder, hatred and the intimacy it requires, mirror opposites, and the complexities of envy, unrequited hate and Odium Dei: the hatred of God. Carlos Longhurst writes that Unamuno penned Abel Sánchez during one of the worst times of his life (11). After having served as rector of the University of Salamanca for fourteen years, Unamuno was suddenly dismissed in 1914 without explanation, a humiliation that he never forgot or pardoned. Furthermore, Europe was at war and Spain was leaning toward a Germanophile ideology. The experience filled Unamuno with a sense of tragedy, of horror, and of disgust. According to Carlos Clavería, there is no doubt that Unamuno cast into Abel Sánchez his denunciation of Spanish life. “Pero quién sabe si Unamuno no asoció al tema de Caín y a su obsesión por la envidia hispánica algo más íntimo y secreto que había experimentado y 53

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sufrido en su propia vida” (But who knows if Unamuno did not associate the theme of Cain and his obsession with Hispanic envy with something more intimate and secret that he had experienced and suffered in his own life) (104). Michael MCGaha’s study of Unamuno is titled “Abel Sánchez y la envidia de Unamuno.” He did not call it Joaquín Monegro’s envy, it is Unamuno’s envy. In the prologue to the second edition of Abel Sánchez, Unamuno recalled having been asked by a doctoral candidate if he had drawn his character Joaquín from Lord Byron’s Cain, and having replied that his sense of suffering came from his own life not from books. “Pero ¡qué trágica mi experiencia de la vida Española!” (How tragic is my experience of Spanish life!) (80), Unamuno exclaims. Perhaps the hands that wrote the story of the first murder were also experiencing bitter hours, but, as Abel Sánchez remarks, the Bible does not explain why (120). The Old Testament muffles the brothers’ voices; it is the Lord who plays with thunderbolts and does most of the yelling and chastising. Loudly, the Lord asks questions to which he knows the answers. Why did Cain’s countenance fall? The Lord knew that it was because Cain felt rejected. What has Cain done? The Lord knows that he killed his brother. Very few words are used to describe the first murder. Abel was dead before he had a chance to speak, to gloat, or to return the hatred. Genesis wants the faithful to learn by rote that Abel is good and Cain evil. Abel loves, Cain hates, and there is no allusion to the Lord having perhaps fomented this hatred. Questioning or doubting the Lord is sacrilege. Always asking innocent, charged questions, the God of the Old Testament remains just, above suspicion, fomenting odium theologicum (theological hatred) that José Luis Abellán describes as acrid and virulent religious disputes (26). If the first murder has been visited and revisited in literature, it is in search of answers, of missing pieces. Lord Byron calls his Cain a mystery. This is a problematic story that pretends to be categorical, but it never succeeds in this pretension, so the tables must be turned, Cain asks to be better understood, defended, rehabilitated if need be. Unsure whether he is Cain by choice or condemned to be Cain as a result of God’s hatred, Unamuno’s Joaquín will fill in for Cain, speak and act for Cain, and walk in the uncharted territory of his tormented soul. “Joaquín no va por una senda trazada de antemano [. . .] La senda que no obliga ni a pensar, porque no hace falta más que seguirla, la dejará para Abel” (Joaquín does not follow a well-worn path. To Abel he leaves the path that does not provoke thought because all it requires is to be followed) (261), Rosendo Díaz-Peterson writes in Estudios sobre Unamuno. When Joaquín Monegro asks Abel Sánchez what he has drawn from the Bible regarding the murder of Abel, Abel’s reply is, “Poca cosa” (Very little) (120). Abel then proceeds to read the passage from the Bible in search of

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inspiration for his painting, only to be interrupted by Joaquín who wants to know why Jehovah preferred Abel’s offering to Cain’s. “No lo explica aquí,” (It does not explain it here) Abel replies (120). So Joaquín proceeds to tell Abel a piece of playground lore. When children who learn their catechism by rote are abruptly asked the question Who killed Cain?, the immediate response is “His brother Abel” (121). Díaz-Peterson writes that for Unamuno catechism was an expression of laziness and the reflection of a nation that lacked vision and did not think (50). In a sense, catechism was the path that Joaquín chose not to follow; it is the path of Abel who is shocked and dismayed when Joaquín suggests that if Cain had not killed Abel, Abel would have killed Cain. In her study of archetypal motifs of the other, Gayana Jurkevic writes that “the Old Testament archetype of unlike brothers is only the tip of the mythological iceberg upon which the novel [Abel Sánchez] is constructed. In order to appreciate the palimpsest of mythological tradition upon which this novel rests, it is necessary to go beyond the familiar Cain and Abel story which appears as its first, and most recognizable layer” (346–347). In his play “El otro” (The Other) Unamuno explores the mystery of the executioner and the victim via Cosmas and Damien, only to return to the first layer, Cain and Abel. If Cosmas had not killed Damien, Damien would have killed Cosmas. Only this time, the spectator cannot distinguish Cosmas from Damien. “The conclusion Unamuno appears to draw from his fictional examination of doubling, is that the psyche functions completely only in the presence of a complement upon which it depends to provide its sought-for wholeness” (Jurkevic 346). In this case, there is no wholeness, only loss of self. In Act IV, Scene IV, el Otro exclaims, ¡Pobre Caín! ¡Pobre Caín! Pero también me digo que si Caín no hubiera dado muerte a Abel, Abel habría matado a Caín ¡Era fatal! Ya de chicos en la escuela, era broma preguntarle a otro de sopetón: «¿Quién mató a Caín?». Y el preguntado solía caer y replicaba: «Su hermano Abel». Y así fue. Y, en todo caso, ¿se es Caín por haber matado al hermano, o se le mata por ser Caín? (Poor Cain! Poor Cain! But I also tell myself that if Cain had not killed Abel, Abel would have killed Cain. . . . It was fatality! The joke was to ask children at school suddenly, Who killed Cain? And the answer was always, His brother Abel. And that is the way it was. And, in any case, is one Cain because one kills one’s brother or is the brother killed because one is Cain?)

In, The Double; A Psychoanalytic Study, Otto Rank writes that the double, or imagined pursuer, is habitually portrayed as the protagonist’s brother who personifies that part of the ego which becomes detached, and assumes an

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independence threatening to the protagonist (20). Abel, Cain’s double, was a shepherd, Cain, Abel’s double, was a farmer. In the prologue to the 1902 edition of En torno al casticismo, Unamuno remarks that the first murder was a fratricide, the sedentary farmer killed the errant shepherd, and that the farmer who killed his brother the shepherd was also he who built the first city and consequently established the duality/opposition of the city versus the country: Cain (the tiller of the soil) representing the city, the country’s double, and Abel (the shepherd) belonging to the country, the city’s double (274). “El odio mismo del castellano al morisco,” Unamuno adds, “era el odio de los hijos de Abel a los de Cain, porque también los abelianos odian y envidian” (The Castilian hatred of the Moor is the same hatred as those of the children of Abel toward those of Cain, because Abelites hate and envy as well) (276).The connection between the Abelites and the Castilians stems from the fact that the Castilians identified with Abel the shepherd instead of with Cain, the farmer. Again, Catholic Spain saw itself as a country of shepherds and refused to acknowledge that the Moors themselves were also shepherds. In Paisajes, Unamuno gives possible explanations for this duality and for the Lord’s preference for shepherds. While the shepherd relies solely on the Lord for good fortune, the farmer believes in the sun and the rain. “Tal vez por esto fue más grata a Dios la ofrenda del que solo esperó en su gracia” (Perhaps that is why God preferred the offering of he who only counted on his grace) (28). Another duality: Miguel de Unamuno’s character Abel Sánchez was an artist, Joaquín Monegro was a man of science, a medical doctor. However, Joaquín is not science versus Abel art, quite the contrary. Díaz-Peterson sees Joaquín representing the vicissitudes of life, while Abel enjoys the triumphs of logic. “Unamuno se hace profeta del futuro insistiendo que si no hay vida nada va a quedar de todo ello. [. . .] Este es su gran desafío al tomismo, que considera falto de vida, y al Abel escolástico, que lo representa” (Unamuno becomes the prophet of the future by insisting that if there is no life, there is nothing. He is challenging Thomism that he considers as devoid of life as the scholastic Abel who represents it) (263). José Luis Abellán, on the other hand, sees the series Death-Luzbel-Hell-Hatred represented by Joaquín, and Life-God-Heaven-Love by Abel and affirms that Abel incarnates Life and Joaquín knowledge (31). While Joaquín’s life seems to go from the Tree of Knowledge to the Tree of Life, Abel appears to be going in the opposite direction. This is obvious when Joaquín exclaims that Cain was right to blame his parents for having taken the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge instead of the Tree of Life (123), and also when he denounces Abel’s art for being false, devoid of emotion, cold, and calculating (135). Yet another duality: Cain and Abel were brothers, Abel and Joaquín were lifelong friends who could not remember a time when they did not know

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each other. “Aprendió cada uno de ellos a conocerse conociendo al otro” (They learned to know themselves by knowing the other) (85). Brothers at war, mirror opposite twins in a struggle for life that, according to Unamuno, establish a connexion between those who unite to fight the other, as well as those who are at war with each other (Del sentimineto trágico 99). In the play “El otro” where Unamuno rewrites the story of Cosmas and Damien, the Other, el Otro, is both internal and external. In Act II, Scene II, the protagonist Laura explains that she met twin brothers, Cosmas and Damián (Spanish spelling)—whom she could not tell apart—who fell madly in love with her and as a result started hating each other. Since she could not tell them apart, she did not prefer one or the other, and she ended up marrying either one or the other. In many ways, Laura is more just and more innocent than God who ostensibly preferred one brother over the other. Laura’s inability to tell these brothers apart does not, however, keep one brother from killing the other and subsequently losing his name or self. Either Cosmas or Damián becomes the Other. In Act II Scene IV, he who has become the Other speaks, ¿Yo? ¿Asesino yo? Pero, ¿quién soy yo? ¿Quién es el asesino? ¿Quién el asesinado? ¿Quién el verdugo? ¿Quién la víctima? ¿Quién Caín? ¿Quién Abel? ¿Quién soy yo, Cosme o Damián? Sí, estalló el misterio, se ha puesto a razón la locura, se ha dado a luz la sombra. Los dos mellizos, los que como Esaú y Jacob se peleaban ya desde el vientre de su madre, con odio fraternal, con odio que era amor demoníaco, los dos hermanos se encontraron. . . . Era al caer de la tarde, recién muerto el sol, cuando se funden las sombras y el verde del campo se hace negro . . . ¡Odia a tu hermano como te odias a ti mismo! Y llenos de odio a sí mismos, dispuestos a suicidarse mutuamente, por una mujer . . . , por otra mujer . . . , pelearon. (Me? An assassin? But who am I? Who is the assassin? Who is the assassinated? Who is the executioner? Who is the victim? Who is Cain? Who is Abel? Who am I, Cosmas or Damián? Yes, the mystery has burst wide open, madness has become reason, darkness has become light. The twins who, like Esau and Jacob, were already fighting in their mother’s womb, with fraternal hatred, with hatred that was satanic love, the two brothers found each other. Night was falling, the shadows were melting, and the green of the countryside was becoming black. Hate thy brother as thyself! And filled with hatred for each other, ready to commit a mutual suicide, for a woman . . . they fought.)

Coincidentally, when Joaquín asks Abel if Helena is a source of inspiration for his painting of Cain and Abel, Abel argues that there is no woman in this tragedy. Joaquín, in turn, responds that there is a woman in every tragedy. Eve perhaps, Abel suggests. “La que les dio la misma leche: el

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bebedizo” (She who gave them the same milk: the potion) (122), Joaquín replies. Michael MCGaha explains that according to Melanie Klein envy (or hatred) is a destructive impulse that goes back to the relationship of an infant with his mother (94). MCGaha does admit that it is obvious that Unamuno considers the idea of an evil potion to be a mere superstition, Joaquín does, however, repeat the word several times because there is an element of truth in all superstitions. MCGaha then suggests that Unamuno saw a connection between the potion and envy. Furthermore, when Joaqu`ín realizes that the potion is the original sin, he links the idea of the potion with evil, innate, that leaves no room for free will (96–98). As a result, “el individuo llega a considerar a Dios como un ser injusto y cruel, que nos crea para atormentarnos, y después de haberse entretenido con nuestras desdichas, nos mata. Una actitud como esta fácilmente le llevaría a uno a odiar y a envidiar a Dios” (The individual ends up considering God as an unjust and cruel being who creates us in order to torment us, and who, after having taken pleasure in our suffering, kills us. Such an attitude would make one hate and envy God) (Ibid.). God’s cruelty and readiness to torment is obvious when he rejects Cain’s offering and accepts Abel’s. “Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen?” the Lord asked Cain, as if he didn’t know (4 Gen:5). Joaquín Monegro fell in love with his cousin Helena and was not loved in return. After admitting to Abel that he doesn’t know whether he hates Helena more than he loves her for all the suffering she is making him endure, he suggests that Abel and Helena meet. Abel, in turn, offers to paint Helena’s portrait. As fate would have it, the goddess Helena prefers Abel’s offering to Joaquín’s. After having reminded Joaquín that they are practically brothers, Abel protests innocently, “¿Y qué iba a hacer, Joaquín, qué querías que hiciese?” (95). (And what was I to do, Joaquín, what did you want me to do?) Would the first Abel have protested the same way had he not been slaughtered? Joaquín’s reaction is, “¡Pobre víctima!” (96). (You poor victim!) Like Cain whose offering was rejected, Joaquín began to hate Abel with all his being. “¿Odio? Aún no quería darle su nombre, ni quería reconocer que nací, predestinado, con su masa y con su semilla. Aquella noche nací al inferno de mi vida” (Hatred? I still did not wish to give it a name or recognize that I was predestined to carry its mass and its seed. That night I was born into the inferno of my life) (97). It was not with Abel Sánchez that Unamuno addressed the theme of hatred stemming from envy and of intimate hatred for the first time. In the prologue of the 1902 edition of En torno al casticismo, Unamuno noted that the first murder was committed because of envy and not as a result of the struggle for survival (274). A 1904 essay titled “Sobre la soberbia,” (On

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Arrogance) announces Joaquín’s torment as well as the theme of Odium Dei. Y ese especial y característico odium theologicum es hijo de otra característica y muy especial superbia theologica, o, si se quiere mejor, de la soberbia espiritual. Malo es que un hombre se ande preocupando de si es o no es soberbio y de ahogar la soberbia en sí, y dé luego en cavilar y revolver en su cabeza si no es por soberbia por lo que trata de combatirla, y si la humildad a que aspira no es la más fina soberbia, y otras sutilezas por el estilo. (And that special and characteristic odium theologicum is the result of the special and characteristic soberbia theologica, or, better yet, spiritual arrogance. It is bad enough that a man worries about being arrogant and stifles the arrogance in himself and then wonders if he is fighting against his arrogance out of arrogance and if the humility that he yearns for is not the finest of arrogance and other similar subtleties.) (714–715)

In 1909, Unamuno penned an essay titled “La envidia hispánica” where he addressed the theme of Cain and of envy being the blood of Cain. With Abel Sánchez, the blood of Cain would eventually flow not only in Joaquín’s veins but also in the collective soul of Spain. In the prologue to the second edition of Abel Sánchez, Unamuno refers to the collective envy, “la lepra nacional [. . .] la vieja envidia tradicional—y tradicionalista—española, la castiza, la que agrió las gracias de Quevedo” (The national leprosy, the old traditional and traditionalistic envy—Spanish, pure, the one that soured the graces of Quevedo) (81). Joaquin’s envy, “una envidia trágica, una envidia que se defiende, una envidia que podría llamarse angélica” (a tragic envy, an envy that defends itself, an envy that could be called angelical) (Ibid.). Fearing for his secret, for his hatred, for his envy, Joaquín pales when Abel tells him in the beginning of Chapter XI that he is preparing to paint the first murder, the slaughter of Abel by Cain. Immediately, Joaquín thinks it is all about Cain, about him, only to hear that it is about Abel. “Como me llamo Abel” (Since my name is Abel) (119), Abel says. Again, Cain’s soul appears to be plain and simple, easy to paint: envy. When asked about Abel, Abel hesitates, unable to describe Abel’s soul. “No acierto a dar con la expression, con el alma de Abel. Porque quiero pintarle antes de morir, derribado en tierra y herido de muerte por su hermano” (I cannot find the word to describe Abel’s soul. Because I wish to paint him before he dies, lying on the ground and fatally wounded by his brother) (120). When asked why the Lord preferred Abel’s offering to Cain’s, Abel replied that the Bible did not explain why. “¿Y no te lo has preguntado tú antes de

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ponerte a pintar tu cuadro?” (And haven’t you asked yourself that question before starting to paint?) (120), Joaquín then asks. Abel admits that he has not yet addressed that question but suggests that perhaps God already knew that Cain the envious one would slay his brother. With a slightly mocking tone, Joaquín suggests that perhaps Cain had been given a potion. He then urges Abel to keep on reading only to interrupt him again and again. On one occasion, Joaquín shocks Abel by suggesting that perhaps Abel would have killed Cain had Cain not killed Abel. He adds that the blessed, God’s favorite, was Abel and the disgraced was Cain. Abel Sánchez protests, “And how was that Abel’s fault?” Either defending himself or defending Cain, Joaquín replies, “los abelitas han inventado el infierno para los cainitas porque si no su Gloria les resultaría insípida. Su goce está en ver, libre de padeciminetos, padecer a los otros” (If the Abelites had not invented hell for the Cainites their glory would be insipid. Their pleasure lies in watching others suffer while they are free from suffering) (122). Chapters XI–XIV of Abel Sánchez are reminiscent of Solana’s La Tertulia del Café Pombo that Thomas Franz evokes, “depicting a group of Spanish and Spanish-American writers, such as José Bergam and Pedro Emilio Coll, in the company of Solana and their tertulia leader, Ramón Gómez de la Serna. The latter figure, significantly, is standing in the middle of the group, behind a table filled with goblets and wine bottles, looking as if he were pausing in a discourse. Behind him is a mirror reflecting a seated couple watching the proceedings from the exact vantage point of the presumed picture gazer” (2004, 68). In the space of those four chapters, Abel decides to paint the scene of the first murder, refers to the written word in his efforts to better comprehend the depths of this scene, Lord Byron’s Cain and the Bible; he also discusses his project with Joaquín who suggests that if Cain had not killed Abel, perhaps Abel would have killed Cain, and who then reads Lord Byron’s Cain several times and reflects upon it in his Confesiones (a book within a book). Joaquín also comments on the success of Abel’s finished painting and plans a banquet to commemorate it. After having tried to fill in the silences of the Bible, Joaquín turns to Lord Byron’s Cain in Chapter XI. Abel has consulted Lord Byron in his effort to better understand the first murder. “La lectura del Caín de Lord Byron me entró hasta lo más íntimo. ¡Con qué razón culpaba Caín a sus padres de que hubieran cogido de los frutos del árbol de la ciencia en vez de coger de los del árbol de la vida! A mí, por lo menos, la ciencia no ha hecho más que exacerbarme la herida” (The reading of Lord Byron’s Cain touched me deeply. How right was Cain when he blamed his parents for choosing the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge instead of the tree of life! For me, at least, science has only exacerbated my wound) (123).

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Joaquín had chosen science; Cain believed the fruit from the Tree of Life would have been far preferable to that of Science. Joaquín, however, blames no one for his dejection, while Byron’s Cain accuses his parents. According to Truman Steffan, Byron wanted us to take Cain seriously and to respect him in his ironic qualities that propelled him toward the catastrophe (35). Byron’s Cain does not appear to be consumed by hate as Joaquín is every moment of his waking life. Furthermore, Byron’s Cain is capable of love, while Joaquín is not. Steffan notes that Byron’s Cain pitied Lucifer because of his inability to love. Cain, on the contrary, was born with love for Adah, his sister and his wife. He is also devoted to his children, respects his parents all the while disliking them, and reluctantly agrees to accompany Abel to render tribute to he whom he considers to be the Great Destroyer. When Lucifer urges Cain to follow him, Cain replies, “But I must retire/To till the earth, for I had promised—” (177). The promise is to Abel, to cull some fruit and offer it on an altar. Lucifer reacts, “Saidst thou not/Thou ne’er hadst bent to him who made thee?” Cain replies, “Yes,/But Abel’s earnest prayer was wrought upon me” (Ibid.). Those are not the words of a monster, nor does Cain act as monster when he is standing before the altar with his brother Abel who urges him to precede him since he is the firstborn. Cain prefers to follow, Abel begins to pray. Cain has offered the fruit of his toil; Abel’s burnt offerings are the firstlings of his flock. Cain prays, and as a result a fire on Abel’s altar kindles into a bright flame and ascends to heaven, while a whirlwind scatters Cain’s fruit on the earth. Kneeling, Abel urges Cain to pray because Jehovah is wroth with him (242). It is at this point that the eternal question is asked: why? Abel does not have much of an answer, he simply states the obvious, “Thy fruits are scattered on the earth.” He urges Cain to make another offering. “I will build no more altars,/nor suffer any” (243), Cain replies. It was not hate that propelled Lord Byron’s Cain, rather knowledge and the realization that Jehovah was an arbitrary judge and a vengeful deity who required blood. Perhaps the answer to the question why the Lord preferred Abel’s offering is that there is no bloodshed in an offering of fruit—culling fruit does not even kill the tree—whereas Abel’s offering was bloody and formidable. For Steffan, it was Cain’s loathing of this gore that made him demolish Abel’s altar and then strike at him. “Cain’s fury was discharged, not against his brother, but against a life plagued with pain and human impotence, and against the Author of Life, who was also the author of wrong and of death” (45). Byron’s Cain was not driven by hate and envy, as was Joaquín Monegro who resembles Lucifer and the Author of Life more than he does Byron’s Cain. “El relato de la muerte de Abel, tal y como aquel terrible poeta nos lo expone, me cegó. Al leerlo sentí que se me iban las cosas y hasta creo

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que sufrí un mareo. Y desde aquel día, gracias al impío Bryon, empecé a creer” (The story of Abel’s death, as told by that terrible poet, blinded me. While reading I felt I was losing myself and suffered vertigo. And from that day on, thanks to the impious Byron, I began to believe) (126). Until this moment, Joaquín was an atheist, the reading Lord Byron’s Cain fomented faith. What he does not say is what he began to believe in and how this belief was tied to the reading. It could very well be a belief in a creator that Byron’s Cain describes as he who takes pleasure in, “The fumes of scorching flesh and smoking blood,/To the pain of the bleating mothers which/Still yearn for their dead offspring? Or the pangs/Of the sad ignorant victims underneath/Thy pious knife” (243–244). Joaquín also writes that he began to believe in hell and of death as a being, “es el Demonio, es el Odio hecho persona, es el Dios del alma. Todo lo que mi ciencia no me enseño me enseñaba el terrible poema de aquel gran odiador que fue Lord Byron” (It is the Demon, Hatred made flesh, the God of the soul. What my science did not teach me I learned from the terrible poem of that great hater Lord Byron) (124). Nicholas Round postulates that if we take Unamuno’s Del sentimiento trágico de la vida as a formulation of a positive religious doctrine—the quest for a faith in human immortality—and Abel Sánchez as its application to a concrete human case, disturbing conclusions will follow because the doctrine is not very relevant to the situation and not of much use (25). However, such a conclusion can be misleading. Round uses the term ontological security and explains that if the aim of human life is to be itself, the problem in the novel stems from the fact that this impulse can conflict with that of other selves. Joaquín’s self cannot coexist with Abel’s self: a definition of hatred. Joaquín’s ontological security is undermined by his hatred for Abel. Joaquín clearly sees the impossibility of living with this hatred, but also without it. He wonders if his hatred will die with him or if it will outlive him, “pensé si el odio sobrevive a los odiadores, si es algo substancial y que se transmite; si es el alma, la esencia misma del alma” (I thought about hatred outliving the haters, if it is something substantial that can be transmitted; if it is the souls the essence itself of the soul) (124). For Franz, in his effort to draw parallels between Abel Sánchez and Paradise Lost, segments such as the one cited above imply that hatred was even older than Joaquín or Abel and must have been present with mankind’s first parents of before the world took shape (1990, 13). Although consumed by hatred, Joaquín needs to believe in a God who loves and forgives. After having read the impious Byron he is convinced that he believes and, as a result, a daughter is born, a recompense for the offering. The state of grace, however, is short-lived. Almost immediately, Joaquín’s reaction is, “Será mi vengadora” (She will be my avenger) then later another

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attempt at grace, “Será mi purificadora” (She will be my redemption) (127). While his daughter sleeps, Joaquín swears to free himself of his infernal chains, he would be rid of his hatred for Abel, he would put Abel on a pedestal. In his need to believe, in his search for religion as cure, Joaquín decides to turn Abel into God. “Tenía que ser yo el mayor heraldo de la Gloria de Abel” (I needed to be the greatest herald of Abel’s work) (127). So Joaquín took to contemplating the work of art being shown to the public. He would gaze at the Cain in the painting as in a mirror then turn to the people around him and wonder if their eyes would turn to him after having contemplated the other. To his horror, Joaquín soon realized that Abel’s Cain did not resemble him in the least and that neither Abel nor Helena gave any thought to him. “Y esta idea de que ni siquiera pensasen en mí, de que no me odiaran, torturábame aún más que lo otro. Ser odiado por él con un odio come el que yo le tenía era algo, y podia haber sido mi salvación” (And this thought that they didn’t even think about me, that they did not hate me, tortured me even more than the other possibility. To be hated by him with the hatred I felt for him was something, and it could have been my salvation) (128). Bitter awareness of unrequited hate engendered the idea of a banquet in honor of Abel’s success. Franz, in his study of the intertextuality of Abel Sánchez, writes that the literaturized banquet/visual arts connection is also clearly evidenced in Bocaccio’s famous banquet scenes in the “Story of Nastagio degli Onesti” portion of the Decameron, later made into a series of four frescos by Botticelli. But doubtless the genre receives its most prolific statement in the thousands of painted versions of that early banquet scene known as the Last Supper rendered both before and after the immortal work of Da Vinci, a scene since carried over into cinema by works such as Pier Paolo Paolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) and Gabriel Ariel’s Babette’s Feast (1985), based on a 1959 story by Isak Dinesen. (2004, 68)

When the day of the banquet arrives, Joaquín tells his wife that he is going to battle. He then asks to see his sleeping daughter. “¡Pobrecilla! ¡No sabe lo que es el demonio! Pero yo te juro, Antonia, que sabré arrancármelo” (Poor little girl! She knows not of the demon! But I swear to you, Antonia, I will tear him out of myself) (131).These are Joaquín’s last hours believing in free will. At the banquet, Joaquín sits to the right of Abel, perhaps an allusion to Jesus being on the right side of God, God being a shepherd, like Abel, and Joaquín consequently one of his sheep. When the desserts are brought in, Joaquín stands, and prepares to speak. After having moved the audience to tears, Joaquín points to Abel’s painting, to the image of Cain, “¡Pobre Caín!

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Nuestro Abel Sánchez admira a Caín como Milton admiraba a Satán, está enamorado de su Caín como Milton lo estuvo de su Satán” (Poor Cain! Our Abel Sánchez admires Cain, as Milton admired Satan, he is in love with his Cain just as Milton was in love with his Satan) (132). With those words, and possessed as he is by envy, Joaquín seeks what Franz would call a direct or sublimated revenge (13). In seeking parallels between Paradise Lost and Abel Sánchez, Franz examines the reiterative development of envy in the two works. First there is Satan who, like Joaquín, is determined to make his rival fall. Then there is the rejection of impatience. While Satan waits for revenge in Paradise Lost, Joaquín abstains from killing Abel on his sickbed and Abelín in the delivery room, “temptations that he must reject in order to carry vengeance to a higher, eternalizing level” (Franz 14). The eulogy at the banquet is precisely this higher plane of revenge. Furthermore, Franz explains that if Milton did communicate an admiration for Satan, as Joaquín suggests that Abel is in love with Cain, it was not because of the guile in the garden, but rather because of his rebellion and defeat. After his speech, Joaquín realizes that he has not succeeded in killing his demon. The next day, he even regrets not having spoken the truth, “no haber acabado con él artísticamente, denunciado los engaños y falsos efectismos de su arte, sus imitaciones, su técnica fría y calculada, su falta de emoción” ( not having finished him off artistically, denounced his lies and the false affectations of his art, his imitations, his cold and calculated technique, his lack of emotion) (135). Such a denouncement would have amounted to killing Abel, and perhaps, Joaquín meditated, Cain began to love Abel after having killed him. Abel, in turn, remains as innocent as ever. Helena does ask him not to trust Joaquín. She warns him that Joaquín envies him. Abel refuses to listen, Helena insists, “es envidia . . . , envidia” (it’s envy . . . , envy) (134). Joaquín’s wife, Antonia, urges him to turn to religion, and after some hesitation Joaquín tries to convince himself that perhaps the church can cure him even if he does not believe. In the confessional, he tells the priest that he hates Abel with all his soul. “Pero eso, hijo mío,” the priest says, “eso no es odio; eso es más bien envidia” (But that, my son, is not hate, it is envy) (136). Joaquín replies, “Todo odio es envidia, padre; todo odio es envidia” (All hate is envy, father; all hate is envy) (Ibid.). “Todo odio es envidia,” Julián María writes, quoting Unamuno, pero entonces, el odio a sí mismo, ¿qué sentido tiene? No sería difícil descubrir en él una raíz de soberbia, de odio a la limitación, a la finitud, a la necesidad no aceptada de morir; en el fondo, se podría hablar de una satánica envidia de Dios, un odium Dei, la inversión rigurosa de la caridad. Y de esta inversión de la caridad en su sentido primario de amor Dei fluye inevitablemente la destrucción

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de la caridad como amor al prójimo. Y a veces el origen concreto del odio a Dios y de la más honda desesperación es el odio a SU imagen, al hombre. Y entonces el círculo se Cierra. (All hatred is envy, Unamuno says; but then, what is the meaning of self-hatred? It would not be difficult to discover in it a source of arrogance, of hatred of limitations, of mortality, of the rejected finality of death; profoundly, one could speak of the Satanic envy of God, an Odium Dei, the rigorous inversion of charity. And form this inversion of charity in its primitive meaning of amor Dei, inevitable flows the destruction of charity as love of one’s neighbor. And at times the concrete origin of the hatred of God and of the deepest desperation is hatred of his image, of mankind. Then the circle closes.) (105–106)

When the priest urges Joaquín to try to control his hatred, Joaquín tells him that he does not believe in free will, nor does he believe in freedom. Furthermore, Joaquín admits to feeling a deep resentment toward God. “¿Qué hice yo para que Dios me hiciese así, rencoroso, envidioso, malo?” (What did I do to have God make me this way, resentful, envious, bad?) (136). He then adds that he does not trust God because he made him evil, just as he made Cain evil, and if there is freedom, it is the freedom to be evil. Odium dei is not odium theologicum. In “Sobre la soberbia,” Unamuno describes odium theologicum as the belief that the best way to get to heaven is to hit a heretic on the head with a huge figure of Christ or to wield the crucifix as an ax (718). Odium dei, on the other hand, is internal, God’s hatred, the hatred of God who created man in his own image, woman, cast the disgraced couple out of paradise, damning them to a life of eternal hatred. If he created them in his own image, did he hate himself? Perhaps the Lord who created Cain was directing the two questions, “Why art thou wroth? and “What hast thou done?” at himself, and not at Cain, a result of the damnation. On this reiterative journey to hatred, Joaquín’s tortured soul hopes that if he does not love it is by choice, only to discover that his self-hatred renders him incapable of love.

Part Two

DIARIES OF THE AMERICAS

Chapter 4

With Hate Leading the Way Pieces of Aguirre and Other Doomed Expeditions

In October 1561, the ruthless Basque nobleman Lope de Aguirre was tried postmortem and found guilty. His corpse was subjected to exemplary punishment, he was drawn and quartered, and his body parts were sent in the four cardinal directions. “I am the greatest traitor!” a red-eyed Klaus Kinski declares, portraying the conquistador in Werner Herzog’s film, Aguirre, Wrath of God. “If I want the birds to drop dead from the trees, they will! I am the wrath of God!” Dies irae, the original wrath, the very origin of hatred: Aguirre does not declare himself to be God, but his wrath, God’s wrath-innature, hatred more powerful than God himself. The film strays away from history: February 1, 1561, the few remaining members of the Ursúa expedition were on a raft on the Marañón River in the Peruvian Amazon. The only document that will survive is the diary of Gaspar de Carvajal, the monk who tells Inés de Atienza (Pedro de Ursúa’s mistress) that the church is always on the side of the strong. The diary—that never was because Carvajal was not part of the expedition—is interrupted because someone drank the ink in hopes of curing fever and suffering. It is a pity that there is not fact here, drinking ink: fiction becomes fact. It harkens to Horacio Quiroga’s uprooted characters, Juan Brown and monsieur Rivet (more doomed expeditioners), who hated each other but still drank together. In Quiroga’s story “Tacuara Mansión,” when Brown and Rivet ran out of alcohol, they drank something as unnatural as ink, carburetor alcohol. Doomed expeditions: destined to fail from the onset. There is the element of fate and of the impossibility of a positive outcome. The doomed expeditions proceed to the horizon of doomsday, into what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan would call landscapes of fear that he defines as, “the almost infinite manifestations of the forces for chaos, natural and human. Forces for chaos being omnipresent, human attempts to control them are also omnipresent” (6). 69

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In some instances, the landscape of fear is the jungle, a chaotic force that prompts the expeditioners to hate nature and want to control it. But other landscapes of fear exist, such as madness, the self, the other, imminent death. This study addresses either real or imaginary texts left behind, fragments of texts, or texts erased or destroyed before they were written, and how novelists and filmmakers have reinterpreted and re-created this primal hatred of nature. Hate points the way in Lope de Aguirre’s search for El Dorado, in Cabeza de Vaca’s foundering in the Florida Everglades, in either ill-fated or cruel efforts at spreading Catholicism, and in attempts to grasp these moments in time as depicted in films such as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, Carlos Saura’s El Dorado, Roland Joffé’s The Mission, Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca, and even Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse, Now. Although it is set in 1960s Vietnam, Apocalypse, Now was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” a story that should be read alongside José Eustacio Rivera’s La vorágine in order to explore both the nature of hatred and the hatred of nature. Together with these cinematographic renderings of doomed expeditions, I will be looking into texts such as the Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, La vorágine, Horacio Quiroga’s stories set in the jungle that clearly demonstrate a link between self-loathing and the hatred of nature, and “Heart of Darkness.” Although “Heart of Darkness” does not belong to Latin American letters, venturing into doomed expeditions calls for references to this classic, and further explorations of the horror. The objective is to delve into what Conrad’s Marlow calls “places of darkness” and “hints for nightmares” and determine why there exists this need for expeditions in search of a past that never spoke and of a journey from within and without that speaks no more. In the beginning of the Americas, the doomed expeditions were led by explorers, conquistadors, and soldiers of fortune in search of power and wealth. These were expeditions into the heart of nature that soon gave way to a profound hatred of nature, and what would also appear to be nature’s hatred, and the more nature resisted, the more hate led the way. What is known of these expeditions comes from texts, testimonies, letters, and fragments of texts that shine light on this hatred of nature. More recently, authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda have undertaken what Mercedez López Baralt sees as a viaje a la semilla (journey to the seed, or origins, or the quick) with a re-writing of colonial letters (19). In fact, theirs is an effort to relive the doomed expeditions and the hatred that led the way with a re-writing these journeys into the heart of nature. Such an undertaking builds upon texts that go back to the discovery and the conquest of the Americas and later results in genres such as travel writing, nature writing, forest literature, and the novela de la selva that, according to Lesley Wylie, “transformed the burdensome texts of the colonial era into enabling stories

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of cultural and narrative self-determination, inaugurating a home-grown tradition of tropical nature writing” (1). While the so-called burdensome texts were written by outsiders (conquistadors and soldiers of fortune who came from Spain) and perhaps made no effort to grasp nature (only to conquer it), because there was no such thing as ecological awareness, the home-grown texts attempted to think nature fully, but also ended up interpreting it as a vortex, a glimpse of the horror, an inferno (meaning that they came largely to the same conclusions as the burdensome texts). Whatever the outcome, to consider the texts of the past burdensome suggests a need to right a wrong, to relieve a burden, to right the past with the present and the future, to write better, to undo the hatred; a hard barrier between fact and fiction, as if everything the outsiders wrote were either hard or flimsy fact or downright lies (but not fictionally intentional ones). In Under Western Eyes, Conrad’s character Sophia Antonovna makes a distinction between those who rot and those who burn (211). Such a distinction could also go beyond historical and fictional characters and be applied to the natural world. Can distinctions be easily made? Can there be definitions? Can nature be grasped? According to Timothy Morton one cannot enter a world of direct access because things (in this case nature) exist in a profoundly withdrawn way; they cannot be splayed open. “You can’t know a thing fully by thinking it or by eating it or by measuring it or by painting it” (2016, 16). May I add, by conquering it or by destroying it or by hating it or by doubting it. Does the inferno still exist? If it does, is it worth it? There can be doubt, just as Marlow wonders if it was worth getting to Kurtz. “No; I can’t forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him” (51). So, is it worth the effort, and the hatred, and going a little farther as the Harlequin does in “Heart of Darkness”? “then still a little farther—till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back” (55). The Basque conquistador Lope de Aguirre went very far, but he did manage to get back. He survived the catastrophic expedition in search of El Dorado. He lived, if not to tell, at least to not find El Dorado, to betray, and to murder. Knowing his own pending death, Aguirre stabbed his daughter to spare her the fate of being the daughter of a traitor, such was the fate of many women in the time of the doomed expeditions, they could not even argue for their lives. Soon after stabbing Elvira (for she did have a name), Aguirre was captured, executed, and chopped into pieces. As previously mentioned, pieces of Aguirre were sent to towns that he had conquered and pillaged. Citing Francisco Vásquez, Bart Lewis describes how Aguirre wanted to be remembered for his cruel acts and for not believing in the faith of God. “Vásquez also detailed the distribution of Aguirre’s various body parts—hands, head, quartered torso—, carried to close towns as warnings” (36). Hernán Cortés

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and Francisco Pizarro were Aguirre’s role models. Just as Cortés disobeyed orders and pursued his march to Mexico, Aguirre declared independence from Spain and denaturalized himself, thus giving the story of his life what Lewis considers to be a “readymade literary structure, full of intensity and suspense” (9). Another piece of Aguirre: in Carlos Saura’s film El Dorado Aguirre declared himself to be not only the Wrath of God, but also the Prince of Freedom and of the Kingdom of Terra Firma and the Provinces of Chile. In an interview conducted in 1988, when Agustín Sánchez Vidal asked Saura what he thought of Herzog’s cinematic rendering of Aguirre, Saura replied that he was dazzled by the first part of the film because it revealed to Spaniards what they should have done themselves. Such a comment suggests a proprietary feeling toward a remote Castilian past and even a movement to take doomed expeditions told by outsiders away from outsiders, in this case, a German outsider. In other words, the implication is that Herzog, the German, became yet another chronicler of fortune by appropriating Aguirre. Saura also declared himself to be frustrated by the second part of the film because it distorted a wonderful story. Saura adds that Herzog’s film gave nature too prominent a role whereas what mattered were the Spaniards killing each other. “The jungle, the beasts in it, the monotony of the river, they all constitute the background of the mise en scène. The conclusion that follows, be sparing with the scenery and use it only at the right moment!” (Sánchez 71). In that same interview, referring to a film about Felipe II of Spain, Saura seemed to contradict himself by stating, “A realist story would not work, unlike with Lope de Aguirre, where the jungle is essential, Nature itself” (75). Unlike Carvajal’s ink desperately consumed in Aguirre, Wrath of God, no one drank Arturo Cova’s ink in José Eustacio Rivera’s La vorágine, a twentieth-century doomed expedition that re-enacts the earlier expeditions. Cova was able to keep on hating, degenerating, drinking, and writing. Before being swallowed up by the jungle, Cova leaves his exacerbated manuscript in the care of Don Clemente, exhorting him to take care of his book and give it to the Consul because it contains his story and the desolate story of the rubber tappers. “¡Cuánta página en blanco, cuánta cosa que no se dijo!” (So many blank pages, so many things left unsaid!) (211). Instead of lack of ink, or lost fragments, this document contains blank pages, and the unsaid. Cova is not a conquistador; his role models were not Cortés and Pizarro; he did not set out in his expedition in search of gold or power or fame. But upon closer analysis, hate did lead the way: there are signs of violence and ambition from the onset. Cova dreams of wealth, power, and recognition; he laughs like Satan, commits murder, and either burns or rots, or both. Oftentimes, Cova resembles Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz as the critic Albert Guerard describes him. “The Kurtz who had made himself literally one of the devils of the land, and

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who in solitude had kicked himself loose of the earth, burns while the others rot. Through violent not flabby evil he exists in the moral universe” (168). There is much ink in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” There is an initial narrator who introduces Marlow to the reader, then Marlow’s voice becomes ink, and then a manuscript that Marlow described as seventeen pages of close writing that Kurtz had found time for, a beautiful piece of writing, with an ominous opening paragraph (50–51). The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted Kurtz with the making of a report. “It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you. [. . .] Exterminate all the brutes!” (51). Kurtz had entreated Marlow to take good care of what he called his pamphlet. Here is an expedition within an expedition, Marlow’s journey within and without in search of Kurtz, yet another journey into the heart of darkness. Initially a flight, the story told in La vorágine is also an expedition within an expedition, or an expedition in search of an expedition. Rivera’s journey within, in search of Rivera, Cova’s journey within, in search Cova and of Alicia who seemed devoid of interiority. Finally, there is Rivera’s finding of Rivera and Cova’s losing himself only to find his hatred, and unfortunate finding of Alicia, just as other did not find El Dorado. Likewise, Apocalypse, Now, a doomed expedition within another doomed expedition. In this case, the film seemingly strays away from literature since “Heart of Darkness” is the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s film. While “Heart of Darkness” is set in what was once known as the Belgian Congo, Apocalypse, Now is set in 1960s Vietnam and begins to the sound of the Doors song “The End.” The first lines of “The End” are evocative of a love song: “This is the end/Beautiful Friend/This is the end/my only friend the end.” Soon however, the words are drawn into the primal vortex of hatred, “Father?” “Yes son?” “I want to kill you!” “Mother?” The setting is the unbearable beauty of the jungle, something akin to Christopher Columbus attempts at describing a nature so green, so very green. Soon, smoke, and the fire, the jungle burning. Little does it matter if this is Vietnam, this could very well be Cova’s Colombian inferno. And little does it matter if it is Martin Sheen who is burning from the inside in a shabby Saigon hotel room, the ceiling fan mimicking the helices of the helicopters; this could very well be a rendering of Rivera’s journey called Arturo Cova. The critic Beatriz Pastor writes that in failure narratives, the landscape as an aesthetic concept disappears and is supplanted by an ever hostile and threatening natural environment (204). Francis Ford Coppola renders it in Apocalypse, Now by making the jungle burn immediately. Instead of burning the jungle, which he would gladly do, Cabeza de Vaca floods it as to better describe the ten years he spent lost and naked wandering these strange lands, “extrañas tierras” (76). The critic Juan Francisco

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Maura writes that “La Naturaleza de la Florida presentada en los naufragios, es cruel en oposición a la imagen de ésta que se hace por otros autores en el mismo período. Pese al realismo evidente de su obra, Cabeza de Vaca, parece recrearse en las descripciones de pobreza y desolación de las tierras por las que pasa” (The natural world of Florida presented in the Naufragios is cruel compared to the image rendered by other authors. [. . .] In spite of Cabeza de Vaca’s obvious realism, he seems to revel in the descriptions of poverty and desolation of the lands he is covering) (58–59). Maura believes that in fact this natural world was not all that bad and that these descriptions were simply a recourse, Cabeza de Vaca’s effort at being a martyr and at highlighting his struggle in the face of adversity. In other words, for Maura Cabeza de Vaca’s hatred was feigned. While Christopher Columbus repeated the word green to describe the natural word around him, Cabeza de Vaca uses the adjectives bad and poor throughout his narrative. The first port they reach is “un muy mal Puerto” (a very bad port) (78), and wherever they arrive the land is “tan despoblada y tan pobre” (so underpopulated and so poor) (88), “tan mala tierra” (such a bad land) (104). Cabeza de Vaca even refers to these lands as a punishment, where their sins had led them. “Tal era la tierra en que nuestros pecados nos habían puesto” (105). For Cabeza de Vaca this land is increasingly bad, mala, evil, and the people wretched, an impossible land, impossible to dwell in it, and impossible to escape from it: “tierra tan extraña y tan mala, y tan sin ningún remedio de ninguna cosa, ni para estar, ni para salir de ella” (103). The hatred of nature become nature’s hatred: “tan mala tierra, para poder salir de ella y buscar algún remedio” (104). Such passages are reminiscent of God’s cursing of the land in Genesis after the Fall: shepherds becoming the chosen people, farmers damned, and agriculture as sin. As mentioned before, Maura considers such a description of the land to be an exaggeration, but a necessary one, otherwise the narrative would wind up no other value than a testimonial one (24). Furthermore, if the exaggerations do indeed make Naufragios the most entertaining narrative of the discovery of the New World, as Maura suggests, then Cabeza de Vaca could have announced the viaje a la semilla, the novel of the jungle, even the doomed expeditions that never were. Subsequently, this one doomed expedition could have prompted other doomed expeditions such as those of Fray Marcos de Niza and of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado who were inspired by Naufragios, and only found poverty and disillusionment (27). Instead of being reproductive, these expeditions leading to other expeditions appear as cannibalistic as the five Christians in Naufragios who had chosen to spend the winter by the beach, away from the Indians for fear of being eaten. One expedition feeding on another expedition. But instead of being eaten by the Indians, the Christians “se comieron los unos a los otros,

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hasta que quedó uno solo, que por ser solo no hubo quien lo comiese” (ate each other, until there was only one left, and no one to eat him because he was the only one left) (125). The last man was Hernando de Esquivel. When found he was still feeding on Sotomayor, the leader of this group of expeditioners. Will there be one last doomed expedition that cannot feed on another? The ethnologist Nicolás Echevarría’s 1990 film Cabeza de Vaca departs from the original by going native, eradicating the Christian ideology, and reinvesting the hero’s faith in the virgin land (Walter 142). Instead of dwelling upon the hatred of the land so strange as Cabeza de Vaca does in Naufragios, Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca focuses on tribal magic, shamanism, and a hateful armless dwarf named Malacosa to further exaggerate this journey into the heart of darkness. Maura writes that Cabeza de Vaca exaggerates in his narrative. In the film, Echevarría distorts a distortion that Walter affirms is empowered through acts of writing. “Replicating the strategy of American films about the Vietnam war . . . Cabeza de Vaca envisions a kind of cultural redemption from the horror of conquest via a familiar Western, male hero paradoxically empowered through his loss of self” (140). Exaggeration upon exaggeration, and a certain circularity in this vortex that takes us back to La vorágine and “Heart of Darkness.” Walter goes as far as to compare scenes of violence in the film Cabeza de Vaca to those in Apocalypse, Now. The similarities end there; while the film Cabeza de Vaca suggests that the conquest could have turned out differently and draws similar conclusions to a film such as The Mission, Apocalypse, Now simply falls into the abyss, a wide angle of hell, the horror. Yet another story being written after being told, and then being twicedistorted and told again, Ronald Joffé’s 1986 film The Mission that takes the viewers to 1740s Paraguay. In the brief opening scene, a letter is being dictated by a former Jesuit, Cardinal Luis Altamirano in Asunción, in the year 1758. There is a closeup of his face and much bitterness and hatred that Cardinal Altamirano soon regrets. After having uttered that the Indians are, once more, free to be enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese settlers, Altamirano tears up the pages that have been written and starts reciting a more diplomatic letter. Flashback, ten years, a mission, Altamirano’s voice justifying the Jesuits and their missions in that area, as well as the noble, musical souls of the Guaraní, a voice that James Saeger considers a white European distortion of native American reality (63). Saeger is appalled by the handling of the Indians that are treated as mission furniture (64) and the fact that the film trades historical authenticity for a movie paradise. “While the camera moves slowly over forest, village, and the beautiful Guaranis, the lush score of Ennio Morricone romanticizes primitive life” (70). Here is an attempt to erase the hatred of nature, drawing an impassable crevasse between the present and the past, as if the historical past

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and nature were better and truer, as if there had never been cruelty or hatred retold every time cruelty and hatred were lived and told. I see in The Mission a series of doomed expeditions into a green inferno that no one quite understood, just as they did not understand the Guaranís any more than Cova understood Alicia or the Colombian natural world. More and more pieces of Aguirre: first the Spaniards, then the slavers, then the Franciscans, then the Jesuits, then Altamirano’s mission to transfer territory from Spain to Portugal in accordance with the 1750 Treaty of Madrid. The Mission retells a chapter written in history by Jesuits or former Jesuits and yet another journey to the quick of horror. The internal journey of the Jesuits can be likened to that of Conrad’s Kurtz. The horror and the bitterness are announced in the opening scene. This story wants a happy ending, or at least tidy. There is no such thing. Pieces of the past are left in the ruins of San Ignacio Guazú that the Jesuits left behind, now a tourist attraction. Tour companies in the area boast exciting full-day tours that combine two “fascinating” historic sites into one full day from and invite tourists to travel back in time, stress-free, hotel pick-up and drop-off, around UNESCO listed ruins, the San Ignacio Mission, another doomed endeavour guided by hate, a Jesuit effort to spread Christianity in Paraguay during the seventeenth century. Across the Paraná River, in Argentina, more fodder for the tourists, the ruins of San Ignacio Miní, to distinguish them from the Paraguayan ruins. This is the site of Horacio Quiroga’s first expedition to the jungle. In 1903, Quiroga accompanied the poet Leopoldo Lugones whose project was to photograph the ruins and publish a book on the Jesuit past in this area. According to Quiroga, this was nothing but an incursion into the past for Lugones, whereas for him it was a glance into the future. Upon arrival, Quiroga knew he would have to return to this jungle and conquer the natural world at any price, be it his life. San Ignacio is a town in the province of Misiones, Argentina, on the banks of the Paraná River and the Arroyo Yabebirí, sixty kilometers from Posadas, the capital of the province. Yabebirí means stingray, and in Quiroga’s time it was dangerous to swim in the arroyo because of them, but there are no more stingrays today, or tigers. What is left is protected land that boast the greatest biodiversity in the world, and tourist attractions such as the Iguazú Falls and the ruins of the Jesuit missions. By no means did Lugones and Quiroga discover uncharted lands when they set out on their photo expedition. Quite the contrary, the area was already attracting tourists such as John Brown, one of Quiroga’s characters, “que habiendo ido por solo unas horas a mirar las ruinas, se quedó veinticinco años allá” (who having gone for a few hours to see the ruins, stayed there for twenty-five years) (Los desterrados 65). Perhaps when Juan Brown went there for a few hours to visit the ruins there were less tourists than there are

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today, and perhaps not many of these modern-day tourists decide to spend a few hours more, or a few years more, or even a quarter century, “simplemente por no valer sin duda la pena hacer otra cosa” (simply because there was nothing else worthwhile doing) (Los desterrados 86). Quiroga calls his characters los desterrados (the uprooted). Like him, they decided to remain in San Ignacio, perhaps for lack of anything else to do or anywhere else to go. Fate took them to this jungle where they discovered what they initially believed to be a fascination for nature, or a desire to conquer it, or even a hatred of nature as is evident in many of Quiroga’s stories. The story “Tacuara-Mansión,” lends itself to hatred, nature, and the unnatural. Elsewhere perhaps, people drink with friends. Not in Misiones where, just about every night, John Brown goes to a bar that caters to tourists by day and to locals by night where he drinks to oblivion in the company of the chemist and orange distiller Rivet, whom he hates. One night, they even drink something unnatural, “alcohol carburado” (carburetor alcohol) that “no es una bebida para seres humanos” (is not a drink for human beings) (90). After having consumed this unnatural substance to the last drop, Brown falls and then decides to drag Rivet out of the bar, onto his horse, and go home. The problem is that nature gets in the way of this very short doomed expedition. “Los viajeros tropezaron de pronto con el monte, cuando debían estar ya en Tacuara-Mansión . . . Don Juan volvió grupa, y un rato después tenían de nuevo el bosque por delante” (Suddenly the travelers stumbled upon the jungle, when they should have reached Tacuara-Mansión. Don Juan turned his horse around and after a while he had, once again, the wilderness before him) (90).This happens again and again, wherever they go, they reach a dead end, the jungle. As it turns out, they had spent the night riding around the tree in front of Brown’s house. By morning, Rivet is dead. “Filthy gringo,” such is Brown’s reaction. Another piece of Quiroga, another doomed expeditioner summoned to Misiones: Van-Houten or, as Quiroga wrote, “Lo-que-queda-de-Van-Houten” (What is left of Van Houten) (Los desterrados 76). Many of these explorers/ wanderers that ended up in Misiones seemed to have lost some body part along the way. There is a character simply known as El manco (the armless one) in “Los destiladores de naranja.” He is an inventor of sorts who is often asking Dr. Else, whom the author refers to as an (ex-hombre) (an ex man), for advice. Dr. Else also arrives in Misiones as a last expeditioner would. “El hombre apareció un mediodía, sin que se sepa cómo ni por dónde” (The man appeared one day at the noon hour, without anyone knowing how or wherefrom) (Ibid., 117). He did not even appear on a specific day, a specific month, a specific year, simply at noon. He is communicating to those observing him what a last expeditioner may feel, unaware of the day, the how, the where. Like other expeditioners who have made their way to Misiones, Dr. Else can

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drink, although not as much as Brown and Rivet. He does, however, end up mistaking his daughter for a rat, and killing her, an accidental murder, unlike Lope de Aguirre’s murder of his own daughter. Dr. Else’s delirium tremens has a fierce natural world crawling all over him, and it continues to do so even after his daughter’s death. While Dr. Else is assaulted by rats, Paulino in “A la deriva” is bitten by a snake. His name barely matters, he is simply “el hombre” (the man) for a good part of the story. The bite is quick, unexpected, and the man’s foot begins to swell and hurt instantly. Then thirst takes over, but he cannot taste the beer his wife gives him. It only took a few seconds for this life to set upon its doomed expedition into nature. Another short expedition, the man decides to get on a canoe and row to the center of the Paraná River. Soon, he is caught in the vortex wondering how long it has been since he last saw his boss, and what day it was when he last saw him. “Un jueves,” was his last thought before he died (Cuentos 52). Another two stories where nature takes her revenge in Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte are “La miel silvestre” and “El almohadón de plumas.” The peril is first announced in “La miel silvestre” (Wild Honey) with a description of killer ants native to that jungle. “Son pequeñas, negras, brillantes y marchan velozmente en ríos más o menos anchos. Son esencialmente carnívoras” (They are small, black, shiny and they move quickly on more or less wide rivers. They are essentially carnivorous) (97–98). And they devour everything along their way. Benincasa, the doomed character in this story, decides to turn the jungle of Misiones into a bachelor party, one last hunting trip before marriage. Armed with his rifle, he is sure that the prey will eventually arrive, but it was not exactly what he had expected. Instead of being confronted by a huge wild animal, he was bitten by those carnivorous ants. He traded his gun for a machete and set out to the jungle the next day, only to find a beehive. But one hive was not enough, he drank the honey from five hives. Soon, he was overcome by dizziness. When I first read this story, I wondered if had in fact mistaken ant nests for beehives and greedily consumed whatever nectar the ants had made for themselves. Upon closer reading, there is a hint that the honey itself was narcotic. Benincasa, incapable of movement, was consumed by the carnivorous ants, swallowed by nature. Are these doomed expeditions? Quiroga’s life itself had the feel of a doomed expedition, and his characters are pieces of Quiroga’s doomed expedition. The first expedition with Lugones, planted the seed. In the story “La meningitis y su sombra” Quiroga writes, “supóngase que en una tierra hay un millón, dos millones de semillas distintas, como en cualquier parte. Viene un terremoto, remueve como un demonio todo eso, tritura el resto, y brota una semilla” (suppose that in the earth there are one million or two million different seeds, as anywhere else. Then an earthquake upheaves every seed like

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hell, grinds the rest, and one seed sprouts) (Cuentos 113). Upon returning to Buenos Aires, this longing to undertake the viaje a la semilla germinates for six years, until Quiroga falls in love and marries Ana María Cirés whom he takes to the jungle with the intention of settling there and living off the land with all the hardships resulting from such a life choice. Today, the banks of the Paraná River are strewn with swimming clubs, campgrounds, and fishing clubs. Quiroga’s house was rebuilt after a fire and turned into a museum. There are various Jesuit ruins, and even a Japanese camping club. This was Quiroga’s folly, the unconquerable jungle that cost Quiroga his life and his family, not once but twice. Eventually, Quiroga’s wife committed suicide by drinking photo developer that is to an image what ink is to paper. There is much self-loathing and hatred in this doomed expedition of Quiroga’s. Unable to continue living in the jungle that she hated, Quiroga’s first wife commits suicide. Many of Quiroga’s characters drink themselves to death, others go to Misiones to meet their violent death, but always on their own terms. Expeditions are repetitive and dull, and they test self-loathing and self-preservation. Upon closer inspection they resemble life as when Freud describes it as wanting to make complicated detours before reaching its aim of death. “What we are left with is the fact that the organism wished to die only in its own fashion” (33). One last doomed expedition, Spanish director Icíar Bollaín’s 2010 film within a film También la Lluvia (Even the Rain). Executive Producer Costa (Luis Tosar) and Director Sebastián (Gael García Bernal) arrive in Cochabamba, Bolivia in the year 2000, to shoot a film re-enacting the Spanish conquest and discovery of the Americas from landfall on October 12, 1492, to the Taíno Chief Hatuey’s death at the stake in 1512. The project appears doomed from the start; filming a landfall in landlocked Bolivia, making the Spaniards speak English instead of Spanish, making the Taínos speak Quechua, encountering natives who were not nearly as naïve and submissive as expected: they argue, they insist they are right, and they don’t even want to pay for their water, not even the women are meek, on the contrary, they order the men around. What happened to the real women of the conquest? Aguirre’s daughter just let him kill her. It does not mention if she even put up a fight. So, there they are, the film crew, torn to pieces, an alcoholic Christopher Columbus, a proud Montesinos, Costa asking the natives how to say water in Quechua, an assistant who wants to document what is really happening, and those inconvenient water wars. From the beginning, it is all about saving money and hiring poor people seemingly easy to exploit. If Columbus’s landfall is being re-enacted in landlocked Bolivia, it is because Bolivia is a poor country, the people are humble and eager to make two dollars a day. The producer and the director are smug, they are certain their project will succeed and be way below budget. But just as Aguirre did not find gold, Cabeza de

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Vaca ended up in the Florida Everglades instead of Mexico, and Quiroga ended up being consumed by the jungle, this too will be a doomed expedition. “I despise you!” Hatuey yells as he is burning at the stake. “I despise your God! I despise your greed!” Soon, the people witnessing the execution being to chant. “What are they yelling?” one of the executioners asks. “His name! He will never be forgotten!” friar Antonio de Montesinos replies. Up to now, these doomed expeditions have only focused on a specific segment of the historical population, Director Bollaín turns to the natives and the women and rewrites what could have been their role. “Bollaín warns that these productions can fall into a colonialist dynamic by reproducing the imbalances between the ‘visible’ countries in the global film market, and ‘invisible’ countries whose native actors and visually appealing locations are exploited” (245), Fabrizio Cilento writes in his article, “Even the Rain: A Confluence of Cinematic and Historical Temporalities.” A happy ending? In the end, the government reverses the privatization process, multinational company is forced out and water prices are returned to their original levels. At what cost? “It is always so difficult,” Daniel sighs. His daughter has lost the use of one of her legs. That is how the film ends. “Even the Rain considers the cyclical recurrence of exploitation in the poorest Latin American nations, from colonialism to the more sophisticated neocolonialism of late capitalism; represented not only by multinational corporations but also in international film productions. The film’s characters are entrapped in a Nietzschean dimension for most of the film, doomed to the eternal failure of something that will always remain the same and will never change” (247), Cilento concludes. Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” could not be more removed from Spanish conquistadors, soldiers of fortune, and characters that people Latin American novels in search of what López Baralt called la semilla, the seed. “My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the working of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.” What else should he be set for, with his staff? What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him posted there, And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh Would break, what crutch ‘gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,

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The landscape described in the poem, a landscape of love and hate according to Daniel Karlin, is England’s. Childe Harold is in search of a dark tower while the Aguirres, the Covas, the missionaries, the filmmakers and the Quiroga want gold, power, dominion over nature or fame. They are all, however, seeking, and being lied to, and pointed in the wrong direction. “My first thought was, he lied in every word,” such could very well have been Cabeza de Vaca’s and Aguirre’s thought. The hoary cripple with the malicious eye could have been a native pointing the wrongs to El Dorado or to Mexico, “to waylay with his lies, ensnare all travelers,” further dooming the expedition. Daniel Karlin writes that the poem begins with hate pointing the way (239). As to the landscape, it is a landscape of hate, and, “Roland loves what he hates, desires what disgusts him [. . .] he is Browning’s intensest figure of a divided nature. The other ‘Nature,’ the landscape he describes, traps him in a sardonic and pitiless embrace” (240). Much like Cabeza de Vaca’s land that makes him ask himself, “What kind of land is this?” Had Cabeza de Vaca been there, he would have blamed the landscape and all that water, just as Rivera/Cova would have begged the green inferno to set them free, and pieces of Quiroga would have been devoured by hateful carnivorous creatures.

Chapter 5

Hating Crows The Travels of Concolorcorvo! and of Ernesto Guevara

Hating crows, a murder of crows, crow bait, crow’s feet, eat crow, Jim Crow. In Book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (3), Crow tries to dissuade Raven, who was then white, that even if he knows that Coronis has been unfaithful to Apollo, he should not tell. “This journey will do you no good: don’t ignore my prophecy!” Crow implores. “See what I was, see what I am, and search out the justice in it. Truth was my downfall (Book II, 531–535). Raven goes ahead and tells Apollo about the infidelity, thus enraging Apollo who kills Coronis, regrets it, then turns around and punishes the messenger. “But he stopped the Raven, who had hoped for a reward for telling the truth, from living among the white birds” (Book II, 612–632). The English language distinguishes between raven (corvus corax) and crow (corvus brachyrhynchos). Both the French and the Spanish only use one word, corbeau and cuervo, respectively. Leviticus 11:13 reads, “And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls.” Among them, the raven. In Genesis 8:7–8, after forty days of rain, Noah opened the window of the ark, “And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.” Then Noah sent a dove that found no rest, meaning that the waters were still on the face of the earth, so he pulled the dove back into the ark and waited another seven days before sending the dove back out. This time the dove came back with an olive leaf. The Bible remains very vague as to the raven’s role, lore has it that the raven acted much like the devil, going to and fro. In the Koran’s version of the story of Cain and Abel, it was the raven who taught Cain how to bury his murdered brother. For Lévi-Strauss, as a carrion bird the raven is a trickster and mediation animal between life and death. Although the raven does not kill, he does eat animal flesh (Carroll, 1981, 302), thus inspiring hate, much like the devil, the king of hate. 83

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Nurtured by haters such as Francisco de Quevedo, making four sworn enemies whose last names all began with the letter P (hence one of the possible solutions to the riddle of the four PPPP), wanting to denounce fraud and illegal trade in the Viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain, Alonso Carrió de La Vandera was commissioned to conduct a review of the postal system that motivated El Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (The Lazarillo of Blind Walkers or Guide for Inexperienced Travellers). His pseudonym was Concolorcorvo, not so much a crow, but having the color of a crow after the fall from grace; in other words, black. Carrió’s charge—to inspect the post offices and postal routes from Buenos Aires to Lima—led him not only to condemn his colleagues, those abhorred postal administrators who would eventually end up threatening his livelihood, but also the entire system that Ruth Hill considers to be a, “culture of creative accounting, winks and nods, and outright fraud” (3), that contributed to the formation of elites in Lima, Santiago de Guatemala, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires. While Emilio Carilla compares Carrió’s Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes to other eighteenth-century travel narratives to determine its value and dimension, the present study is a reading of Carrió’s travels from Buenos Aires to Lima alongside Ernesto Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries and Otra vez (Once Again), travel narratives or memoirs that took Guevara on a motorcycle from Argentina, to Chile, on foot and by boat as a stowaway to Peru, hitchhiking to Colombia and Venezuela, by plane to Miami, and by plane again back to Buenos Aires, then to Bolivia, on to Peru, Guatemala where he radicalized, Mexico where he met Fidel Castro, and finally Cuba on the small yacht named Granma. The eighteenth- and twentieth-century itineraries are surprisingly similar. The autobiographical voices and the writers themselves, in turn, are hardly comparable to each other; one is a young man ready to live and die on his own terms, the other is a resentful old man living in an unloved place and worried about his prestige and livelihood. In this reading, however, the objective is not so much to determine value, as in Carrilla’s, but rather to explore these autobiographical trajectories, the shedding of the blindfold, travel and discovery that ultimately foment hate. As both the travelers and the guides shed the blindfold and discover the landscape and its people, so they will begin to hate. I call these autobiographical trajectories. I could also call them travel narratives, or chronicles, or memoirs. Guevara’s writings could fall under all those rubrics, whereas Carrió is more problematic. A title such as Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes evokes fiction. But where does fiction end and autobiography begin? Paul de Man affirms that any book with a readable title is, to some extent, autobiographical, then turns around and concludes that if all texts are autobiographical, then none of them are (1979, 922). In that same essay “Autobiography as De-Facement,” Paul de Man also writes, “The interest of

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autobiography is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is, the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions” (922). By stating that textual systems are made up of tropological substitutions, De Man is putting forth the idea that the specular moment is not an event that can be located in history, but rather the manifestation of a linguistic structure (Ibid.). De Man is also referring to a stratum of metaphors, a tiering of tropes or figurative modes of speech, an effort, whether conscious or subconscious, to say and at the say time to conceal, a simultaneous earthing and unearthing. Instead of disparaging his enemies and society publicly, Carrió went to great lengths to cover up his hatred. Besides publishing a riddle of a travel narrative under a pseudonym—Concolorcorvo—Carrió also lied about the place and date of publication, and even made up a new name for the publisher, all to better mask either his authorship or his deep resentment. This was the eighteenth century, Carrió had left his native Asturias for Mexico in 1736 (at the age of nineteen), then moved to Peru in 1746 where he held positions such as Corregidor (Mayor) of Chilques and Mesques (Cuzco), Capitán General (Captain General), Alcalde Mayor de minas (Mayor in charge of mines), and Subdelegado de bienes de difuntos (Subdelegate of the estates of the defunct) until 1767 when he volunteered to accompany expelled Jesuits from Peru back to Spain. In 1771, while still in Spain awaiting a significant promotion, Carrió was appointed Segundo Comisionado para el arreglo de correos y ajuste de postas (Commissioner in charge of the postal service arrangement and the adjustment of the posts) between Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Lima, a charge which he accepted unwillingly (Lorente Medina x–xi) because he was expecting to become a magistrate or a governor and also because he was fifty-five and bitter about not having succeeded in life (Bataillon 200). The new appointment/disappointment took Carrió back to Peru where he would write the Lazarillo of Blind Travellers. Pamela Phillips remarks that in eighteenth-century travel literature, the environment is more than just the place visited. Although Phillips is mostly referring to agents of the Spanish crown traveling throughout the kingdom of Spain, the reference is pertinent to Carrió’s and Guevara’s travels as well. Carrió was put in charge of documenting the state of the countries through which he traveled: agrarian productivity, gauchos, indigenous peoples, the condition of the post offices, and natural resources (31). Furthermore, Carrió’s travels also involved making a case for colonialism. In other words, while denouncing Viceregal society, Carrió was also re-enacting, reinforcing, and justifying the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century voyages of exploration and conquest. Guevara’s route was the mirror image, the same, and the opposite. Instead of disparaging the poor, the farmers, and the indigenous peoples,

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and praising the exploiters as Carrió did, Guevara listened and observed with growing indignation. Eventually, his love for the underprivileged and for the landscape in which they lived, together with his hatred of socioeconomic inequality, would become a quasi-fanatical hatred that accepted no questioning. Carrió wrote the Lazarillo for several mysterious reasons, one of them to express his bitterness, eventually to denounce corruption in the postal administrative system that allowed for the diversion of gold and silver, trade in illegal goods, and the overall blindness of society, a project much like Ernesto Guevara’s. Ruth Hill writes that just as blindness was a moral and intellectual trope in Europe, “blindness in Carrió’s Guide for Blind Rovers (or Guide for Blind Traders) impinges on different types of travelers—merchants, muleteers, readers of exotic travelogues (armchair travelers), government officials—and what they were packing, so to speak” (4). Paul de Man adds insight to the trope by explaining that blindness was not so much caused by an absence of light, but rather by the absolute ambivalence of a language. “It is a self-willed rather than a natural blindness, not the blindness of the soothsayer but rather that of Oedipus at Colonus” (1983, 185). In his travels, Guevara starts out as a blind rover who will eventually shed the blindfold and denounce the world around him. Unlike Carrió, Guevara did not feel compelled to disguise his project simply because he does not set out with a distinct project. The twenty-two-year-old does not know. He wants adventure; he likes to travel; he comes from a very liberal family. Soon, he wants a job, any job, in the medical field, in a laboratory, in a school, in a newspaper, coaching a rugby team. Much of his adventure is spent waiting for a job that never comes. Eventually, the project will take shape, and from that moment on, unlike Carrió, Guevara voices his utter discontent. What indeed prompted Carrió to go to such great lengths to conceal his intentions? The author of Lazarillo of Blind Walkers went as far as to invent a publishing house and to call it La Robada, alluding to theft and corruption in the bureaucracy since La Robada refers to something stolen. In this effort, Carrió the postal administrator sets out with his pseudonym and secretary, Concolorcorvo, and travels from Monteviedo, to Buenos Aires, counting bulls, cows, and mules, expressing disdain for the gauchos, counting souls, describing the pampa Indians as cowardly traitors forever vanquished by the Spaniards even if they were fifty against one Spaniard, from post to post, through Córdoba, Tucumán, talking and mocking, Chile, Potosí, justifying or denouncing, Cuzco, and finally Lima, taking inventory as would a fifteenthcentury explorer/conqueror, describing nature with what Carrilla considers to be the frigidity of an inventory (255). A little over two centuries years later, in 1952, the young Argentinian Ernesto Guevara set out with Dr. Alberto Granado his partner in crime, on a

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Norton 500 motorcycle named La Poderosa (The Mighty One) to undo 500 years of exploration, exploitation, pillage, and conquest. The philanthropic goal was to work in a leper colony in Peru. Ernesto Guevara—who went by several monikers, Ernestito when he was a boy, Chancho (Pig) as he was growing up, Fuser when he set out on La Poderosa, and Che as the iconic face on the tee shirts and also when he was in charge of La Cabaña fortress prison in Havana—began as defender of justice and a budding righter of wrongs, and ended up a hater as he discovered the reality of the Latin American world. Indeed, it is not until he reaches the copper mines of Chuquicamata, Chile, that the young Ernesto Guevara loses his innocent gaze and begins to hate social injustice, capitalism, and the exploitation of the poor. This was initially a self-righteous hatred as in, I hate the way they treat the miners, but it eventually became a more universalized hatred that could bear no crossexamination. In his travels, in his discovery of the Latin American landscape, Guevara started out loving mankind and ended up hating mankind for the same reasons. While Carrió’s journey was considered work, Guevara’s was initially play, but the motives were similar, and they had everything to do with the gaze. These were both voyages of exploration. The blind walkers and the curious riders set out to reconnoitre a land and its people. When Carrió sets out from Montevideo, he begins by describing the traveler. “Si fuera cierta la opinión común, o llámese vulgar, que viajero y embustero son sinónimos, se debía preferir la lectura de la Fábula a la de la Historia” (If one is to believe the general or unrefined opinion that the words traveler and liar are synonymous, one should prefer reading Fables rather than History) (17). Karen Stolley believes that Carrió is alluding to three specific fables in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “The Raven and the Crow,” “The Crow’s Story,” and “Phoebus Repents,” where both crow and raven were rendered black and punished for telling. In the 2004 Brazilian film, The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles, young Fuser (Gael García Bernal) often shows signs of being much like the raven of the fable: too sincere, too abrupt, too honest. On January 31, 1952, when Granado and Fuser reach San Martín de los Andes hungry and in need of a place to spend the night for free, they knock at the door of the Von Puttkamers, friends of a Peronist acquaintance according to a January 1952 letter that Ernesto Guevara sent to his mother. After Granado explains that they are both traveling medical doctors, Von Puttkamer asks them to take a look at a lump on his neck. Immediately, Fuser diagnoses a tumor and Granado, wanting to secure a free meal and lodging for the night, suggests that it may simply be a sebaceous cyst. Fuser insists, this is a tumor. Granado argues that if he gives them a place to spend the night perhaps they can treat this cyst. Von Puttkamer chooses to listen to Fuser and asks, “You can’t do anything for me?” Finally, they are turned away. “Work

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with me next time, okay?” the usually good-natured Granado yells. “You can’t treat people like that!” Fuser replies, “Not at the price of a man’s health.” No rewards for honesty, they are left outside in the cold. Remarkably, as Fuser becomes Che Guevara, the sense of honesty will be exacerbated, to the point where his truth would become the only truth; hated were those who did not go by his truth. Both the crow and the raven were once white and made black for telling the truth. Obviously, black was considered a negative color. For Karen Stolley such a story reveals that the loyal messenger is not considered to be of any value, that telling the truth is a punishable act, and that the punishment consists of a change of color, from white to black (5). Again, Concolorcorvo means “having the color of a crow.” Carrió published the Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes under that pseudonym. It could very well be that he is alluding to the fable, and to the fact that he will be telling the truth and not be rewarded for doing so. Concolorcorvo is the writer, the teller, Calixto Bustamante, the Incan. Stolley writes that Concolorcorvo would be more appropriate a name for a black person than for a Peruvian Indian (2). Besides referring to Ovid, to crows, to the hatred of crows, Carrió himself mentions the importance of the sound of the name. “¡CONCOLORCORVO!, es un término retumbante y capaz de atronar un ejército numeroso y de competir con el de Manco-Cápac, que siempre me chocó tanto como el de el [sic] Miramamolín de Marruecos” (Concolorcorvo!, is a resounding name capable of deafening an entire army and competing with Manco-Cápac’s that always shocked me as much as that of the Morrocan caliph (164). Carrió is referring to Muhammad al-Nasir whom the Christian called Miramamolín. He was the fourth Almohad Caliph in the beginning of the twelfth century. Concolorcorvo!, a deafening sound, a wakeup call, and a call to shed the blindfold. Upon reaching the copper mines of Chuquicamata, the young Ernesto Guevara ceases to be a blind traveler. The film focuses on his encounter with a Communist couple traveling to the mines looking for work. They ask Fuser and Granado if they too are looking for work, to which they answer in the negative. Perplexed, the Communist couple asks, “Why travel?” Their answer is, “Por viajar.” (For the sake of traveling.) From that moment on, after hearing his own answer to a simple question, Fuser is no more. There is a suggestion that such a conversation took place when Guevara writes that the man urges them to accompany him because he is also a rover before his silhouette disappears in the distance. Guevara’s reaction is, “con que nos mostraba en el fondo su desprecio por el parasitismo que veía en nuestro vagar sin rumbo” (It was his way of showing us how he disdained the parasitism that he saw in our wanderings) (72). As he approached the mining zones, Guevara experienced a sensation of asphyxiation, and he exclaimed, “What a desert!” (73–74). It was supposedly

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the driest desert in the world. Guevara describes the hills as he would people, prematurely aged in their struggle against the elements, just like the mine workers, “pobres héroes [. . .] que mueren miserablemente en las mil trampas con que la naturaleza defiende sus tesoros, sin otro ideal que el de alcanzar el pan de cada día” (Poor heroes who fall into the thousand traps that nature lays to defend its treasures, without an ideal other than the daily bread) (Ibid.). Up until that moment, Guevara had described his travels in a light picaresque mode, a dog named Comeback, a powerless motorcycle named The Mighty One II, the thrill of pretending they were seasoned leprosy specialists to get a free meal, hiding in a dirty bathroom as stowaways, the delight of setting out into the unknown with no money and no specific plans. Suddenly, Guevara is describing Chuquicamata, an open pit copper mine, he is giving percentages, heights, explaining how copper is produced, debating the possible nationalization of mines, and alluding to the lessons that can be learned from the cemeteries of the mines, the people devoured by the mine collapses, silica, and the infernal climate of the mountain (75–76). There is even an addendum to the chapter on Chile, written one year later, with hindsight, that addresses the cost of healthcare in Chile and the meagre indemnification paid to the families of the 10,000 mine workers buried in the nearby cemetery. The initial picaresque has become serious; it is leaning toward the tragic. The Lazarillo who set out on The Mighty One II has undergone a metamorphosis, Guevara writes. “El personaje que escribió estas notas murió al pisar de nuevo tierra Argentina, el que las ordena y pule, “yo,” no soy yo; por lo menos no soy el mismo yo interior” (The person who wrote these notes died when he stepped on Argentinian soil again, he who puts them in order and hones them, I, I am not me, at least I am not the same internal I) (25). Two Lazarillos, or lazarillos, from comical to brutal, making their way through a landscape, one a disgruntled and disillusioned postal administrator, the other a medical student soon to become a doctor, then a wanderer, and finally a revolutionary. Lazarillo is the diminutive of the name Lázaro, but the sixteenth-century picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes converted the proper name into a common noun, lazarillo, to signify someone who leads the blind, a direct reference to Lazarillo’s first profession, a blind man’s helper. Perros lazarillos are seeing eye dogs. Although Marcel Bataillon believes that Carrió’s Lazarillo has nothing to do with the Lazarillo de Tormes (197), the theme of the Lazarillo merits close reflection, as does the idea of Ernesto Guevara being either a Lazarillo, a picaresque character, or a self-proclaimed lazarillo insisting on opening the eyes of the people and leading them on the path to revolution. Carrió did title his book Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, thus alluding to the picaresque and to the Lazarillo de Tormes where the blind play a very important role. Soon after he is employed by a blind man, Lázaro becomes

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aware that, “después de Dios, éste me dio la vida y, siendo ciego, me alumbró y adestró en la carrera de vivir” (After God, he is the one who gave me life and, for as blind as he was, he illuminated me and pointed me in the right direction) (24). This consciousness came soon after the blind man told Lazarillo to put his ear against the ear of a stone animal to listen to the sounds inside and then punched him, hurting him badly, just to teach him a lesson about being so credulous. “Necio, aprende, que el mozo del ciego un punto ha de saber más que el diablo” (Idiot, you should learn that a blind man’s boy should know a little bit more than the devil) (23). He who leads the blind should be quick and shrewd, and lack innocence. In the first chapter of his travel narrative, Carrió writes, “Los viajeros (aquí entro yo), respecto de los historiadores, son lo mismo que los lazarillos, en comparación de los ciegos. Éstos solicitan siempre unos hábiles zagales para que dirijan sus pasos. [. . .] Aquéllos, como de superior orden, recogen las memorias de los viajeros más distinguidos” (Travelers (this is where I come into the picture) are to historians what lazarillos are to blind people. The former always seek out some shrewd lads to guide them along the way. The latter, being of a superior order, gather the memories of the most distinguished travelers) (19). In this double-word analogy lazarillo is in the lower case, no longer a proper name, simply a noun referring to someone (anyone) who helps the blind, a guide. Carrió considers himself a traveler, therefore a guide, or source of information, for historians. Since this is a double-word analogy, travelers are therefore lazarillos as well, and historians are blind. Hence, a guide for blind walkers. Likewise, Guevara was a traveler when he set out on La Poderosa II, but a traveler ready to travel blindly, at least part of the way, until the old motorcycle broke down, until he reached the copper mines in the Atacama Desert, a traveler who would eventually want to guide other blind travelers and the blind historians, this time to change the course of history. Now that it has been established that a lazarillo is a guide and that the term comes from Lazarillo de Tormes who was employed by a blind man, other facets of lazarillo/Lazarillo should be taken into consideration. Although Lázaro realized how important a role the blind man played in his life, second only to God, he also hated the blind man, “jamás tan avariento ni mezquino hombre no vi; tanto, que me mataba a mí de hambre” (I never saw such a miserly and mean man; so much so that he was starving me to death) (27). To satisfy his hatred and resentment, Lázaro would play devilish tricks on his master. Besides cutting a hole in the blind man’s canvas bag to steal his food, he would intercept the coins that his master earned in exchange for saying prayers and replace them with coins of lesser value. He would also find different ways to drink the greedy blind man’s wine and, most importantly, “siempre le llevaba por los peores caminos, y a adrede, por le hacer mal y daño, si había piedras, por ellas; si lodo, por lo más alto, que, aunque yo no

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iba por lo más enjuto, holgábame a mí de quebrar un ojo por quebrar dos al que ninguno tenía” (34–35). (I always led him along the worst roads, and on purpose, to hurt him. If there were rocks, we would walk on them, if there was mud, I would lead him into the deepest puddles. Even if I too suffered while walking on these bad roads, I would gladly have given an eye for him to lose the two eyes he didn’t have.) This signifies that he who leads can also mislead; lazarillo is a trickster and the hater of either a cruel master or of whomever is following him blindly. In the Lazarillo de Tormes the blind man was cruel. One could venture to ask if Carrió is implying that blind walkers are cruel as well, if they are the historians; just another riddle. What is obvious is that blind travelers cannot see the world around them, there is a lack of recognition or knowledge, obvious in the Diarios at the onset of the journey, less obvious in Otra vez and Carrió’s work. Carrió knows what he is seeing. The examples of his knowledge of the cities and the countryside are plentiful. Montevideo has a population of 1,000 souls. In 1770, there were 170 births and 70 deaths (20). Every year, the meat of over 200,000 cows and bulls rots while on chariots on its way to different destinations (21). The gauchos dress gaudily, they use their ponchos as pillows when they sleep at night, and they all have a little guitar that they play poorly (22). “Basta de gauderios porque ya veo que los señores caminantes desean salir a sus destinos por Buenos Aires” (23). (Enough with the gauderios, I see that the walkers are ready to leave for Buenos Aires.) So Carrió, or Cocolorcorvo, is the lazarillo, guiding the blind walkers. The jurisdiction of Buenos Aires is very healthy: two-thirds of the people die “caídas de caballo y cornadas de toro” (34). (falling from a horse or gored by a bull) The blind walkers should also know that the poor people of the city of Salta suffer from an illness called “of Saint Lazarus” and that their women are the most beautiful in the Americas in spite of their huge goiters that make everyone laugh and that they cover with kerchiefs (61–62). As to the natives that Carrió considers weak and cowardly (80), they know no better way to tame their mules than to tie them up outside and starve them to the brink of death, the result being either weak animals or a high mule mortality rate. Guiding the blind walkers through the Tucumán, Carrió does not spare the workers either, whom he considers to be miserable people living in a land of abundancy (94). The gaze is hateful, the landscape is dismissed with disdain. Initially, Guevara’s gaze is more compassionate, the more he sees, the more he feels for the people, and at the same time, the more he sees, the more he hates. In the diaries, Granado and Guevara offer the freezing Communist couple traveling to Chuquicamata their blankets. “Fue esa unas de las veces en que he pasado más frío, pero también, en la que me sentí un poco más hermanado con esta, para mí, extraña especie humana” (That was one of the times that I suffered the most from the cold, but also when I felt a bit more

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connected with what I considered to be a strange human species) (72). Again, the more Guevara loves the more Guevara hates. Upon encountering the administrators of the mine, he describes them as the impertinent, blond masters who warned them that this was not a city for tourists and offered them a guide (a lazarillo perhaps) to show them the installations. As to the guide, Guevara refers to him as, “el perro fiel de los yanquis” (The faithful dog of the yankees) (72–73). Guevara’s gaze goes from tender to hateful. As they leave Chuquicamata on foot, the climate becomes infernal, the solitude of the Andes is enormous, and the rays of the sun feel as heavy as lead. They are so weary that they feel stupid rather than heroic. Finally, a car full of drunken miners on strike picks them and drops them off in a nearby town where they encounter a group of walkers getting ready to play soccer against a rival team. They have been recruited! This means house and home until they leave for Ichique (76–77). When they are not training, Granado and Guevara visit water treatment plants. Guevara notes that it is not very difficult for the exploiters to extract the mineral wealth in this part of the world. Apparently, the first exploiters were German, followed by the British. As to the natural world being exploited, it resembles the thousand and one nights (78). While Guevara condemns the exploitation, Carrió vaunts it. Speaking for a postal inspector in Potosí, “Más plata y oro sacaron los españoles de las entrañas de estas tierras en diez años que los paisanos de VM. En más de dos mil que se establecieron en ellas” (“The Spaniards extracted more silver and gold from the entrails of this land in ten years than your countrymen did in the more than 2,000 in which they were established here” (109) (Kline 1965, 165). The person being addressed here is Concolorcorvo, his countrymen being fellow Peruvian Indians. Between Iquique and Arica in Chile, Guevara reflects upon the 1540 expedition led by the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia through this same sloping, arid terrain. Guevara puts Valdivia’s expedition amongst the most notable of the Spanish conquest and Valdivia himself as representative of man’s eagerness to find a place where he can exercise total authority (much like Julius Caesar). In other words, Valdivia is the portrait of the absolute ruler (79–80). At this point, Guevara has already chosen sides. Valdivia’s life will be snatched away from him by the Araucans or Mapuches, the admirable warrior tribe. At the other end of the spectrum, and regardless of how many European enemies he has, or of his readiness to denounce European fraud, Carrió remains on the side of the Spaniards. When Guevara’s gaze falls upon the natives, the gaze is tender. Carrió, in turn, calls them “indios pampas” and describes them disdainfully and mockingly: they are highly inclined to unnatural sins, always riding with their wives or concubines on their horse’s rump (which explains why they have so few women). “Son traidores, y, aunque diestrísimos a caballo y en el manejo de la lanza y bolas, no tienen

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las correspondientes fuerzas para mantener un dilatado combate. Siempre que han vencido a los españoles o fue por sorpresa o peleando 50 contra uno, lo que es muy común entre indios contra españoles y mestizos” (32). (“They are traitors, and although extremely adept at horsemanship and in the handling of the lance and bolas, they do not have the necessary stamina to keep up an extended battle. Whenever they have defeated the Spaniards, it was either by surprise or because they were fighting 50 against 1, which is very common with Indians against Spaniards or mestizos”) (Kline 1965, 67). Carrió’s condescension and derisiveness contrast sharply with Guevara’s attitude upon arriving in the small old town of Tarata in Peru. The calles (streets) of Tarata become endearing callecitas where, “se respira la evocación de los tiempos anteriores a la conquista española; pero esto que tenenos enfrente no es la misma raza orgullosa [. . .] es una raza vencida la que nos mira pasar por las calles del pueblo” (One breathes the memory of times before the Spanish conquest; but what we have before our eyes is not the same proud race [. . .] it is a conquered race that watches us walking along the streets of the town) (88). Guevara adds that their gaze is tame, fearful, and indifferent. They seem to continue living because living is a habit that they cannot break. Carrió, in turn, sees not a conquered people but a risible one worthy of anecdotes. Before leaving Santiago del Estero in the Tucumán province of Argentina, Concolorcorvo poses a conundrum to the wise men of Lima. In the times of war with the Chaco Indians, a Spaniard needing to rest fell asleep under a tree with a carbine loaded with two balls placed near his head. Soon thereafter, the Spaniard was awakened by an Indian holding a lance and the carbine and asking him to “haz tun,” in other words shoot the gun so he could hear it. Immediately, the Spaniard shot and killed the Indian. “Se pregunta a los alu[m]nos de Marte si la acción del español procedió de valor o de cobardía, y a los de Minerva si fue o no lícita la resolución del español” (46). This is a time of war, so Concolorcorvo asks the disciples of Mars if the Spaniard was courageous or cowardly. He also asks the disciples of Minerva (wisdom) if the actions of the Spaniard were licit. The tone is light and jocular; it is not so much the Indian’s life that matters but rather the value of the Spaniard’s actions. Although Carrió is serious, dead serious, his tone remains light and his gaze picaresque. Guevara, in turn, is rapidly radicalizing. The disparities between the two travelers become more apparent when they reach Cuzco. For Guevara, in the Diarios there are two or three Cuzcos, or two or three ways to evoke it. There is the Cuzco that is the promised land of the nomadic Inca who must henceforth defend it against enemy tribes, there is the Cuzco that pleases the eye of the tourist, and there is the vibrant Cuzco that depicts the formidable value of its warriors through its monuments, walls, streets, and church adornments (88–89). However, “en Cuzco no hay que ir a mirar

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tal o tal obra de arte: ella entera es la que da la impression sosegada, aunque a veces un poco inquietante, de una civilización que ha muerto” (In Cuzco one does not need to go and see such and such a work of art: the entire Cuzco gives the sedate although troubling impression of a civilization that has died) (109). However, Guevara also realizes while chatting with the mestizo in charge of the museum of archaeology about the consumption of coca in the region, that that this was, una raza que aún lucha por su individualidad” (A race still struggling to find its identity) (112). Guevara also noted that the museum of archaeology in Cuzco was lacking in artefacts because the treasure hunters, the tourists, the foreign archaeologists, and anyone with any interest in the matters had systematically ransacked the region (111–112). Carrió’s chapter on Cuzco, in turn, describes the city, defends the conquistadors, describes the cruelty of the Indians, the working of the mines, and probes the conquests of Peru and Mexico. The Incan Concolorcorvo who represents the civilized Indian, according to Forace, affirms that conquistadors were great men unjustly persecuted by both envious foreigners eager to portray the Spaniards as cruel and fellow countrymen. Such hatred goes all the way back to when Columbus discovered the island of Hispaniola. “Colón no hizo otra cosa en aquellas islas que establecer un comercio y buena amistad con los príncipes y vasallos de ellas. Se hicieron varios cambios de unos efectos por otros, sin tiranía alguna, porque al indio le era inútil el oro y le pareció qe engañaba al español dándole una libra de este precioso metal por cien libras de fierro en palas, picos y azadones, y otros instrumntos para labrar sus campos” (145). (“On these islands Columbus did nothing more than establish commerce and friendly relations with the native princes and their vassals. Various commodities were exchanged without treachery. Gold was useless to the Indian who thought he was deceiving the Spaniard by giving him a pound of this precious metal in return for 100 pounds of iron in the form of shovels, picks, hoes, and other implements for working the ground”) (Kline 1965, 206). Forace writes that, “El amanuense se presenta como un defensor de la conquista quien responderá a las acusasiones vertidas contra los conquistadores, diseñando a su vez sus prodestinatarios, paradestinatarios y contradestinatarios, ya que su discurso funciona simultaneamente como un instrumento de refuerzo ideológico, persuasion y polémica” (The Incan secretary presents himself as a defender of the conquest who will answer to the accusations made against the conquistadors, signaling at the same time his three types of readers, those who agree, those who disagree, and those who are undecided, given that his discourse is an instrument of ideological reinforcement, persuasion, and polemic) (4). Forace’s entire thesis is contained in that quote. This is reminiscent of Guevara’s sense of truth and hatred of anyone who would not adhere to his truth.

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In an effort to express his hatred of the Indians who are a product of this landscape, Carrió also refers to the their cruelty and their inability to learn how to work the mines that they never could have exploited without the assistance of the Spaniards who were doing most of the hard work and ennobling cities such as Cuzco with cathedrals, churches, convents, and palaces (146–147). For Forace, the objective here is to eradicate the barbarian Indians and to appropriate more territory with European immigrants. One can only imagine Guevara reading Carrió. In Caracas, Guevara encounters a man accompanied by a boy that he (Guevara) judges to be a pícaro. In fact, later in that same paragraph Guevara will use the word picaresque to describe the face of the stranger who, in turn, considers Guevara to be part of the establishment. Had he and this talkative stranger been traveling with Carrió, Carrió would have been deemed a conquistador, and the stranger a savage Indian. At the end of Diarios the stranger says to Guevara, “Usted morirá con el puño cerrado y la mándibula tensa, en perfecta demonstración de odio y combate, porque no es un símbolo, usted es un auténtico integrante de la Sociedad que se derrumba: el espíritu de la colmena habla por su boca” (You will die with your fist clenched and a tense mandibule, in perfect demonstration of hatred and struggle, because you are not a symbol, you are an authentic part of a society that is collapsing) (142). Guevara listens and gazes at this man’s picaresque scowl. He does not respond even if he does not agree. To himself he says that he now knows that he will be with the people. He swears to stain, “en sangre mi arma y, loco de furia, degollaré a cuanto vencido caiga entre mis manos” (With blood my weapon and, mad with fury, I will decapitate any conquered one who falls in my hands) (143). This is Guevara’s spiritual trajectory, from the beginning to the end of this first journey. One year later in 1953, after having earned his medical degree, Guevara will again embark on a journey whose trajectory is much like Carrió’s, from Buenos Aires, to Bolivia, to Lima, Perú, then on to Ecuador and Panamá. The second part of this same journey will take him from Panamá to just about every Central American country then to Mexico, and finally to Cuba. All three travel narratives could be deemed more realist than Lazarillo de Tormes that, according to Francisco Rico, is only realist because it pretends to be so (46). Rico then suggests the adjectives plausible and verifiable serve better to describe the Lazarillo; adjectives that could be appropriate for all three travel narratives. Along with Bataillon, Rico proposes that the Lazarillo de Tormes is a fictitious autobiography (50), something that Carrió and Guevara never pretend to be. However, Carrió did want to be anonymous, as was the Lazarillo de Tormes. As to Guevara, unnamed had no place near his name, he was the raven who would always tell. Many questions have been raised regarding the authorship of El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes. Although Carrilla writes that there exists no absolute

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proof that Carrió is the author of El lazarillo, there are so many allusions that Carrió is in fact the author that there is no room for doubt (261). With this certitude in mind, the next question has everything to do with the reason why Carrió felt the need to use a pseudonym and to go to great lengths to have his book published clandestinely. Carrilla even wonders, “¿hay en el cuerpo del Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes ataques visibles, insultos, opiniones peligrosas, como para poder explicar tanto resguardo?” (Are there visible attacks, insults, dangerous opinions within the text of the Lazarillo of Blind Walkers that would explain such caution?) (261). Immediately, Carrilla discards Carrió’s lame excuse that he would have had to give all the copies away had he published the book under his own name and opts to search for the answer to the riddle in a riddle itself, fragments of the texts that could easily be considered innocent and playful (262), the four PPPP. In part seven of Tradiciones peruanas, Ricardo Palma dedicates a chapter to the four PPPP of Lima. En tiempo no remoto se ha dicho que Lima tiene tres M M M notables—Mujeres, Médicos y Músicos—. En los antiguos, es decir, hasta antes de que entrara la patria, todo el mundo decía que Lima era la ciudad de las cuatro P P P P. Viejos y mozos hablaban de estas cuatro letras, sin cuidarse de averiguar a qué aludían. Gracias al Inca Concolorcorbo y a su desvergonzado librejo Lazarillo de caminantes, he logrado averiguar la significación de las enigmáticas letras. (In ancient times, it was said that Lima had three notable MMM—Women (Mujeres), Doctors (Médicos), and Musicians (Músicos)—. Amongst the oldsters, in other words before the we were patriots, everyone said that Lima was the city of the four PPPP. Old and young talks about these four letters without knowing that the alluded to. Thanks to the Inca Concolorcorvo and his shameless book Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, I have succeeded in discovering the meaning of the enigmatic letters.) (81)

It appears that letter games were popular for over two centuries; they were private jokes, only for the initiates. Carrilla identifies the four PPPP as four of Carrió’s enemies: José Antonio Pando, Postal Administrator in Lima; Felipe Porcel, Official Mayor of the Posts, Juan Bautista de Pando, Customs Accountant, and Dr. Antonio Perlier. For Carrió, these names were those of the individuals who wronged the administration of the posts. Herrera Navarro considers the accusations against Pando and his group to be very serious, as Carrió’s worry about being accused of some crime against these same individuals (509). The four PPPP were there to insinuate without naming. However, Herrera Navarro adds that “en cada lugar, en cada sitio, en cada casa, las cuatro PPPP significan una cosa distinta, y en la suya, en el ámbito de los Correos—La Robada—coincidirían con los funcionarios responsables

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del estado en que se encontraba” (In every place, in every site, in every house, the four PPPP mean something different, and in the world of the posts—La Robada—they coincided with the bureaucrats responsible for the state of the posts) (509). At the end of Carrió’s Lazarillo the four PPPP are, “Pila, Puente, Pan y Peines” and “Pedro, Pablo, Paulino y Perulero” (Fountain, Bridge, Bread, and Peines (Combs), and Pedro, Pablo, Paulino, and Peruvian) (226–227). According to Ruth Hill, Pila, Puente, Pan, and Peines, “encodes Carrió’s opinion of his society in the 1770s and transforms a postal inspector’s report into social history and cultural critique” (42). Hill then goes on to explain that although Peines means combs, the reference is also topographical since Los Peines was part of Lima’s promenade, La Alameda, and its inclusion, although it ridicules the excesses of Lima’s elite, also measures Lima’s superiority to Mexico City, a superiority that was plurilateral. “In Carrió’s opinion, the immoral activities that were taking place along Lima’s Paseo Militar, or Los Peines, surpassed even those that were taking place along Mexico City’s Alameda and Paseo de Jamaica” (55). In fact, for Hill Pila, Puente, Pan and Peines is ripe with sexual and occupational connotations that have not been explored by scholars. Pan, for example, is not simply bread or the suggestion that there was more bread in Lima than in Mexico City, but also a common circumlocution around prostitution, adulterous affairs with non-Spanish women, and illegitimate children (58–59). As to Puente, where there is a bridge, there is water, so Hill discerns the ricas aguas or men’s exchange of cologne (agua de colonia) or liquor for sex (66). Finally, in Pila, Fountain, that also alludes to water, Hill sees the culture of the square in which Lima’s most famous fountain was located, Plaza Mayor, a hub for the sex trade, and believes that it was foremost in Carrió’s mind when he included Pila in the first solution to the riddle of the four PPPP from Lima (68). While Carrilla insists that the four PPPP stood for the last names of the four postal officials who were the sworn enemies of Carrió, Hill is convinced that the four PPPP of the second riddle (Pedro, Pardo, Paulino, Perulero) refer only to Archbishop Pedro Pardo de Figueroa, member of the Order of Minims of Saint Francis de Paul (Paulino) and longtime resident of Peru (Perulero) who was denounced several times to officials of the Inquisition for propitiating the death of fiscal, carrying off his wife, consorting with nuns, dancing, drinking, and gambling (77–78). “Or perhaps the second solution is a red herring,” Hill suggests, “and Carrió truly wished to express disgust for an indigenous opponent of the repartimiento system” (72), who was working for subordinates of the Archbishop as part of the Archbishop’s evangelization campaign. Whatever the case may be, the riddle remains unsolved; Carrió was in no way compromised. Herrera Navarro notes that whatever Carrió failed to

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mention or simply insinuated in his Lazarillo, he published openly in the Manifiesto of 1777, perhaps believing that he had enough people backing him and realizing that he had not gotten into trouble with the Lazarillo. He was wrong. This time around, the Count of Floridablanca ordered him to retire immediately. Carrió’s belongings and papers were confiscated and he was sentenced to a prison sentence that he did not serve because he was sick in bed (510). Unlike Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, Carrió’s words, actions, and enemies did not condemn him to death. Guevara’s final moniker was El Che. He was a traveler, an adventurer, a revolutionary, a medical doctor who became the defender of the people, a hater of the people, and quite reminiscent of a Francisco de Quevedo poem, “Epitafio de un medico, en que habla la Muerte.” (Epitaph for a doctor in which Death Speaks.) “Médico fue, cuchillo de natura,/Causa de todas las riquezas mías” (A doctor he was, the knife of nature, cause of all my riches) (54). Ready to kill to save humanity, at the end of Diarios Guevara howls, “Y siento mis narices dilatadas, saboreando el acre olor de pólvora y de sangre, de muerte enemiga” (I feel my dilated nostrils savouring the bitter odor of gunpowder and blood) (143). At the beginning of Otra vez, he is momentarily the blind traveler again, “el viaje es el mismo: dos voluntades dispersas extendiéndose por América sin saber precisamente que buscan ni cuál es el norte” (The journey is the same: two different willpowers traveling through America without knowing exactly what they are searching for or which way is north) (11). With this mindset he sets out for the arid heights of Bolivia where, “El verde es un color prohibido” (Green is a forbidden color) (12). From Bolivia, the travelers proceed to Peru, from Peru to Guayaquil, and then on to Panama, still unsure of their destination, with no specific plans, the journey being merely an everyday struggle for subsistence. It is in Central America that Guevara gains more and more awareness of the United Fruit Company and the impact that the United States has had on this entire area. His hatred for the United States will intensify with every new country he visits: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and finally Guatemala where he meets a group of Cubans plotting an uprising against the Batista dictatorship and witnesses the 1954 CIA/United Fruit Company coup in Guatemala. It is at this point that Guevara radicalizes. If there is a point of comparison between the three travel narratives, it is not how they judge the landscape and society and disparage the exploiters, it is in this trajectory from blindness to insight and back to blindness, as well as in the open-endedness of their endings. Carrió’s Lazarillo ends with an inside Bourbon Spanish American joke, the riddle of the four PPPP. Diarios ends with a youthful and ardent belief in self-knowledge and hopes for the victory of the proletariat. Otra vez ends with Guevara’s belief that this year could be important for his future, and a

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promise to write again with more details, a promise broken. Karen Stolley’s thoughts on the end of Carrió’s Lazarillo are applicable to Guevara’s Diarios and Otra vez. There is an effort on the part of the writer to seal the text, but such an effort is destined to failure because no story is inviolable. “Por eso la conclusion del Lazarillo es un final ilusorio, un final sin final que subraya la imposibilidad de encontrar una historia definitiva y verdadera” (That is why the conclusion of the Lazarillo is a false ending, an ending without an ending that underlines the impossibility of finding a definite and true story) (124). I mentioned that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses both the raven and the crow used to be white until they told the truth and were then made black as a punishment. Dolores Romero López writes that, “La doctrina simbólica tradicional dota al negro de un significado infernal, diabólico, de mal agüero. Negro es el color de las tinieblas y, por ende, de la muerte” (The traditional symbolic doctrine gives the color black the quality of a bad omen, as well as an infernal and diabolical meaning. Black is the color of night and consequently of death) (203). In Genesis 9:23–25, after Ham saw the nakedness of his father, Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” When he was murdered, Guevara’s nickname was Che. A crow indeed, the crow who went to tell the truth and then could not stop telling the truths and punishing those who did not admit his truths until finally he got punished for doing so. He lost his life. It was an ugly death, but from there, the icon, the song, the inalterable face that is no longer the de-facement of autobiography. Death as a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, as Paul de Man writes, “and the restoration of mortality that deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the curse” (1979, 930). As the crow flies, three travel narratives of the Latin American Landscape.

Chapter 6

The Curse of Ham, the Malediction of Changó Nature and Terror, Mackandal’s Brood

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. (Gen. 9:21–22)1

What did Ham do? The story from Genesis suggests that it was a gaze that brought about Noah’s wrath, the curse of Ham, one of the three sons of Noah who went forth from the ark. The other two, Shem and Japheth, were the ones who, “covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness” (Gen. 9:23). It is difficult to grasp why the gaze, merely the gaze, could lead to a curse that generated a link between slavery and blackness. Modern and ancient scholars and writers have pondered over those few lines. David Goldenberg mentions pro-slavery writers such as J. J. Flournoy, as well as Black scholars and clergymen such as E. Blyden and T. Peterson who accepted without a doubt that Blacks were the children of Ham, the aboriginal Black man (142). Even the writer James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time that he knew that according to many Christians he was a descendant of Ham, cursed, and predestined to be a slave (46). After all, Ham meant black and hot and Canaan was condemned to slavery for the sin of his father (Ham), whatever that sin was. Goldenberg refutes the long-accepted etymology of the biblical name Ham, and argues that it does not mean dark, black, heat, or even Egypt, “and there is no indication from the biblical story that God intended to condemn black-skinned people to eternal slavery” (149), despite the fact that Egypt is called “Ham” or the “Land of Ham” four times in Psalms (78:51, 105:23, 27, 106:22). Goldenberg also discards the idea that Noah’s sons, whose descendants populated the world, were of different skin colors, white, black, and red (152) as well as the persistent reports in modern scholarship that Ham 101

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copulated with a dog and a raven while on the ark, and thus had his semen turned black as a punishment (295). We are left with many questions unanswered. The painting on Goldenberg’s book jacket does depict the three sons of Noah, two of them looking away, Ham staring straight at us, Noah lying naked. We are also left with the wrath of Noah, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9:25). Errors have a life of their own, however, and Goldenberg does admit that the Curse of Ham became so well entrenched as God’s word, that it was even used to legitimate the enslavement of some black African by other black Africans (177). Here is where the Curse of Ham and the Curse of Changó converge. Changó is the orisha who took the descendants of Canaan from Ile-Ife, the sacred city, the dwelling of the orishas, to the Americas, in this case to Saint-Domingue. Ile-Ife will never forget, “la imborrable mancha/ la siniestra rebellion/contra el glorioso Changó/tercer soberano de Oyo/y su nunca igualada venganza/cuando prisionero y en el exilio/al Muntu condena a sufrir/su propio castigo (Zapata 55). (The permanent stain/the sinister rebellion/against the glorious Changó/third sovereign of Oyo/and his unequaled vengeance/when a prisoner and in exile/when he condemned the word to suffer/his own punishment.) Three twentieth-century Hispanic writers, one Cuban, Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), and two Columbians, Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920–2004) and Enrique Buenaventura (1925–2003), turn their gaze and their pens toward eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, vodou, terror, the events that led to the 1791 rebellion, the pact at Bois-Caïman, and the making of Haiti. Theirs is a creative effort to revive a forgotten preterit, a stagnant hateful trauma, and reconstruct a history/story that begs to be revisited and perhaps even retold or rewritten, re-hated. There are many characters, historical, mythological, or fictitious, from the lwas or orishas that traveled with the slaves across the Atlantic all the way to Saint-Domingue, to Mackandal the poisoner, Dessalines, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Jamaican Bouckman Dutty, Henri Christophe, Ti Noël the observer, even Napoleon. Why Haiti? The question does not suggest entitlement, ownership, or lack thereof. Neither Carpentier, nor Zapata, nor Buenaventura needed to be Haitian to write about Haiti or to be vodou initiates to write about vodou. The question demands more reflection; another answer. All three writers had enough material around them to work with, to do without Haiti, be it violence, betrayal, hatred, and even African-derived religions, yet they chose Haiti. Therefore, it could very well be that Saint-Domingue become Haiti is the writing at the origin of the palimpsest, the words painted over words, the seeds in the ashes, as in the end of La tragedia del rey Christophe when the Cantor sings, “de nuestro pequeño Rey,/quedaron las semillas./Sus cenizas estarán siempre” (Of our small King/ the seeds remain) (Buenaventura 146).

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And his ashes will always be blended with seeds. The three authors saw a need to embark upon a voyage to the seed, all the way back to the events that led to the Rebellion of 1791, in other words to François Mackandal whose dialectics translate time in the world as an eternal breaking and mending of the circle, the dia that separates the logos only to solder it back together again. Mackandal, a Mandingo slave become a revolution, a packet of poisons, a common noun. Having established the ties that bind nature, religion and African medicine, the objective will be to examine the significance of Saint-Domingue and eventually of Haiti, the role that vodou plays in the ring of terror, and to ask if healing, revolution, and black magic can co-exist. In other words, the question is whether there is sense in going from nature to terror via organic poisons and becoming animal in the process, or if there is failure in the logos, the announcer becoming the announced, enthusiastic revolutionary philanthropy become hubris and a craving for absolute power. If there is failure, failure must be repeated, and in the unmaking of Saint-Domingue and the subsequent making and unmaking of Haiti lies the original failure, Joseph Conrad’s peeping over the edge, the meaning of a gaze, “The Horror!” (72). In Changó, el gran putas (Changó, the biggest badass), Zapata laments that for the forgetful the history of the Republic of Haiti will always be the massacre of the white people by the blacks radicalized by hatred, instead of the slavers’ genocide of a defenseless people (198). Because of this stance, the critic Dagoberto Cáceres Aguilar considers Zapata’s novel to be a navigational map for the search of truths barely told by the conquerors as well as an exercise of memory that activates a gaze turned inward, towards pain, the pain of slavery, and the pain of remembrance (233). The novel begins with an epic poem “La tierra de los ancestros” that presents the tutelary gods of the Yoruba religion and their cosmic vision that, according to Darío Henao Restrepo, orders the plot of the novel, “y el destino de los esclavos africanos que llegaron a América en los barcos negreros, según la explicación mítica, por la maldición de Changó” (And the fate of the African slaves that arrived in America on the slave ships, as a result of the curse of Changó according to the mythical explanation) (12). In this past, in this pain, and in this house, there are many maledictions. After having fallen from grace for having fought with his brothers, Changó is banished from the kingdom. As a result, all those who were against Changó will be exiled far away from Africa (Henao Restrepo 18). “tu raza/tu pueblo/ tu lengua/¡destruirán!/¡Las tribus dispersas/rota tu familia/separadas las madres de tus hijos/aborrecidos/ malditos tus Orichas/ hasta sus nombres/ ¡olvidarán!/En barcos de muerte/esclavos sin sombras,/zombis” (Your race/ your people/your language/destroyed!/The tribes dispersed/your family broken/mothers separated from their children/abhorred/your Orishas

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cursed/even their names will be forgotten! In the ships of death/slaves without a shadow/zombies) (Zapata 66–67). Such is the malediction of Changó, beyond forgiveness, accepting no boundaries, taking all prisoners, even the innocent. It is much like the wrath of the God of the Old Testament and Noah’s resentful and embarrassed hatred that did not simply turn to Ham, the perpetrator, but toward the innocent, toward Canaan, the son of Ham, and an entire people. Likewise, Changó’s curse was not simply directed against those who plotted against him, but against the African people condemned to exile and slavery. For Cáceres Aguilar, however, Changó’s curse is a prompting or a provocation aimed at making the Africans discover what is theirs and therefore finding the ontological value of everything they thought was worthless (235). Similarly, Roxanna Curto writes that for Enrique Buenaventura theater must serve a social function by awakening spectators from their indifference and provoking them to take part in revolutionary struggle against colonization and cultural dependency (379). Henao Restrepo also sees the positive outcomes of the curse because all those who were cursed will eventually redeem themselves in America. “el esperanzador destino de los hijos de Changó en el nuevo continente será la libertad” (18). (The hopeful destiny of the children of Changó in the new continent will be freedom.) Henao Restrepo adds that it is Changó who will give slaves his spiritual force that will enable them to be reborn in the new continent (Ibid.). Obviously, this rebirth requires enslavement, suffering, hatred, rebellion, Mackandal. The first part of Alejo Carpentier’s 1949 novel, El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) is a rendering of the wave of poisonings and the numerous violent oppositions that led to the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804. The title of the first chapter is: “Las cabezas de cera” (The Wax Heads), and on the morning when this story begins there appears to be an abundance of heads. In the novel, the slave Ti Noel himself muses upon this phenomenon, observing “Había abundancia de cabezas aquella mañana” (13). The first series of heads were showcased in the window of a barber shop. Right next door, there were calves’ heads for sale in a butcher shop, and in the bookstore next to the barber shop there were heads on stamps that came from Paris. Ti Noel, who exemplifies the eternal observer, and is often considered to be the main character of the novel—perhaps because he is the only one who is present from beginning to end—stops to observe the head of the king of France and of other characters of the French court. This abundance of heads appears to amuse him. There also seems to be an abundance of heads in “La rebellion de los vodús,” part three of Zapata’s novel. The messenger of Ngafúa, a sparrow, hides in Toussaint L’Ouverture’s shoe and sticks his head out from time to time, at least until the ghost of a dismembered Napoleon appears in the jail

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cell with a crown laying as heavy as remorse on his head. Before begging Toussaint to turn his gaze away, Napoleon admits that he regrets having tried to bring slavery back to the island. Toussaint admits that he has regrets as well, having proclaimed the adhesion of Haiti to France, believing that chains oppressed but did not enslave. Soon thereafter, both Napoleon and the sparrow vanish, and another head appears, a head wearing a real crown, the head of Changó, the head that made Toussaint realize that the prisoner of Saint Helena had died (242–244). In Buenaventura’s play, Toussaint is presented as a slave who was well treated by his masters because he lived and worked indoors, never out in the fields. Emancipated in 1776, Toussaint had his own house and managed to make quite a bit of money. Cordones-Cook notes that Toussaint seemed to be the opposite of Dessalines who wondered what good books were to a rebellious black man (11). In La tragedia del rey Christophe, Toussaint argues, “no soy doctor, curo con hierbas” (I am not a doctor, I cure with herbs) (104). By virtue of curing with herbs, Toussaint is a descendant of Mackandal, and because he denies being a doctor, he is negating African medicine, or at least declaring that it is other. It was Toussaint who made Christophe a Sargent, and later Dessalines who made him a General. Nicknamed the Black Napoleon for having sided with the French and striving for an imperial crown on his head, Toussaint was instrumental in transforming the slave insurgency into a revolution. He was deported to France in 1802 and died in a jail cell the following year. In is while Toussaint is in his jail cell that Zapata introduces him in “La rebellion de los vodús.” Fifty years before Toussaint’s exile, imprisonment, and death, Carpentier’s character, Ti Noel, gazes at body parts detached, an uncanniness that announces the imminent and eternal return of magic and violence. Ti Noel, who has already learned truths from the profound wisdom of Mackandal, alludes to the circularity of the situation when he stops to reconsider Mackandal´s story about Adonhueso, king of Angola and incarnation of the serpent, who was an eternal beginning, never ending (14–15). In his musings, Ti Noel compares the African kings, whom he considers to be the real kings (the warriors, the jaguars, the serpents, the owners of the fire) to the European kings whom he judges to be cowardly and incompetent. The entire story could be read in terms of these opposing yet seemingly tidy forces: black-white, Africa-Europe, Vodou-Christianity, colonizedcolonizer, nature-culture, heaven and earth, magic and science. Although there is no beginning to the circle, this is where the observer climbs on, as if this were a merry-go-round, or better yet a fast-moving serpent biting its own tail. This could very well be nothing but a ride, but the next moment is brutal: the title of chapter II is “La poda,” which means pruning, and in this case amputation.

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Ti Noel was present, working with Mackandal in the cane mill, observing the horses going around in a circle, and listening to Mackandal´s description of the African holy city of Widah (Judah) where the Cobra was worshipped, just when a horse stumbled and Mackandal´s left hand was caught in the iron cylinder attached to the horse. The extent of Mackandal’s injury was so serious that it left no option other than amputation of his entire left arm. The obvious result is an absent left hand, and a remaining one, the right one, the one that will soon do the foraging, the one that will do the finding. Both arms are equally important, and according to the critic James Pancrazio, Mackandal’s severed arm is the missing part that bares the mark of the fetish. “It is an absence that produces excess, which becomes a model for a paradoxical notion of identity as an absent presence” (152). Up until that point there was an inverse fragmentation, the uncanniness of the heads with no body, now there is an absent arm and a remaining arm. Mackandal himself exemplifies this absent presence or present absence. He is rarely present in the story that is either repeating or unfolding, yet he is ever-present as Ti Noel´s constant recourse. In fact, Mackandal’s effect on Ti Noel is much similar to the effect that Buenaventura wants the theatre to have on an audience: raising consciousness, awakening, shocking, demonstrating the extent to which they continue to carry the ideology of the colonizer (Curto 381). The word model is insufficient, yet Mackandal appears to be a model when he first appears in the story, not as a presence, but as a thought of Ti Noel’s. Even more than a passing thought, Mackandal appears to be a reaction. When Ti Noel is told in the bookstore that the head he is examining on a copper engraving belongs to the king of his country, in other words to the king of France, he stops to consider the wisdom and the stories of a long-lost Africa told by Mackandal at the plantation. The critic Landry-Wilfrid Miampika sees the slave plantation as a space of encounters, transmission, and reproduction of the collective subconscious of the slave. The recourse to a mythical Africa therefore becomes a miraculous weapon that allows the slave to resist alienation and uprootedness (13). This instant thought of Mackandal’s Africa is precisely what allows Ti Noel to resist a feeling of alienation and discrimination when he is told so matterof-factly that the king of France is his king. On the other hand, this king of France could very well be Ti Noel’s future Roi Christophe as he is depicted in Buenaventura’s play, trying to restart the nation’s economy by making the plantations run again with black slave labor and ordering the construction of a Citadel. Like Ti Noel, in the beginning of Act I of La tragedia del rey Christophe, Christophe appears to be an observer. A cook’s assistant, Christophe listens to the conversations in the Fonda La Corona until a captain notices him and says, “Y tú, negro de mierda, ¿qué haces aquí? Véte a la cocina” (And you, useless negro, what are you doing here? Go to the kitchen)

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(94). Unlike Ti Noel, Christophe will not remain an observer and will be on the battlefield by the end of Act I. “In his desire to bring Haiti into modernity Christophe commits the same crimes and errors as his predecessors” (Curto 382). Beatriz Rizk even considers Christophe to be a precursor to the future Latin American dictators (66) as well as a tragic hero. As a result, Christophe undid Mackandal’s magic, weakened his poisons, and catapulted Haiti/Saint-Domingue back into the darkness as presented by Marlow in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the dark places of the earth, the darkness that was here yesterday (5). In this case, yesterday is Mackandal (the historical figure) incapacitated after his accident and made an animal caretaker because of his ability to treat illnesses, and also Carpentier´s Mackandal put in charge of pasturing the cattle. In Chapter III of El reino de este mundo, while Mackandal is taking a break stretched out in the shade of a carob tree, his hand discovers, to his surprise, all sorts of insects and organic poisons. “la vida secreta de especies singulares, afectas al disfraz, la confusión, el verde verde, y amigas de la pequeña gente acorazada que esquivaba los caminos de hormigas” (the secret life of strange species given to mimicry, confusion, the green greenness, protectors of the little armored beings that avoid the pathways of the ants). (23) The title of the third chapter is: “What the Hand Found” (Lo que hallaba la mano). The hand is the subject, as if the hand were independent of the rest of the body, or as if this were a collective hand belonging to anyone who reaches out and forages in the grasses of the slave plantation, only to find plants, fungi, and insects: the fruit of poison. The extreme detachment of the hand renders the body itself an absence, so much so that Carpentier´s story of the events that culminated in the Saint-Domingue revolution begins with body parts. What interested Mackandal’s hand the most were the fungi with their different smells: wood rot, medicine bottles, sickness, cellars; and shapes: ears, ox tongues, wrinkled excrescences. After having crumbled the flesh of a fungus between his fingers, Mackandal took it to his nose, and then held his hand out to a cow that drew back her head in fear. Carolyn Fick points out that it remains a matter of dispute whether the poisons used by slaves were actual organic poisons prepared by those who held the secrets of herb medicine or simply arsenic disguised by other herbs. What Fick considers to be more significant than the poisons themselves, however, is the impact that these poisons had on the colonial mentality. “Thus, in addition to the countless fatalities resulting from the use of poison as a weapon of slave resistance, this practice contributed greatly toward maintaining the master class in a state of fear from which there appeared to be little effective recourse” (66). Whether or not Mackandal knew what he was looking for, or if he simply stumbled upon the power of organic poisons in his foraging, also remains a matter of dispute. It could be argued that Mackandal was simply attracted by

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the odor of the fungi and that he only made the discovery that it was in fact a poison when he observed the cow´s reaction to the smell. On the other hand, the ethnobotanist Wade Davis points out that the manipulation of poisons remains a consistent theme through African cultures (196). It is probably that the slave Christophe knew how to manipulate poisons since he was a cook. Buenaventura puts Christophe cooking in the Fonda la Corona in Act I. Yet Christophe chooses to do away with his life with a silver bullet instead of with the poisons that Mackandal’s hand found. Again, Christophe appears to be the undoing of Mackandal, the severed arm that lost its accidental character and became a necessary moment, even a sign. Had Mackandal’s arm not been amputated he would not have been literally put out to pasture, he would not have discovered the herbs and the fungi, and he would not have tested the poisons on the cow and been prompted to pick more fungi and to put them in his leather pouch along with other plants and herbs that he later showed to the Mamán Loi, a witch who lived alone in the hinterland and who knew exactly which plants and fungi to keep and which to discard (25). Mamán Loi (Lwa) means priestess (Carpentier also refers to her as a witch, a bruja). Consequently, Loi is not necessarily one character, but possibly representational of a priestess or houngan, in other words the “mistress of the god.” Wade Davis believes that the historical figure Mackandal was the apprentice of old women and men who had either brought the ancient wisdom with them from Africa or acquired it from either the descendants of the Arawaks or of the Africans (198). What the hand found, therefore, was a natural source of poison, the possibility of terror and the beginning of a legend, so much so that eventually packets of poisons were referred to as macandals (Weaver 92). In El reino de este mundo, these poisons are carefully examined by Mamán Loi, and it is precisely Mackandal´s encounter with Mamán Loi and the assessing of the poisons that foreshadow the ties that bind healing and poisoning, or religion, nature, and terror. African medicine survived the Middle Passage; it was imported into the Caribbean world where it continued to develop, evolve, and borrow from both European and Caribbean medicine. In this sense, the African slaves’ familiarity with herbs and the knowledge of herbal remedies render African medicine a syncretic medicine. But who were the enslaved healers? Karol K. Weaver´s answer is that they were respected members of the slave community. Hospital workers, midwives, and spiritual healers all employed herbal remedies. Weaver holds that the plants were not only the components of remedies, but cultural symbols as well. “A plant´s ritual significance could not be separated from its healing ability. African men and women did not differentiate between plants as drugs and plants as food sources—plants were consumed for their health benefits” (66).

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The fact that plants had a symbolic quality and also served multiple purposes blurs the dividing line between healing and poisoning. Therefore, the question as to which activity played a major role, healing or poisoning—or whether a religion turned into black magic or vice-versa—will probably remain unanswered. For the time being, it is important to bear in mind that both practices—healing and poisoning—were in fact religious practices. At one end of the spectrum, it was with plants and herbal concoctions that enslaved herbalists treated anything from infected wounds to tetanus, syphilis, malaria, yellow fever, and scurvy, whereas on the opposite end the plants and mushrooms that Mamán Loi and Mackandal examined were destined to be used as lethal weapons. An argument could be that Mackandal and Mamán Loi were not enslaved herbalists, but rather vodou practitioners, so conscious of the fact that the organic matter collected by Mackandal was to be used for religious purposes (and ultimately for terroristic purposes), that the words vodou and religion were almost redundant. In fact, the word vodou is not mentioned, but there are many allusions to snakes in the first few chapters of El reino de este mundo. By definition, vodou is a god, a spirit, and a sacred object at the same time. In other words, vodou is both a god and a fetish, just as Mackandal is simultaneously a person and a packet of poisons, a macandal. Since Mackandal’s name means amulet, there is no way to determine which came first, the person or the fetish. Moreau de Saint-Méry’s translation of the word vaudou is “the snake under whose auspices gather all those who share the faith” (Métraux 36). Métraux even suggests that vodou and snake are interchangeable when he writes: “The Vodou—that is to say the snake—will not give of its power or make known its will, except through a high priest or priestess” (Ibid., 36). Vodou as magic, as medicine, as well as a religion (the tie that binds), and a reason for being, is ever-present in Mackandal’s and Mamán Loi’s clandestine meetings that could have occurred daily, or weekly, or for an entire week, or month, or year. Carpentier´s use of the imperfect tense emphasizes the routine and the repetition with no reference as to how much time elapsed or how many times Mackandal and Ti Noel paid visits to Mamán Loi before the time came for Mackandal’s marronage. In fact, Mackandal’s and Mamán Loi´’s encounters are all in the imperfect tense. In one instance, Carpentier writes, “a veces” (at times), and this occurred when Mamán Loi and Mackandal would talk either about animals becoming human, or humans becoming animals and acquiring lycanthropic powers. Although the conversation and the recurrence of the conversation remain in the imperfect, the use of a veces suggests that this talk of animals did not occur each and every time the one-armed slave and the priestess met. Again, the clandestine meetings and the periodic tracing of a soft border between humans and animals always suggest the practice of vodou, as does

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Mamán Loi’s house: a tribute to the vodou guardians of the cemetery and to the African lwas in a Saint-Domingue where vodou was expressly forbidden. Carolyn Fick believes that despite prohibitions, vodou was one of the few areas of totally autonomous activity for the African slaves, and that as a religion and a vital spiritual force, it was a source of psychological liberation (44–45). The spiritual force has everything to do with nature. A connection can easily be established between vodou and the natural world. Each lwa does indeed personify forces of nature, and each lwa owns his/her own tree and plants and may be propitiated for purposes of protection, of healing, or of harm. In this instance, the plant matter that could have treated infection or illness was only being examined and collected by Mackandal and Mamán Loi for purposes of resistance, vengeance, and terror. Plants could heal, but they could poison as well. At times knowledge of the healing arts had everything to do with what dose was necessary for life or for death. In this sense, healing could very well be the origin of the practice, since healing involves life and death, and the healer who can preserve life can also take life. Maya Deren alludes to this soft border between life and death when she writes, “The hero of man’s metaphysical adventure—his healer, his redeemer, his guide and guardian— is always a corpse” (23–24). Healing, in fact, played a vital role in the practice of vodou. Maya Deren holds that the houngan´s major role was medical (161). Likewise, Métraux affirms that the main income of a houngan came from his fees for treating the sick (74). What distinguished houngans from both medical doctors and herb doctors was that houngans only dealt with supernatural illnesses caused by sorcerers, whereas the white medical doctors treated the so-called natural ailments, and the herb doctors treated people with medicinal herbs. Métraux suggests that there was competition between the three, in other words, between the vodou priests, the white medical doctors, and the herbalists. Furthermore, it is likely that there was often debate as to whether an illness was natural or supernatural. Several eighteenth-century books, archival records, periodicals, and even court proceedings trace a history of illness and treatments for illnesses in the island of Saint- Domingue. In her study of enslaved healers, Karol Weaver’s sources include: Jean-Barthélemy Dazille’s Observations sur les maladies des nègres, Nicolas Louis Bourgeois’s, Voyages Intessans, and MédéricLouis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s, Lois et Constitutions and Description Topographique. Unfortunately, there is an absence of documents written by the African healers, herbalists, priests, and veterinarians of the time. This knowledge has either been assimilated or forgotten. The likelihood is that some remedies of African origin were appropriated by the white surgeons and apothecaries, while others were kept so secret that

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they eventually accompanied the herbalists and the vodou practitioners such as Mamán Loi and Mackandal to their graves. This makes it almost impossible to gain an in-depth knowledge of African medicine, and consequently to determine not only which herbs were used for which ailments, but also the composition of the poisons. Wade Davis lists ingredients such as a powder ground from the dried hearts of human victims, ground glass, lizards, toads, crushed snakes, and human remains (196). The historian Carolyn Fick refers to a concoction that consisted of sage, eggs, boiler scrapings, pois puants, blue verbena, wild raspberry, and wheat herb, all boiled together with a black powder added (256–257). Before the slave Assam took the latter remedy to her master’s plantation, however, the slave responsible for the concoction drew blood from Assam’s shoulder, rubbed the cut with gunpowder, scraped the dried blood with a knife, placed a piece of a ram´s horn in the dried blood, and put everything in his pocket. When she was interrogated on September 27, 1757, Assam admitted to having thrown away the packets of drugs when she was arrested because of the bad effect they had had on her master and her fellow slaves. It could very well be that she had been instructed to discard the evidence in case of arrest either to keep the recipe secret or to keep secret the fact that there was no recipe, that this was merely rat poison or arsenic. Most importantly, the secret, whatever it was, kept the practice of vodou alive and effective. Again, the clandestine nature of the times will forever leave a veil of darkness over herbs and poisons in pre-revolutionary Haiti. However, it could very well be that many of the remedies used in modern-day Haiti go back to the secret and illegal remedies of the slave days. Maya Deren affirms that the race would not have survived without a widespread knowledge of herbalism. Laws figure among the extant documents of the times, and these bear witness to the prevalence of poisons and also to the tension between slaves and the white and mulatto population when it came to medical practice. Slaves managed hospitals, slaves assisted surgeons, slaves acted as nurses and midwives, slaves knew how to cure wounds, reduce fevers, treat scurvy, and cure sick animals. Karol Weaver even demonstrates that an indigenous knowledge of inoculation survived the Middle Passage. This procedure, called acheter la petite vérole (buying smallpox) consisted of buying smallpox from infected patients and giving it to oneself in order to acquire immunity (54). Nonetheless, a law enacted in 1738 prohibited surgeons, apothecaries, and druggists from entrusting poisons and drugs to slaves (not necessarily to free blacks or mulattoes). Another law enacted in 1772 even banned the sale of rat poisons containing arsenic to the slave population. Such laws suggest that those slaves who could heal could also do harm, and that the efforts to heal and also to do harm were an occasion for the expression of African ways. There was, however,

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no bold line of demarcation between science or medicine and religion, the two seemed to go hand in hand. There was the belief that it was the lwas or saints who informed the vodou practitioner as to which herbs to use, and such beliefs can be labeled superstitious and primitive. But there was also a solid indigenous medical knowledge that empowered the slaves, maintained their traditional beliefs, and fomented resistance. More laws to curb the distribution and circulation of drugs and poisons were enacted after Mackandal’s capture. Karol Weaver writes that immediately after Mackandal’s execution the making or selling of packets known as macandals was prohibited and slave owners were ordered to strictly supervise herbalists and hospital workers who were in charge of distributing remedies (92). But there was also debate as to whether illness and suspicious deaths were the result of poisoning committed by slaves or resulted from natural causes, and so if in fact actual poisonings by slaves were rare or frequent. Perhaps these were simply efforts to assuage the fears of the population and to divert the attention away from the power and knowledge of the slaves when it came to poisons and medicinal herbs. Both Mamán Loi and Mackandal represent the power to do harm when they meet to examine the plant matter. The repetitiveness of these encounters is only broken with the words “Cierta vez” that could be translated into once. From this moment on, practically all the verbs are in the preterit: Mamán Loi fell silent, ran to the kitchen, and put her arms in a pot of boiling oil while Ti Noel tried to hide his astonishment. Again, time in terms of length of time seems to be of little or no importance, so there is no telling how long the waiting and the preparation lasted. Carpentier simply begins a paragraph with “Un día” (One day). One day they poisoned a dog and on the afternoon of that day Mackandal returned to the plantation and stopped to examine it carefully, only to decide that the time had come, the time for his marronage. The entire passage in the imperfect is a gathering of knowledge, a preparation, and when the imperfect ends and the preterit begins, so the cycle of terror begins. The story of Mackandal is also rethought by Zapata in the first section of “La rebelión de los vodús” titled “Hablan los caballos y sus jinetes.” (The Horses and their riders speak) The title of this subsection is a reference to orishas or lwas (spirits or powers) who mount mediums or any initiate willing to receive them and who can then speak for the dead or for the spirits or powers. The spirits subsequently become the jinete or horseman, and the medium the horse. “Vengan, Don Petro quiere hablarles hoy de Mackandal” (Come, today Don Petro wishes to talk to you about Mackandal) (251). With that invitation Zapata announces the entry of Mackandal invoked by the defunct Bouckman when he led the slave revolts of Bois Caïman. “Mackandal huye de la habitación de Lenormand de Mézy donde cuidaba del Ganado. Siempre fue arriero y por eso sabe conducer sus tropas

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cimarronas. Manco, si hubiera tenido dos brazos se toma la isla entera” (Mackandal flees Lenormand de Mézy’s estate where he took care of the cattle. He was always a muleteer thus very capable of leading his maroon troupes. He was missing an arm, had he had two he would have taken the entire island) (Zapata 251). Zapata also recounts Mackandal’s arrest and the French affirming that they burned him at the stake on a twentieth of January. But Mackandal has not died, he speaks, he says that no bullet can kill him nor is there a bayonet capable of taking his eye out, or a fire able to burn him. Those are all lies, “¡Con este brazo muerto he cortado mil cabezas de blancos!” (With this dead arm I have taken off thousands of white men’s heads!) (254). The word maroon comes from the Spanish word cimarrón, a domesticated pig that reverted to the wild state. It was in the Caribbean world of slavery that the word came to be used of runaway slaves. When Mackandal disappeared, his master did send out a search party, only to make the other slaves understand that this type of behavior was unacceptable. The truth is that the master erroneously came to the conclusion that a one-armed slave was nothing but a one-armed slave, perhaps of less value than a runaway pig and hardly worth the loss of good mastiffs. Thus, the search party was called off. The problem, however, was absence. First there was Mackandal´s severed arm, then his entire body. “The body was a text, and lack left an indelible mark,” James Pancrazio writes (155). If for Mackandal absence was being, then an absent Mackandal became much more than a one-armed slave, an absent Mackandal was a packet of poisons, a macandal, a legend, a name whispered in secret nocturnal gatherings. James Pancrazio holds that El reino de este mundo implicitly suggests that a resistance model is on “conceptual complicity with hegemonic discourse. Marronage is the inverted reflection of emancipatory moralism, the basis of revolutionary praxis in Cuba: both sustain an ideology of disappearance in which being is not in the kingdom of this world” (182). But to what kingdom does Mackandal belong? From the very beginning, Carpentier’s story refers to several worldly yet faraway kingdoms: France and Africa, for example. Then there is the heavenly kingdom: the kingdom of Christ. But there is also the elusive kingdom of this world, elusive because it is continually being displaced or relocated. Initially, Mackandal appears to belong if not to the kingdom at least to a kingdom of this world, the natural world, the unnatural plantation, for Mackandal is close to nature. His hand forages in the grasses and recognizes what it finds. Mackandal’s lwas and his poisons can all be found in the natural world that becomes a refuge from oppression and at the same time the possibility of freedom, of revenge, and of rebellion. But when Mackandal goes into deep marronage and creates a false absence that exacerbates his being, he appears to be fleeing to another

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kingdom, a kingdom out there that renders the kingdom of this world, the one where his hand foraged in the grasses, a kingdom where his absence reigns. Mackandal’s absence made Ti Noel feel left behind. Mackandal seemed to have taken everything, including Africa and the salt of life (27). The observer was left with nothing to observe, at least not until Mackandal reappeared, physically diminished and mentally empowered. What astonished Ti Noel the most was how much work Mackandal had put into organizing a slave rebellion. The absent Mackandal was soon to become the omnipresent Lord of Poison. “El veneno se arrastraba por la Llanura del Norte, invadiendo los potreros y los establos. No se sabía como avanzaba entre las gramas y alfalfas” (The poison was crawling through the Northern Plains, invading the barns and the stables. No one knew how it made its way through the grasses and the alfalfa) (31). The most knowledgeable herbalists in the Cap were summoned, but the poison continued to spread and to kill for an indeterminate amount of time until a bowlegged slave denounced Mackandal after having been repeatedly threatened with a load of gunpowder up his rear end. The slave talked: the Lord of Poison was none other than the one-armed houngan Mackandal, a member of the Rada rite (33–34). Interestingly, Wade Davis makes a bold distinction between the Rada and the Petro rites. “In Haiti, the Rada have come to represent the emotional stability and warmth of Africa, the hearth of the nation” (49). Davis then proceeds to describe the Petro rites as reflecting, “all the rage, violence and delirium that threw off the shackles of slavery. The drums, dancing, and rhythm of their beat are completely distinct. Whereas the Rada drumming and dancing are on beat, the Petro are offbeat, sharp, and unforgiving, like the crack of a rawhide whip” (Ibid., 49). Maya Deren, in turn, writes that the difference between Rada and Petro is not to be found on a moral plane as an opposition between good and evil. While the Rada lwas may punish severely, the Petro lwas have been known to behave if properly propitiated. “As the Haitians put it, the Petro are plus raide: more hard, more tough, more stern; less tolerant and forgiving, more practical and demanding” (61). The Petro rites were introduced in Saint-Domingue in 1768, approximately ten years after Mackandal´s execution. Had this occurred during Mackandal’s lifetime, and by virtue of Mackandal’s intention to abolish slavery, to rid all of Saint-Domingue of its white inhabitants, and to establish a republic of free blacks, Mackandal would have belonged to the Petro rites rather than the Rada. In this light, the Petro rites reflect a transitional moment in the history of slavery, a distancing from the plantation because there is to be no tolerance of slavery. Besides being an unloved place, however, up until that point the plantation had functioned as a mental space where Africa and a past were

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re-created. Turning away from the plantation also signifies turning away from a mythical Africa. Flight implies a destination. Again, the kingdom of this world is being re-located. Perhaps this has something to do with the reason why Carpentier chose Haiti rather than Cuba as the stage for El reino de este mundo. Roger Bastide points out that because Haiti lost its white population at an early date, vodou was free to develop in a way that it ceased not only to be an African religion but also to express a desire to return to Africa (138). Thus, the island of Saint-Domingue itself becomes the kingdom of this world and ceases to be the place where Africa is regretted as the lost kingdom. Mackandal came across this truth by becoming animal. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari consider becoming animal to be an answer, “to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape, head over heels and away, rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge, or judged” (12). Or slave. In the four years of his marronage, Mackandal continued to control the slaves in the plantation while undergoing a series of transformations. “Todos sabían que la iguana verde, la mariposa nocturna, el perro desconocido, el alcatraz inverosímil, no eran sino simples disfraces” (Everyone knew that the green iguana, the nocturnal butterfly, the strange dog, the incredible pelican, were nothing but simple disguises) (37). For Deleuze and Guattari, however, becoming animal has nothing to do with a substitute for the father or with an archetype. Consequently, Mackandal’s dialectics are not those of the master and the slave and Saint-Domingue’s dialectics are not those of the colonizer and the colonized or even of Prospero and Caliban, as Miampika suggests. Because Deleuze and Guattari consider archetypes to be processes of spiritual reterritorialization, for these two critics becoming animal is an absolute deterritorialization. The cycle of terror comes full cycle, for marronage is deterritorialization as well. When the cycle of his metamorphoses ends, Mackandal becomes a man again: a man intent on creating or re-creating the kingdom of this world: in this case, Haiti, the ceremony, serment. Carolyn Fick remarks that the story of the ceremony, having passed into legend, makes it difficult to separate fact from mythology. What can be safely said, however, is “that the Bois-Caïman ceremony did historically occur following the Morne-Rouge assembly; second, that the oration delivered was authentically Boukman’s and that the ceremony was, after all, a voodoo event” (94). Even more important for Fick is the fact that a final agreement was reached and sealed by a blood pact and a call to arms issued at the August 14 assemblies. “In this sense, voodoo provided a medium for the political organization of the slaves, as well as an ideological force, both of which contributed directly to the success of what became a virtual blitzkrieg attack on the plantations across the province” (Ibid.).

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Carpentier puts his character Ti Noel in Bois Caïman listening to Bouckman’s powerful voice in the middle of what he saw as “congreso de sombras” (Convening of shadows) (59). The voice was interrupted only by the claps of thunder. Ti Noel the observer believes that something has happened in France, that the slaves had been freed and that the plantation owners refused to obey. Bouckman remained silent while the torrential rain fell on the trees. He waited for lightning to strike to declare that a pact had been sealed. “¡Rompan la imagen del Dios de los blancos, que tiene sed de nuestras lágrimas; escuchemos en nosotros mismos la llamada de la libertad!” (Destroy the image of the God of the white men who is thirsty for our tears; let us listen to the call for liberty in ourselves) (60). “Couté la liberté li palé nan Coeur nous tous” (Fick 1990, 93). In Changó, el gran putas, the orishas are the ones who invoke the cast of characters at Bois Caïman. They call Bouckman, Toussaint, Mackandal, Dessalines. Bouckman points to the mountain and says, “¡La reunión est en Bois-Caïman!” (The meeting is in Bois Caïman!) (271). After the pact was sealed, violence. “Era tanta la violencia de aquellos días . . . que los Muertos perdemos la memoria o confundimos los recuerdos. No sé si los cimarrones formamos a nuestros generales o si ellos, señalados por Changó, llegaron a la guerrilla con su sabiduría de antiquísimos Guerreros” (The violence of those days was such that we the dead lose our recall or confuse the memories. I do not know if the marrons were the ones who educated our generals or if they arrived at the battlefield with the wisdom of the oldest warriors, prompted by Changó) (275). Toussaint, who had been taught by Ogún how to cure with plants, joined the ranks as a surgeon. Christophe was dressed as a waiter (275). Thirty-three-year-old Dessalines spoke with the voice of an old man, “Nuestra debilidad es la desorganización” (Our weakness of lack of organization) (276). In the meantime, the waiter Christophe puts a crown on Dessalines’s head and suggests, “Solo los incendios nos harán dueños de esta isla” (Only fire will make us the rulers of this island) (276). Fire and order, “Solo cuando comenzaron a arder las plantaciones del sur, los blancos pueden comprobar, sin creerlo, que la rebelión había sido muy bien organizada: en solo cuatro días se extendió a toda la isla” (278). (It was only when the southern plantations began to burn that the white people realized, without believing it, that the rebellion had been very well organized: in only four days it took over the entire island.) Changó, in turn, made Mackandal a Marshall, Dessalines an Emperor, Christophe King, Pétion President of Trust, and gave Toussaint the keys to Elegba, even dead he would be a door/an opening (L’Ouverture) to liberty (285). Toussaint was also given a gold bullet by Baron Samedi (280) who was hungry for the flesh of the white people. Take it, he said, only this projectile can take your life.

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Buenaventura’s play “Historia de una bala de plata” (Story of a Silver Bullet) transcends time and space but also takes the spectators back to that night at Bois Caïman and the making and unmaking of Haiti. History and its errors undergo an eternal return. The silver bullet alludes to Henri Christophe who committed suicide by shooting himself with a silver bullet, only that this time Henri Christophe is Louis Poitié/Christopher Jones a black veteran of the Civil War who has murdered a white man for having raped his wife and whose life is spared by a Klansman named Míster Smith. There are constant references to Bois Caïman, the prologue ends with a drummer saying, “Y ahora noche oscura, noche tormentosa, llena de presagios” (10). (And now dark night, stormy night, night of augury.) Such was the night of August 14, 1791. When Míster Smith introduces Poitié/Jones to the sailors on the ship taking them to a French colony, he says, “Están ustedes ante el Napoleón negro del Mar Caribe!” (You have before you the black Napoleon of the Caribbean Sea!) (15). Toussaint L’Ouverture was often referred to as the Black Napoleon. Míster Smith’s intention is to have Poitié/Jones liberate the slaves and to crown him Emperor Cristóbal Jones. Upon reaching land, Míster Smith goes to a cabaret called El siglo de las luces (a reference to Carpentier’s novel) where the whores sing an ode to audacity and where Smith plans his takeover of the island and where Jones appears dressed as a general as if it were his turn to perform on the stage. When three gangsters try to shoot Jones and fail to do so, Smith explains that Jones s immortal, or at least cannot be killed with lead bullets. “No solamente es un héroe,” Smith says, “conoce también la vieja hechicería africana. Por eso no le entran las balas de plomo” (Not only is he a hero, but he knows old African witchcraft. That is why lead bullets won’t touch him) (25–26). According to Beatriz Rizk, the play is brimming with mythical references. First, there is the Jones myth, like Christophe in La tragedia, Jones is the classic hero chosen to be the liberator of the slaves and whose rise to power is almost the result of a magic act (237). Smith, in turn, is the modern version of the mythological hero, always referring to his supernatural faculties. “al igul que el Mackandal de Carpentier, se basa en el conocimiento de los mitos y rituals del Africa ancestral y de sus poderes mágicos, como el de transformarse corpóreamente en otras especies” (239). Rizk believes that this myth goes all the way to to Greco-trajan mythology where Proteus, the god of the sea, could become animal, a lion, a serpent, an ant. Likewise, “Historia de una bala de plata” is a becoming other of the stories told by Carpentier and Zapata, as if the story had to be transfigured to be better understood or assimilated. This retelling is about staying the same and becoming other, becoming animal.

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Toward the end of his life, Carpentier’s Ti Noel becomes animal as Mackandal once did, but his metamorphoses are the exact opposite of Mackandal’s. In fact, Ti Noel’s becoming animal could not be more contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of becoming animal: To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. (13)

In other words, Ti Noel’s becoming animal is everything Mackandal’s becoming animal is not, just as Mackandal is everything Ti Noel is not. More than the dialectics of the master and the slave, Ti Noel and Mackandal are Carpentier’s hidden dialectics. There even exist different ways of becoming an animal. In flight, in disappearance, Mackandal became an animal to gain freedom of movement. Becoming animal was action. Furthermore, Mackandal changed animal forms rapidly, without stopping, without giving the particular form any thought. Ti Noel, in turn, chose to become animal because he was tired of being human and disillusioned with the eternal return of the same: the Mackandal Conspiracy, followed by the Bouckman and the Bois Caїman call for rebellion, followed by the Henri Christophe fiasco. The struggle for liberation was at an impasse and the circle had become a vicious circle. Ti Noel becomes animal out of unhappiness and discontentment. The result is that for Ti Noel becoming animal is a failure. The animal societies turn out to be just as cruel as the human societies, if not more so. Being a wasp was too boring, whereas being an ant meant carrying heavy loads under the surveillance of, “unas cabezotas que demasiado le recordaban los mayorales de Lenormand de Mezy, los guardias de Christophe, mulatos de ahora” (Big headed ants that reminded him of Lenormand de Mezy´s overseers, Christophe´s guard, the mulattoes of toda.) (146). In one last effort to find an answer by becoming animal, and also believing that geese had a quasi-perfect society, Ti Noel chose to become a goose only to be either attacked by his fellow geese for trying to occupy a place in the clan, and then ignored for being too passive. No matter what Ti Noel did to gain the approval of the geese, the clan continued to behave like a totally closed aristocratic society. Perhaps there is too much symbolism in Ti Noel’s repeated disillusionments and in the similarities between all animal societies and the Saint-Domingue society of the time. Mackandal, however, had already succeeded where Ti Noel failed. What Mackandal’s hand found was nature, and then poisons in the natural world: a possibility of action and of terror. Subsequently, there

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was freedom of movement in becoming animal. Mackandal´s hand opened the door to Bouckman and Henri Christophe who were unable to fully cross the threshold or to break the ring of the cycle of terror. As pale imitations of Mackandal, the future leaders of Haiti appear to be an eternal return of tragedy and of failure: an impossibility of revolution or of improvement of the human condition. In spite of the failures of Mackandal’s observer (Ti Noel) and of his successors (Bouckman, Henri Christophe, Toussaint, Dessalines, and even Boyer), Mackandal’s freedom of action as a result of his relationship with the natural world did culminate in the abolition of slavery, in the overthrow of white rule in Saint-Domingue, and in Haiti winning its independence in the beginning of the nineteenth century. John Maddox considers Changó, el gran putas to be tragedy, a song of sacrifice, the goat song, thus linking black people with goats, scapegoats (74). Zapata’s novel is also a drama of memory, a “written representation of oral performance that connects listeners’ identity and emotions to the foundational violence of the past” (61). In this tragic sense, and turning back to Carpentier, Mackandal and Ti Noel represent all the slaves, they are, on a symbolic plane, always playing out a role that exacerbates the dialectics of culture and nature or of myth and history. In her approach to Carpentier´s dialectics and what she considers to be the insolvable dualities of the Cuban author’s thought process, Inmaculada López Calahorro turns to Aristotle, who defines tragedy less as a mimesis of human beings, but rather as an imitation of actions and of life. “El conflicto en ningún caso puede resolverse, y he aquí que el planteamiento de irresolución nos acerca al final de la tragedia griega. No es posible, ni interesa ponerlo de manifiesto, tener un final feliz” (The conflict can never be resolved and this is where a rapprochement can finally be made between the question of irresolution and Greek tragedy. There may be no interest in putting this forth, but it is not possible to have a happy ending) (37). Similarly, Maddox considers Toussaint to be not only the tragic hero, but also the tragedy of Haiti because Toussaint’s tragic downfall is also a collective downfall. “The Haitian revolution consists of repeating deaths and continuing tragic spirits: Toussaint’s, that of Dessalines, that of Christophe and the spirit of the Haitian people’s ideals and freedoms that transcend the earthly battles of the Haitian revolution” (75). As a result, and by virtue of being tragic, characters such as Ti Noel and Mackandal are pre-determined (although they are tragic in different ways), but also determined as they evolve, and ultimately defined in terms of their lucidity. Because Carpentier advocated a difference between historical time and personal time, López Calahorro proposes that these characters be analyzed according to the different moments of time that unfurl in the story of Oedipus: a time of waiting, a time of observation, a time of lucidity, and a time of inversion. This thesis is valuable as an approach to Zapata’s and Carpentier’s

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novels and to Buenaventura’s plays, and to the actual kingdom of this world, because it introduces time without, however, putting the different moments of time in the straight line known as chronological order. There does not, however, appear to be a time for action in this exegesis unless lucidity and inversion are considered forms of action or re-action. In this case, Ti Noel spends his life observing, only to become lucid at the very end, just before he is swallowed by a strong gust of wind, never to be seen again. Because it takes Ti Noel a lifetime to come close to assimilating what Mackandal always knew, it could very well be that Ti Noel´s only other function besides that of passive witness is—as the critic Roberto González Echevarría suggests—to unify various historical events with his presence (135). Mackandal, in turn, whether present or absent, always appears to be living or remembered in a time of lucidity, of inversion, of observation, and of waiting. The fact is that these seemingly different historical events are simply the endless repetition of one and the same event. In other words, Bouckman and Henri Christophe are but the eternal return of Mackandal, if not pale imitations, or better yet, the discovery that the project initiated by Mackandal ended with Mackandal: Bouckman and Henri Christophe, internally divided, self-hatred remaking the curse of Ham, the malediction of Changó. NOTE 1. Some passages relative to Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World were previously published in Ometeca, Vol. XVIII, 2013.

Chapter 7

Madness and Hatred Rivera’s Inferno

“Littered with madness,” such is the expression that Simon Estok uses in reference to Shakespeare’s play, King Lear (2018, 120). For Estok, the character Edgar knows well how to use images and materials of nature to represent the troubled mind. Many of Estok’s depictions of Edgar would aptly describe José Eustacio Rivera’s character Arturo Cova and his degeneration-in-thejungle. Estok points to Edgar’s divided self and his becoming, “a thing fully inhabited by the wilderness and unpredictability he inhabits” (Ibid.). Estok also laments that so little work has been done within ecocriticism on psychiatric debility and disability (119). “People acquire phobias,” Edward Wilson wrote in The Diversity of Life in 1992 (349), some sixty years after Rivera’s Cova pronounced the phobia of nature in La vorágine, that same phobia that Estok termed ecophobia in his 2009 essay, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” Although Estok concedes that this phobia did at times function to preserve our species, it also served growth economies. It was Rivera’s intent to denounce these growth economies, all the while having Arturo Cova descend into madness in the quick of the denunciation. “While literary madness and real madness are entirely different things,” Estok writes, “the literary mad linger with us and resonate in our consciousness long after we shut the book” (2018, 123). As we open the book, the story that Rivera tells in La vorágine is simple, yet complicated. An easy, whimsical affair, a couple flees the city of Bogotá, they are eager to get away from the compromised girl’s enraged parents who want her to marry an older man of their choosing, the love that never was soon turns to tedium and regret. This external journey, Arturo and Alicia’s flight that the critic Hilda Perera considers imposed from the outside, from Rivera himself, but told from the inside (18), soon becomes a neurosis, an internal journey. 121

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The jungle story is complex, yet simple. The movement, the flight, transforms the travelers from the onset. It is said that the ability to travel turns us into animals (as opposed to plants); the couple Arturo-Alicia is an example of this transformation. The jungle story is a flight into the heart of darkness, a discovery of “the horror” that Kurtz utters in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and that Saer’s eternal foundling (El entenado) witnesses not only in the jungle, but throughout his entire life. La vorágine, the jungle story, is a voyage of no possible return because Arturo Cova, the traveler, quite immediately ceases to be the traveler who left Bogotá. As Luis Eyzaguirre affirms, before embarking on an adventure such as Cova’s, the hero must perform some rites of initiation. “Cova no lo hace y no puede entonces volver de su viaje con el amuleto o gracia que fue a buscar al pais de los Muertos” (Cova fails to do this and can no longer return from his voyage with the amulet or grace that he went to seek in the land of the dead) (82). In passing, Conrad’s Marlow does not believe that there can be initiation, quite the contrary: “There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has fascination, too. [. . .] The fascination of the abomination” (6). The abomination has everything to do with the place, as Marlow reflects, “Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery” (Ibid.). As to Cova, the place where he initially lands, the scenic present: the vortex at its widest circle, the slowest and the furthest from the axis. First the plains, then the jungles of Colombia. Astvaldur Astvaldsson writes that just as there are stories that make a place, there are places that make the story (75). With an ecocritical approach, this analysis will delve into the interior and the exterior journey, the traveler’s introspection and the contact with the new environment, and finally the implication of the journey as it draws closer to the axis, to absorption by the vortex, to madness and hatred, always considering the question: Was it the inside or the outside? It will also explore the jungle as vortex, as a place of darkness, as it is in danger of existing no more, in other words, what Scott DeVries considers to be the political ecology of this novel that advocates for reform under the auspices of governmental agencies instead of conservation for its own sake (145). Part Two of Rivera’s novel begins with exclamations and questions. “¡Oh selva, esposa del silencio, madre de la soledad y de la neblina! ¿Qué hado maligno me dejó prisionero en tu carcel verde?” (Oh jungle, wife of silence, mother of fog and solitude! What malignant genie made me a prisoner in your green jail?) (79). As he descends into madness, his hatred and resentment toward nature increases. At this point, Arturo Cova has ventured deep into the jungle, time and space have taken him from the capital city of Bogotá, to the plains of Cáqueza, to Casanare, and beyond, in the direction of el Vichada,

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a point of no return. Although from the onset this novel is Dante’s Divine Comedy with only one orb, the Inferno, by the beginning of Part Two of the narrative Arturo Cova has already witnessed the horror and is now reaching for the smallest circles, the ones closest to the axis where the velocity of the vortex is greatest, both introspectively and environmentally, internally and externally. Part One, in turn, ends with fire and with two exclamations, “¡Dios me desamparaba y el amor huía! En medio de las llamas empecé a reír como Satanás!” (God had forsaken me and love was fleeing! In the middle of the flames, I began to laugh like Satan!) (78). He who ended up laughing like Satan was once Arturo Cova, a young man with dreams of fame and glory (7–8). Immediately upon arriving in Cáqueza with Alicia, he is already transformed. His desire satiated, he regrets the price he has paid for the body he has possessed and asks himself what comes after madness and possession (8). The internal journey has begun and will continue throughout the narrative alongside the external one. If indeed, movement is to animals what lack thereof is to plants, by fleeing Bogotá Cova temporarily leaves the poet behind, only to become a satiated animal. But not for long, the poet in him will incessantly question the flight. This is the inside, the internal journey to which the critic Eyzaguirre gives precedence. “Y, precisamente, la novela falla cuando el novelista se cree en la obligación de incluir en ella su pensamiento social, así como flaquea cuando el centro de gravedad cambia del interior del personaje al mundo alucinante de la selva a que este es arrastrado por su incurable espíritu romántico” (And, precisely, the novel fails when the novelist feels obliged to include his political thought within it, as when the center of gravity shifts from the inside of the main character to the hallucinating world of the jungle into which he is dragged because of his incurable romantic spirit) (82). While Eyzaguirre suggests totally eliminating the social plane and privileging only the psychological one, Scott DeVries focuses on the plight of the rubber tappers and environmental damage and points out how one of the characters, Clemente Silva, expresses regret about the possible loss of a species of a tree because of the industry (144). Leonidas Morales, in turn, prefers an analytical approach incorporating the two levels or planes, the psychological (romantic) and the social (the natural). Morales then avers that Cova’s personality flows between these two planes, and that Cova himself is the vehicle of these two planes, constituting perhaps a third plane, that of the character that assimilates both the social and psychological planes (148). Morales does, however, coincide with Eyzaguirre by writing that the social protest is, “el sector menos logrado y el más falso poéticamente en la novela” (The least successful and poetically the falsest aspect of the novel) (Ibid.). The reason for this—or the error in judgment—is that one tends to confuse Arturo Cova

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the narrator with what Arturo Cova says as a character. The social plane also threatens to make Rivera and/or Cova the writers of an autochthonous text and therefore transform it into an autochthonous discursive situation or what Carlos Alonso would label an anthropology that cannot recognize itself as such or, worse, a text seeking to affirm culture’s essence thereby condemned “to be perpetually interdicted from participating in it” (7). In other words, “Cuando lo dicho incide en el plano de la selva, la voz que narra es un registro exacerbado de sensaciones sobrecogedoras de terror y muerte. Pero cuando lo dicho incide en el plano del personaje, esa voz sale emprobrecida, alicorta, quejumbrosa o, si no, destemplada” (When what is said resides in the plane of the jungle, the voice that narrates is an exacerbated register of startling sensations of terror and death. But when what is said resides in the plane of the character, that voice comes out impoverished, suppressed, plaintive or, if not, unpleasant) (149). In light of these dichotomies, Morales proposes a reading of La vorágine as a journey or a descent into the land of the dead, a descent into hell. This descent is clearly announced by Cova after he sets La Maporita on fire and begins to laugh like Satan. Unlike Conrad’s Marlow who enters a dark place in search for Kurtz, much like Orpheus descends to rescue Eurydice, and Dante’s Virgil to search for his father, Cova’s flight or descent is more like Satan’s, totally internal, Satan feeling the proximity of the fire, the vortex. This contradicts Hilda Perera who puts Rivera himself in this descent, “quien les empuja al escenario de antemano escogido para su obra” (who pushes them beforehand into the environment he has chosen for his work) (18). In this case, for the story to be, there must already be a place, the outside. Unlike Perera and Morales, Charlotte Rogers focuses on the psychological plane, Cova’s progressive descent into madness and how his description of the jungle serves to describe the madness. For Rogers, insanity is the central theme of La vorágine and the locus of the malady is, precisely, the wilderness (92). In his descent, Cova becomes the Other, as described by Serenella Iovino in her essay, “The Human Alien. Otherness, Humanism, and the Future of Ecocriticism.” Describing madness as an intrusion of nature into culture, Iovino writes that, “By showing that the Other is not only nature (as the other-than-human), madness and disability introduce a radical fracture in the traditional taxonomy of the human subject. The human itself can become the Other, the human alien. Examining this “alien” presence within the human is a way for ecocriticism to deconstruct the idea of humanity-quanormality and to approach a more complex and inclusive type of humanism, a plural, and “evolved” one (55). Iovino identifies three zones in every text that represents otherness inside the human world, three zones that all apply to Arturo Cova: wilderness of the body, of the mind, and of the more than human (mystical experience).

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All three zones are pertinent to Cova’s mental and physical degeneration in the jungle, this wilderness of the more than human that could also be considered to be Cova’s own soil. But is this really Cova’s own soil? The jungle may be Colombian territory, but Cova is from the city, he does not own the vortex. Cova is not even the anthropologist of his own culture, nor is he the tourist or the gawker. The social plane could very well be a minute effort at autochthonous expression that fails and consequently saves the text. As Alonso affirms, “not finding what they are looking for in a text would constitute the confirmation that they had found the text they were looking for in the first place” (3). This could very well have everything to do with Rivera having found this text somewhere in the wilderness. But where is nature in this text? It is so present that it is absent, impossible to find or grasp. Timothy Morton would consider it a hyperobject, not visible, not local, yet local, just as madness is not visible, on the same plane as global warming, nuclear radiation, and endocrine disruptors (Morton 2013, 38). This reading, consequently, is an effort to approach nature or the jungle as vortex, as madness itself, and to understand how this madness exacerbates Arturo Cova from the onset. “When you approach an object, more and more objects emerge” Morton writes in Hyperobjects. “It’s like being in a dream written by Zeno. Hyperobjects envelop us, yet they are so massively distributed in time that they seem to taper off, like a long street stretched into the distance” (55). The first line of Part One of La vorágine announces what will happen in the future, Cova’s heart will be overcome by the Violence (7), yet another hyperpbject. The last line is a result, Cova laughing like Satan (78). In between, the jungle renders Cova “loco de alcohol” (40), (mad with alcohol) and, I would add loco de celos, mad with jealousy, “La idea de que Alicia me fuera infiel llenábame de cóleras súbitas, y para no estallar en sollozos me mordía las manos” (The idea of Alicia being unfaithful fills me with sudden wrath, and so as not to burst out crying I would bite my hands) (43). The decent into the vortex is precipitous. Overtaken by jealousy, Cova swears to kill Barrera, and then Alicia. “¡Ni tampoco digan que estoy borracho! ¿Loco? ¡No!” (Don’t say I am drunk. Crazy? No!) (44). In this delirium, Cova sits down and laughs, announcing Satan’s laughter. He hallucinates, he is convinced he is an eagle floating in the wind wanting to descend and grab Alicia, but, much like Icarus, he went up too high and the sun began to burn his hair (45). In a moment of respite, however, Cova feels attracted to the jungle and contemplates living there with Alicia. He even asks himself, “¿Para qué las ciudades? Quizá mi fuente de poesía estaba en el secreto de los bosques intactos” (What are cities good for? Perhaps my poetic inspiration was in the secret of the intact forests) (61). Speaking here, is Rivera author of Tierra de promisión that earned him the moniker Bard of the Tropics (Rogers 100).

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Neale-Silva writes that in La vorágine Rivera understood how different the real jungle was from the imagined one. Carlos Alonso writes that it is a welldocumented fact that when Rivera wrote the sonnets in Tierra de promisión he had not yet visited the Amazon jungle (144). La vorágine, in contrast, was written after a year-long visit, what Alonso labels as an overwhelming and pernicious relationship with the jungle (137). Neale Silva aptly describes this dichotomy: “Ninguna duda cabe de que Rivera veía lo selvático por lo que tenia de monstruoso y de maléfico. [. . .] comprendía ahora cúan diferente era la realidad de lo que él se había imaginado. ¿No había escrito en otro tiempo [. . .] sobre la selva de anchas cúpulas, en que los vientos preludian grandiosos maitines, imaginándose oír mansas voces y moribundos flautines? [. . .] Nada de esto había hallado en la Floresta del Orinoco” (There is no doubt that Rivera contemplated the monstrous and evil facet of the jungle. Now he understood how different reality was from the reality he had imagined. Had he not written beforehand about a jungle of wide domes with whirling winds? He had found none of this in the flora of the Orinoco) (244). As Sylvia Molloy points out, it is the unhealthy itinerary or the monstrous and evil facet of the jungle that will make Rivera a writer. In other words, it is in the decaying jungle that Cova/Rivera will find his poetic inspiration. “No es un viaje que se atesorará de por vida como objeto valioso, sino un viaje que hará de la vida misma un objeto sin valor; no una experiencia de la que se saldrá ileso, sino una experiencia que será, toda ella, lesión. Ni itinerario espiritual ni viaje bibelot, la aventura de la selva en La vorágine sera un itinerario insalubre, que contamina a un hombre y su literatura, pero cuyo saldo no sera del todo negativo: hará de él, por fin, un escritor.” (The outcome of this journey will not render it valuable, on the contrary this is a journey that will make life an object devoid of value; he will not come out of this experience safe and sound, but damaged as with a lesion. Neither spiritual journey nor souvenir travel, the adventure of La vorágine will be unhealthy, it will contaminate a man and his literature, but the result will not be totally negative: it will make him, finally, a writer) (250). Cova stopping to consider living a jungle dream with Alicia is reminiscent of Tierra de promisión, a dream that was not to be. Or perhaps Cova was simply taking a moment to say good-bye to this dream. It is already too late. The love that Cova refers to as fleeing at the end of Part One, is a love that never was; either Alicia’s love or the love of Alicia, a woman Cova never did love. At the early stages of the journey from Bogotá to Casanare where Cova makes insomnia his confidant, he refers to Alicia as “un amorío fácil” (an easy conquest) (7). In his meanderings through dreams and memories, Cova wonders why he is immolating this compromised and whiny young woman with his passions. He also admits that she was simply “un antojo” (a whim), “saciado” (satiated), and he realizes that she is someone who burdened him

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like fetters, “Alicia me estorbaba como un grillete” (8). Forever in search of passion and ideal love, Cova knows that Alicia has killed something in him. They are moving, they are not plants, they are animals and the jungle is on the outside looking in, it is a reality. What keeps Cova from being swallowed by the outside—the jungle—in the very beginning is his perpetual return to the inside, his constant analysis of his psyche. When he is not awake at night regretting what never was and never will be, he is having nightmares that, according to Perera, Rivera uses as a means to better define his interiority in a constant struggle with the exteriority (16). “Volvía a ver a Alicia, desgreñada y desnuda, huyendo de mí por entre las malezas de un bosque nocturno (. . .) Llevaba yo en la mano una hachuela corta. Me detuve ante una araucaria de morados corimbos, parecida al árbol del caucho, y empecé a picarle la corteza para que escurriera la goma. ‘¿Por qué me desangras?’ suspiró una voz desfalleciente. ‘Yo soy tu Alicia y me he convertido en una parásita’” (I would see Alicia again, hair tousled, naked, fleeing from me in the dense vegetation of a nocturnal forest (. . .) In my hand I had a small ax (. . .) I stopped by some conifers that resembled rubber trees, and I started cutting into one of them to release the sap. “Why are you bleeding me out?” sighed a weak voice. “I am your Alicia become parasitic”) (27). Caught in the vortex, the outside, the jungle itself, Arturo and Alicia take turns killing and being killed. Who killed whom first? Cova is the first to mention that Alicia has killed his enthusiasm, but then again, Alicia only exists in Cova’s own words. Read alongside a passage in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this scene has already happened and will happen again, and again. Freud notes that in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, the hero Tancred kills his lover Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armor of an enemy knight, and then slashes a sword at a small tree after her burial only to realize, when blood is gushing out that tree, that Clorinda’s soul was imprisoned in the tree. Tancred has killed his beloved once again (16). In the story, in the purely episodic, in the scenic present, Alicia disappears with la niña Griselda before Cova has a chance to slash a sword into her flesh again, and once she has disappeared deeper into the jungle, she goes from being devoid of interiority—described only by Cova—to becoming a catalyst and an absence. As Bakhtin writes in The Dialogic Imagination, “The dead are loved in a different way. They are removed from the sphere of contact, one can and indeed must speak of them in a different style” (20). Henceforth, Cova ceases to liken Alicia to fetters, she becomes the reason for the descent, a journey, imposed from the outside, by her, propelled from the inside, by Cova himself. The descent into the jungle will therefore alternate between the internal and the external precisely because Cova the narrator and the heteroglossia of

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voices speaking all dwell at the confluence of the internal and the external. “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear,” Bakhtin writes, as if he were referring to a vortex. A few lines later, Bakhtin adds, “The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia” (272). According to Nancy Fernández, the border, in this case the outside, the edge of the jungle, determines the tension that exists between language and reality: “Para precisar el concepto de borde o de frontera (la interferencia, concepto tomado de Michel Serres, entre el lenguaje y lo real, entre el presente del yo y el pasado de la historia) en Saer assume dos sentidos o direcciones posibles . . . El borde, el límite o la frontera plantean la tensión entre el lenguaje y lo real. El idioma de los indios funciona como bisagra respecto del imaginario occidental, el espacio metafórico entre dos lenguas, dos culturas.” (The explanation of the concept of border or frontier (the interference, a concept borrowed from Michel Serres, between language and reality, between the present of the I and the past of history) has two different meaning or directions when it comes to Saer. The border, the limit, or the frontier set the tension between language and reality. When it comes to Western imagination, the language of the Indians acts as a hinge or metaphorical space between two languages, two cultures) (23–24). Although the jungle people are speaking the same language as Cova, in this case Spanish, they are two different cultures, two different languages. Fernández adds that the distance between self and otherness cannot be suppressed (14). In Cova’s Inferno, even within a common language there can be two cultures and two languages. Moreover, as Fernández suggests, “La proyección de espacio y tiempo deviene azar y fantasmagoría por lo que el viaje no solo es tópico y motivo literatio, el viaje y la escritura son operaciones complementarias en tanto practicas de pasaje y umbral que permiten vislumbrar la reposición de las leyes del inconsciente” (The projection of space and time become chance and phantasmagoria because the journey is not only a literary topic and motive, the journey and the writing are complementary actions as a rite of passage and a threshold that shed light on the repositioning of the laws of the subconscious) (108–109). The distance between self and otherness also becomes blurred when Cova speaks to the jungle as to a character. “Tu eres la cathedral de la pesadumbre, donde dioses desconcidos hablan a media voz, en el idioma de los murmullos, prometiendo longevidad a los árboles” (You are the cathedral of heaviness where unknown gods speak softly, in the language of whispers, promising longevity to the trees) (79). Carlos Alonso sees the overwhelming power of nature reflected in such a hyperbolic tone and believes that the heightened rhetoric of Cova conveys the disproportionate dimensions of the natural

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environment. “Hence, no symbiotic relationship between language and geography, only a “solipsistic monologue, where nature acts as a sort of immense echo chamber that returns to the speaker the garbled and amplified reverberations of his own discourse” (137–138). In his “solipsistic monologue” Cova also begs the jungle to allow him to flee, “¡Déjame huir, oh selva, de tus enfermizas penumbras, formadas con el hálito de los seres que agonizaron en el abandono de tu majestad! ¡Tu misma pareces un cementerio enorme donde te pudres y resucitas! Quiero volver a las regions donde el secreto no aterra a nadie” (Let me flee, oh jungle, from your sickly shadows formed with the breath of beings that agonized in the abandon of your majesty! You yourself resemble an enormous cemetery where you rot and resuscitate! I want to return to places where secrets do not terrify anyone!) (79). But there is no going home, no possible return to those places, no escape from madness. “Never again will I feel at home,” Lévi Strauss writes in Tristes Tropiques. “Yo ya no soy yo no mi casa es mi casa,” sighs García Lorca’s Soledad Montero. Metanoia is defined as a change in one’s way of life as a result of penitence or spiritual conversion. At a given moment in Cova’s journey, ¡Nadie nos buscaba ni perseguía! ¡Nos habían olvidados todos!” (No one was searching for us or following us! Everyone had forgotten us!) (80). Briefly, Cova considers returning to Bogotá first chance he gets. Instead, Cova opts to uproot himself even more and decides to head toward el Vichada, even deeper into the jungle. In his book Truth and Singularity, Rudi Visker addresses the concept of uprootedness or eigenlichkeit as something having to do with the realization that we need more not less uprootedness, or that it is only in uprootedness that we are truly at home. “Our roots lie in an uprootedness, in something that we never coincide with, something decentered with respect to us but which still remains for us the attraction of the centre” (161). At this point in Cova’s uprootedness, there is a river to cross on a boat that resembles a floating coffin. “Aquel río, sin ondulaciones, sin espumas, era mudo, tétricamente mudo como el presagio, y daba la impression de un camino oscuro que se moviera hacia el vórtice de la nada” (That river, so still, devoid of foam, was mute, as mute as a foreshadowing, and gave the impression of being a dark path leading toward the vortex of nothingness) (81). Just like the river, Cova’s whirlwind of thoughts oftentimes leads the reader astray. It becomes too easy to confuse Rivera, the writer, with Cova the narrator, with Cova the character. It is also too easy to confuse the novel with the literary convention, Rivera finding a manuscript fragment, Rivera pretending he didn’t write the novel, Rivera as editor, Rivera writing a prologue. This recourse is not new and has been used many times in novels and film. Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, Wrath of God, immediately announces that the only document to survive from Gonzalo Pizarro’s expedition in the

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Peruvian sierras was the diary of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal. According to Molloy, the convention or recourse fails in La vorágine because the text overflows, lo que apenas se menciona «adentro» cobra existencia y encuentra su letra «afuera». El encuadre que procuraba una verosimilitud narrativa, la realidad del documento, borra limites y contamina espacios: señala no só1o el carácter indudablemente ficcional de lo escrito, sino el desdoblamiento—más valdria decir la perversión—de la voz narrativa. Asi como a primera vista La vorágine acude a un viejo recurso estructurante, para luego subvertirlo hasta lo inverosimil, también retoma un trillado motivo—el viaje de aprendizaje hacia lo desconocido—para plegarlo a una insólita 1ógica propia. (what is barely mentioned “inside” gains existence and finds its meaning “outside.” The device that gave it a narrative likeliness, the reality of the document, erases the limits and contaminates the spaces: it signals not only the fictional character of the writing, but rather the duality—or even the perversion—of the narrative voice. Just as La vorágine initially turns to an old literary recourse in order to subvert it to the point of inverisimilitude later, it also borrows a wellknown motif—the voyage of self-discovery into the unknown—in order to bend it to an uncanny personal logic.) (748)

Augusto Roa Bastos coined the phrase literature without a past, past without literature. This literature without a past supposes a need to rescue an absent literature, de memory of texts erased and destroyed even before having been written. Rivera’s novel is presented with a fragment from a letter by Arturo Cova, much suggestive of a literature without a past and a past without literature. Astvaldsson refers here to a rescate creativo (68), a creative rescue that I believe resembles the violent attempt at rescuing Alicia. In this case, the search for Alicia is a disguised way of rescuing an erased and absent literature or a memory. Astvaldsson adds, “no todo conocimiento y significado guardado de una manera permanente está inscrito graficamente, también hay tradiciones orales que usan otro tipo de sistemas referenciales para preservar el conocimiento. En este caso el paisaje y una serie de lugares y objetos simbólicos juegan un papel decisivo” (not all knowledge and meaning kept in a permanent way if written, there are also oral traditions that use another type of referential system to preserve knowledge. In this case the landscape and a series of places and symbolic objects play a decisive role) (69). Astvaldsson writes that to read a book is to rewrite it because each reading gives it a new meaning. This can even be taken to a Borgian extreme, as when Pierre Menard decides to write the Quijote, not to imitate it, but to write it line by line. Astvaldsson adds that having many versions of a story is an

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advantage because truth lies in the process of telling and interpreting, and that the same process occurs when people interact with the landscape (74). This interaction is of utmost importance in any reading of Arturo Cova’s journey into darkness. Much like Aguirre, as the journey approaches the vortex, Cova becomes the great traitor convinced that if he wanted the birds to drop dead from the trees, they would. Much like Aguirre who declares himself to be the wrath of God, Cova becomes the wrath of God, not God, his wrath, his wrath-in-nature, littered with madness. In The Ecophobia Hypothesis Estok asks what the relations are between ecophobia and the imaginings of madness and later defines madness as othering (124–125). In so doing, Estok turns madness into a verb in the present participle. Othering is an action that Arturo Cova carries out incessantly, to the pivot of the reflexive verb. Rivera wrote this Inferno or what Estok would label literary madness that means taking a stand toward the natural environment, a stand that is, “perhaps invariably—an ecophobic one” (Ibid.).

Chapter 8

Canaima, Ecophobia, and the Anthropocene

Describing the Orinoco River, the narrator of Romulo Gallegos’s Canaima says, “Las aguas del río ensucian el mar y saturan de olores terrestres el aire yodado” (9). “The river’s waters pollute the sea and saturate the iodized air with earthy smells” (Tello 1). Here, water, normally considered a cleansing agent, a baptismal prop, is not only dirtying, sullying, foul-smelling, it is also polluting the sea. Seen from above, the brown river waters stain the Caribbean blue. As opposed to blue, which is fresh, clear, healthy, aromatic, enticing, brown carries rot, slime, pollution. What Simon Estok would read into this phrase is a maladaptive response, disgust, microbiophobia, germophobia, ecophobia (2019, 473–474). Here, the river is an artery, and its blood is contaminating the sea. “Our porous corporeality is fundamental here, and as locus, gauge, and conduit for both our self-assurance and our fears, the body is the site through which ecophobia takes meaning and expression” (Ibid.). This reading of Canaima will focus on the hatred of nature—on Canaima the entity—in the light of this maladaptive response, ecophobia—not so much of home as fear of nature, aversion of the nonhuman other—and of the Anthropocene that Erle Ellis describes as an effort to rename the earth’s current interval of geological time (1), that puts anthropos in a position of preeminence and negates the idea of nature, “rendering that to which it refers as strange, mysterious, threatening, and unknowable” (Deyo 444). Disillusioned at first, the protagonist Marcos Vargas asks himself in the beginning of chapter 12 of the novel Canaima, “¿Y esto era la selva? [. . .] ¡Monte túpido y nada más!” (And this was the jungle? Nothing but a thick forest!) (177). This is the jungle of the Venezuelan Guiana that the omniscient narrator, speaking for Marcos Vargas, initially portrays as a disillusion, lacking grandeur, not what Marcos had imagined, but later as an obsessive repetition, something anti-human, enigmatic, a somber and quiet green hell. This 133

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is the setting of Canaima that François Delprat considers to be a geography lesson, a discovery of space, geo-poetics that tie the imaginary to space, and at the same time transcend it (2009, 145–146). In 1930, when Gallegos decided to use the jungle as the setting for this project, it was difficult to reach this tierra incognita from Caracas. Moreover, much of the course of the Orinoco remained uncharted until 1951 when the Venezuelan army officer Frank Rísquez Iribarren reached its headwaters. Although mysterious and inaccessible in Gallegos’s time, the region was nonetheless well known and considered a mythical place of abundance with the promise of riches either from rubber, gold, or diamonds (Aínsa 2003, 28). After having consulted several travel narratives, Gallegos reached the Orinoco by car; he traveled from Ciudad Bolivar to Upata and kept a meticulous journal that he later consulted when writing Canaima while in Spain. Today, Canaima is a three million ha park located in Bolivar State, in south-eastern Venezuela, a UNESCO World Heritage site, with attractions such as the Auyan Tepuy (2,400 m) a plateau of rock, site of Angels Falls (1,002 meters), the highest waterfall in the world (Kalderon 2005, 8). But Canaima is more than an expensive touristy destination or an escape from the hustle and bustle of Caracas, Canaima is a word from the Pémon language (the natives of the area) “Kanaime” (Kalderon 2005, 9) the cause of all evils, a product of nature, an entity that Gallegos appropriates. Canaima a malignant divinity, a frenetic god, origin and cause of all evil, who is competing for the world with Cajuña the righteous one (Canaima 153). It was Canaima who peeked out from the edge of the forest to get a glimpse of Marcos Vargas whose fate was already sealed (Ibid.). Canaima is Nature as something evil, satanic, a green hell inspiring antipathy; it is in the jungle that Marcos Vargas will unhinge and capitulate to madness. What Simon Estok would read in this description of the natural entity Canaima, who is one with the jungle, is an ecophobic representation of nature as an opponent that hurts, threatens, or kills us. Estok adds that the question is whether nature is evil and if it can be naturalized. “Surely the answer to both of these questions is simply no. This goes right back to Augustine’s notion that evil is a human construct, one relative to our imaginations. Imagining badness in nature and marketing that imagination—in short, writing ecophobia—is such a multifaceted affair that it is difficult to know where to begin” (2009, 210). As to nature in the Anthropocene, it can be explained with same image that Manuel Ladera provides of the history of Venezuela: “un toro bravo, tapaojeado y nariceado, conducido al matadero por un burrito vellaco” (29). “a fierce bull, the eyes covered, the nose pierced, led to the slaughterhouse by a cunning little donkey” (Tello 27). There is also reference to the end, perhaps to the end of nature, or of the entire region, with the image of a leafless tree with an owl on a branch. This species of owl, the Ciccaba

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nigrolineata was called the yaacabo in the area because its call sounds likes “¡Yaa-cabó! ¡Yaa-acabó!” (All is finished!) (59). Not only are the trees leafless, they are also “raquíticos” (150) (scrawny). Because of the etymological root of the word raquítico, Charlotte Rogers believes that Gallegos is associating the trees with rickets and that this medical characterization extends to the people of the novel as well. “In his evocation of Guayana as a sick place, Gallegos produces a litany of the forest inhabitants’ common afflictions: beri-beri, snakes bites, dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis, various plagues, yellow fever, hallucinogens” (124). In Chapter XVIII, when Ponchopire explains to Marcos Vargas why his tribe no longer lives on the shores of the Padamo River but rather in the plains of the Ventuari, he says that coughing was killing the Indians and pursuing them from the lower Padamo, to the upper Padamo, to the Tencua rapids. The narrator then further explains that the implacable enemies of the Indians are the rubber tappers and tuberculosis. Very similar to Rivera’s La vorágine, that Jorge Añez accused Gallego of plagiarizing (294), Canaima is a journey into a sick place, the irrational, a devolution as opposed to an evolution, a slip into atavism, a decline, a fall, a descent into hell or what Delprat considers to be a “plongée dans la nature” (An immersion into nature) (157). The difference being, according to de León Hazera, that in La vorágine the jungle reflects Cova’s state of mind, an internal vortex, while in Canaima the jungle is a propelling force that actively influences Marcos Vargas’s psychological mutations (156). This, of course, could have everything to do with the narration itself. Lesley Wylie judges the narrator of La vorágine to be unreliable as opposed to the narrator of Canaima who uses free-indirect style where the subject becomes a channel rather than a source of language (27–28). Bogotá, the big city, is the point of departure in La vorágine, while Canaima begins and ends in the remote Guayana, a magic word, a promised land, a miraculous green felt where, “un azar magnifico echaba los dados y todos los hombres audaces querían ser de la partida” ( a magnificent destiny would cast the die inviting all the courageous men to play the game) (13). Reminiscent of Horacio Quiroga’s Los desterrados, this place is peopled by soldiers of fortune, ambitious, desperate, impatient people in need of remaking their lives and ready to be consumed by this green hell and to go for the prize even if, “junto al tesoro vigilaba el dragon” (The dragon was guarding the treasure) (13). The condition for the fortune, or at least the pursuit, is both internal and external, succumbing to the jungle as syndrome (internal) and capitulating to the vortex (external). For Scott DeVries, this impulse to return to nature expresses something other than political ecology, something akin to the romantic ideal of nature as refuge, an effort to escape the excesses of modernization (146).

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This promised land of Guayana is both a region and a city. The region, south-east of the Orinoco River, was known as Spanish Guiana in the early eighteenth century. It comprises three states, Amazonas, Bolivar, and Delta Amacuro. The modern-day city, located in Bolivar State, was founded in 1961—twenty-six years after the publication of Canaima—by the unification of San Felix and Puerto Ordaz. One hundred and twenty kilometers from Ciudad Guayana, also on the Orinoco River, lies the capital of Bolivar State, Ciudad Bolivar, the birthplace of Marcos Vargas, whose fate was sealed perhaps simply by virtue of being born there. The narrator, whom Doudoroff considers intrusive (xv), describes this region as the Venezuela of the discovery and the unfinished colonization: the frenetic search for quick fortunes, rubber from the upper Orinoco and its tributaries all the way to the Cuyuni, gold from the sands of the Yuruari, diamonds from the Caroni, gold from the placers and the inexhaustible veins of the upper Cuyuni (13). Charlotte Rogers affirms that here Gallegos is reinforcing the idea of the rainforest as the site of an earlier chronological era, and its inhabitants as genetic relics who are wasting away (134). In other words, the region was not first discovered in the early twentieth century. The miners, the rubber tappers, and the soldiers of fortune felt they were entering the forest primeval, but humans had already been there. In his arguments for the Anthropocene, Erle Ellis writes that even remote Amazonian rainforests have tree distributions shaped by human efforts. “Evidence continues to grow that the vast tropical rainforests of Amazonia and the Congo have been largely reshaped by human use of fire, shifting cultivation, dispersal, and propagation of favoured species” (107). Ellis adds that many ecologists, however, tended to perceive habitats without people as places without human influence. Hence, the Venezuelan Guiana where nature appeared to reign alone, but where people had already carved a niche. “There is no nature, there is only history” (99), Alan Liu affirms in Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Weighing against this affirmation, Estok’s belief is that the more control we seem to have over the natural environment, the less we actually have (2009, 209). A literary example to these dichotomies is that of Marcos Vargas falling under a spell—that has everything to do with the allure of a habitat without people— shortly after having been introduced by a Rionegrero to a Maquiritare Indian named Ponchopire and urged to travel with him to Angosturas (as the natives still called Ciudad Bolívar) and show him around. Marcos’s parents do try to remove him from what they considered to be the plebeian and demoralizing atmosphere of this region that had already cost them a son. In this effort, they sent him away to school in Trinidad—the original point of departure of voyages to the Orinoco (including Columbus’s)—but after several years of studying what the narrator refers to as “geografía muerta” (dead geography)

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(16), Marcos turns away from the city and returns to the primitive, what he considers to be the live geography of the banks of the Orinoco River. A fate sealed, no escaping this geography and the devolution from society to perceived solitude. Marcos Vargas speaks for and at the same time contradicts this unofficial, proposed geological epoch with no approximate start date, the Anthropocene. By virtue of having been born in this place, Marcos Vargas appears to be just another animal in that jungle, never an earth- or jungle-changer, simply a creature dominated by a powerful environment. In Canaima, “la naturaleza se enfrenta en lucha desigual, pero hay que combatirla para conquistarla” (Nature must be confronted in an unequal struggle, but it must be fought against in order to be conquered) (Aínsa 2003, 28). Eventually, Marcos Vargas will want to measure himself against Nature. “Quería encontrar la medida de sí mismo ante la Naturaleza plena” (188). In this unequal struggle nature appears to have the upper hand; it is not yet the bull being led to the slaughterhouse by a donkey, it can still reject those who enter it with fear. “La montaña solo rechaza a los que van a ella con miedo” (142), Marcos Vargas says to Arteaguita who fears being one of those whom the jungle rejects. Later, in the throes of madness, Marcos Vargas notices when the jungle itself is frightened and feels superior to it, free from its maleficent influence. He addresses the jungle, “Es la tormenta. Viene contra nosotros dos, pero solo tú la temes” (188). (It is the storm. It is coming for us both. But you are the only one who fears it.) Both Estok and Deyo would read Marcos Vargas’s hubris as an innate aversion to nature that requires an epistemological and ontological shift in human awareness that, according to Deyo, “is indicative of the Anthropocene’s capacity to make inroads into collective consciousness, unsettling official stories that hubristically posit humans in a position of pre-eminence with respect to nature” (444). Despite the perceived force and maleficence of the natural world, or perhaps because of it, there is an effort to reshape and to transform the environment, to right nature. Ladera welcomes Vargas to his property that he christened Tupuquén after a very invasive species of grass that withstands fire and the ax. He tells Vargas that it has cost him money and time to get rid of the stubborn grass and with a nod and a wink adds that there is another species of tupuquén in this land: the rubber and the gold that lure the workers away from agriculture (26). It is remarkable that some scientists date the start of the Anthropocene back to the early human control of fire, others to the rise of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago, and yet others to the peak year nuclear fallout in 1964 (Ellis 2018, 3). In this case, Ladera is complaining that the mining of gold and the exploitation of the rubber trees are affecting agriculture. On another occasion, observing the rapids and the waterfalls, Ladera asks Vargas to imagine what it would mean to Guayana if the waterfalls were used for energy. Ladera also recalls that a few years

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back a team of engineers came to assess the potential of the waterfalls and came to the conclusion that much money and opportunity was being wasted (61).” What Scott DeVries sees here is a political ecology critical of the laxity of state bureaucracies. DeVries’s analysis of La vorágine can be applied to what he refers to as the canonical novelas de la selva (including Canaima), as opposed to the non-canonical ones. Although DeVries finds anomalies within both the canonical and the counter traditions, he identifies a small corpus of non-canonical novels, “not characterized by advocacy for reform under the auspices of governmental agencies but by appeals to conservation for its own sake, for the love of nonhuman nature” (145). What Estok would read into Ladera’s comments is human history as a history of controlling the natural environment, “of taking rocks and making them tools or weapons to modify or to kill parts of the natural environment, of building shelters to protect us from weather and predators, of maintaining personal hygiene to protect ourselves from diseases and parasites that can kill us, of first imagining agency and intent in nature and then quashing that imagined agency and intent. Nature becomes the hateful object in need of our control, the loathed and feared thing that can only result in tragedy if left in control” (2009, 210). For example, despite his slip into atavism, Marcos Vargas refused to communally share the foul-smelling dwelling under the roof of the churuata and to eat with his hands from the bowl where everyone else put their own dirty hands (234), refusal and disgust that could very well be indicative of germophobia or biophobia. Having capitulated to the madness of Canaima willingly, in other words having surrendered his mind, Marcos Vargas refused to forfeit his body. In Canaima, on the one hand, nonhuman nature—microbes, storms, poisons, evil gods—often appears to be more formidable and powerful than the humans trying to exploit it. The spirit of the first half of the twentieth century is still at odds with the certitude that humankind has not only won the battle but has complete dominion over the natural world and a total and negative impact on the environment. Nonetheless, there appears to be an effort to right nature and therefore to change it. Ladera complains about the calamities of his country where everything that could be done to improve upon nature was still left to be done. The thought is that nature must be tamed and conquered to be better exploited. Nature was there for the taking, but not yet taken. There is also a nostalgia for the times when the country was being founded and there seemed to be a future, “mientras que los hombres de ahora sentimos que este país se está acabando ya y no nos preocupamos por que las cosas duren. Por el contrario, queremos destruirlas cuanto antes” (While the men of today feel that the country is coming to an end, so we don’t worry about anything lasting. On the contrary, we want to destroy everything as soon as possible) (28).

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This contradictory world of Canaima can also be understood as a “justbeing-ravaged world” (xix) as Will Kirkland suggests. Marcos is propelled in this just-being-ravaged whirlwind of nature over which he seems to have no influence. Both Quiroga and Rivera approach nature in a similar fashion, the difference being that while Arturo Cova is initially driven by jealousy and goes deeper and deeper into the jungle in search of Alicia, Marcos appears to steer away from his love for la Bordona, thus nicknamed because she was the youngest child, the last string on a guitar. While Arturo Cova burns and wants to burn, Marcos Vargas playfully tells Bordona to refrain from being so intense. “¡Apaga Bordona! ¡Apaga, que nos quemamos!” (99). (Extinguish it, Bordona! Extinguish it or we will burn!) Again, Vargas repeats, “Apaga, Bordona, que ya la ventana está echando humo!” (Extinguish it, Bordona, the windows are smoking!) When Bordona’s father decides to send her to Nice, France, in order to put some distance between her and her infatuation with Marcos, Marcos reacts by telling himself, “tengo que agradecerle que se lleve a la Bordona. Por este camino mejor es andar escotero” (I should be grateful that he is taking la Bordona away. This road is best travelled alone) (106). The narrator adds that Vargas said this sincerely because neither money nor love were his chief interests in life. “Y no estaba mal ir quedándose solo por su camino y ante la vida” (And it would not be bad that facing life he proceeds on this road alone) (106). Again, Marcos Vargas is willing to relinquish his mind to the jungle, but unwilling to burn for love, or, for that matter, to eat with his hands out of a plate where others have put their dirty hands. This solitary road chosen over society and over passionate love will take Vargas deeper into the jungle and further away from Bordona. After he loses his carts, finding himself in debt, he accepts the position of General Manager of a purguo being offered to him and realizes that, “el amor de Aracelis flotaba en la nebulosa del mundo desvanecido en torno suyo” (149). “Aracelis’ love was floating in the mists of that world that had vanished around him” (Kirkland 172). He has even ceased to use her endearing nickname when thinking about her. The solitary road, however, is announced even before Marcos so easily and quickly renounces la Bordona. In fact, it is the call of the wilderness, the taunt or the challenge—either one is or one is not—that will suddenly produce la Bordona whose sudden appearance cannot but announce her abrupt disappearance (like Alicia in La vorágine, she plays a very small role). Vargas leaves Ciudad Bolivar and crosses the Caroni River. It is on the opposite bank of the Caroni that life, la Bordona, and the jungle begin. “¡Bueno, Marcos Vargas! Ya está en el Yuruari y que sea de provecho. En la tierra del oro y de los hombres machos, como dicen por aquí” (Well, Marcos Vargas! You have reached Yuruari, may it be good to you. You are in the land of gold and real men, as they say

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around here) (25), exclaims Manuel Ladera from whom Marcos Vargas buys a cart fleet. While translating Canaima, Kirkland hesitated with the term hombre macho and realized that to use macho man would be making a powerful image ludicrous (xxviii). Literally translated, hombre macho is male man, but the homonym is risible, so real man it is, and one either is, or one is not. “Se es o no se es,” is a challenge that Marcos Vargas accepts when he falls off a stone slab into a whirlpool. As a result, he attracts the attention of Aracelis Vellorini, nicknamed la Bordona, who slaps him for having given her such a fright and by doing so sacramentally confirms him (again, she seems to appear out of nowhere). “¿No es con una cachetada que lo confirman a uno? Pues a mi me la dieron” (43). (“When you are confirmed you get a slap in the face, don’t you? Well I got one” (Tello 45). According to the narrator, “Era lógico que con una bien sentada en su mejilla, le hubiese dado el amor aviso de su existencia” (22). “It was logical that a slap on his cheek was the way love had chosen to proclaim its existence” (Tello18). While love takes Arturo Cova deeper into the jungle in search of Alicia, Marcos Vargas travels away from la Bordona into the heart of madness despite being in love with her and admitting it to Ladera (26). The narrator also affirms that Marcos loved la Bordona. “En efecto, a Marcos Vargas se le atragantaban las ternezas. Estaba enamorado de ella, le parecía la más linda de todas las criaturas, la única apetecible entre todas las mujeres” (101). “It was true that tender words stuck in Marco Vargas’s throat. He was in love with her; she seemed to him to be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen” (Kirkland 114). However, the narrator could very well be mistaken. Later, when allowed to speak for himself, Marcos suggests to Vellorini that perhaps he is not as interested in his daughter as he believes, “podría ser que a mí no me interesara su hija tanto como usted se imagina” (200). At this point, thinking for Vellorini, the narrator even suggests that there was a possibility that Marcos Vargas was not really in love with Aracelis. As a result, contrary to yet-to-be ravaged nature, la Bordona will remain an unravished bride, not really loved, or less loved, forsaken for the jungle. When he asks himself, with disappointment, “So this is the jungle?” Marcos is already a changed man, he had lost his sense of humor for one. Remarkably, this is not his first encounter with the jungle, even Ciudad Bolivar, his city, is a city built in the jungle. Marcos belongs to Guayana; he has been under the spell almost his entire life, he has already been to the other bank of the Caroni where the jungle begins, yet upon crossing yet another river, another frontier, he is in the jungle as if for the first time. This is where Canaima the entity lurks. And while Aracelis’s love was floating in the nebula of the vanishing world around him, Marcos’s instinct of mental self-preservation was vanishing in a nebula of superhuman rapture in this

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green hell (152). This is a turning point, a part of the self, if not all, is vanishing into the world of Canaima, the shapeless, malignant one, the hatred of nature. Wylie sees this motif of the vanishing subject as a symbol for the dissolution of the boundaries of selfhood in the jungle more than a result of travel literature relating to people going missing in the tropics (44). Instead of expressing his disease as Cova does, Marcos lets the narrator and the jungle speak for him. In fact, very little is said of Marcos’s feelings except that he who has been so compassionate up until this moment suddenly trades good treatment for the whip when dealing with the purgueros. Otherwise, it is the jungle that is undergoing a transformation that reflects Marcos’s syndrome. “El mal de la selva, apoderándose ya de su espíritu” (The evil of the jungle, already taking over his spirit.) (171). From here on, a graveyard spiral, a vertiginous decline. After Vargas murders Cholo Parima, there will be no going back, “la tremenda experiencia de sí mismo recién adquirida, paracía haberlo desplazado fuera de todo contacto con las cosas que hasta allí lo hubiesen interesado, tanto las materiales como las del orden afectivo o moral” (147). “the tremendous experience of his own violence just acquired, seemed to have displaced him from any contact with things that had been of interest to him so far, both material and affective or moral things” (Tello 174). Marcos has forsaken his love for Aracelis and chosen the jungle instead, despite being warned, “La montaña no está buena estos días, como nunca lo está después que se ha tragao a un hombre. Téngale miedo cuando la escucha tan silencia” (The jungle is not benevolent these days, it never is after having swallowed a man. You should fear it when it is so quiet) (171). The hatred of nature in defiance of the Anthropocene, an age of humans that could mean the end of nature. Already the purgueros and the miners were reshaping the ecology of the jungle of Guayana, but nature still prevailed, this age of human dominance was still being kept at bay. For example, Marcos Vargas was not the only one being affected by the negative influence of the jungle, both the Indians and the purgueros Marcos worked with were under its negative spell. The purgueros suddenly became needlessly cruel, they took to torturing insects and small animals, tearing off their wings, poking out their eyes, quartering them, and even hurting themselves, enjoying both the animals’ and their own pain (184). Although it is already in danger, nature has nonetheless taken over. Marcos is warned, “no vuelva a alejarse mucho. Mire que la cosa no está muy buena, por ahí pa dentro” (Don’t go too far, things are not good deep inside the jungle) (186). For María del Carmen Porras, Gallegos distinguishes between good and bad spaces according to their location, the values of the beholder, and the historical moment. While some places can be put to good use toward the national well-being and are considered productive, there are others that, regardless of their riches, beauty, or charm that cannot be put to good use. “De esta manera, la selva e incluso

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las zonas urbanas cercanas a ella, son construidas como paradigmas de estos espacios malos donde se desatan esas fuerzas desorientadas” (Therefore, the jungle and the urban zones nearby are constructed as paradigms of these bad places where whirlwind forces are unleashed) (50). The warning is both spatial and psychological, Marcos should not venture too deep within himself either, and he risks doing so by venturing so deep into the jungle. It is not simply the physical venture, merely contemplating a tree is also a risky venture, as when Marcos bursts out laughing, “¡Pues no he tomado yo en serio lo de convertirme en árbol!” (I have not taken the thought of becoming a tree seriously!) (187). Wylie elucidates this transmogrification into a tree as a metaphor for the intimate union between the human and the telluric. “The disappearance of the subject is once again yoked to aesthetic experience, or, rather, to the impossibility of aesthetic experience. The subject’s phenomenal perception of the natural world is predicated on the effacement of Otherness, where nature is experience as an extension of the self and vice-versa” (45). The jungle reflects Marcos Vargas’s decline and Marcos Vargas is the jungle in the mirror. Gallegos used the word desdoblamiento to express the splitting, the division, the becoming two and losing oneness when he describes Ardavín’s alcoholic delirium. The fractured images, “se separan una de otra, danzan en el espacio, vuelven a integrarse y duplicarse sin que ya se pueda determinar cuál es la verdadera y cuál es la ilusoria” (195). “separating from each other, dancing in space, merging and doubling again and again until it is no longer possible to determine which is real and which illusory” (Kirkland 1996, 225). Otto Rank writes of the uncanny double when referring to a shadow or a reflection. Canaima, the novel, contains many shadows, the opposite of the guardian spirit, doubles, and the becoming-double: Ureña is the author’s double; hence, the narrator’s double, Maigualida and Aracelis are opposite doubles, as are Ureña and Vargas, and finally Marcos Vargas and Marcos Vargas, the rebirth of the father in the son. “Should a child strikingly resemble its father, the latter must die, since the child has adopted his image or silhouette,” (53) Otto Rank writes in the chapter dedicated to the double in anthropology. Ureña immediately recognizes the boy sent to him from the depths of the burning jungle. When asked his name, the boy replies that he is Marcos Vargas. “The same holds for the name,” Otto Rank adds, “which the primitive views as an essential part of the personality. [. . .] We recall here the same “nomenphobia” in Poe’s William Wilson and can also understand, on the basis of “name magic,” the invocation of spirits by calling their name” (245). The child is sent back to the city, he has his father’s name: living proof of the failure of the return to nature. The jungle burns before Marcos Vargas’s rebirth as his own son. Either Marcos Vargas remembers, or the narrator

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remembers, telling la Bordona to stop being so intense. “¡Apaga, Bordona! ¡Apaga, que nos quemamos!” (231). Perhaps Marcos Vargas sensed that he would eventually burn. Either Vargas or the forest murmurs in Chapter XVIII, titled Aymara, after Vargas’s Indian wife, “¡Canaima! ¡Canaima! ¡Canaima!” Selfhood is momentarily lost. Initially, there is no Marcos Vargas, only the narrator, the jungle, and some nameless voices speaking as they walk through the lightning storm in the dense jungle. At this point, Marcos Vargas has lost what Ernest Becker would call his symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature (26). He has ceased to be a creature with a name and a life history and the self-consciousness that “gives man literally the status of a small god in nature” (Ibid.). The narrator, in an absence of selfhood, also alludes to something that has already happened before (230), perhaps five years ago, when Marcos Vargas warned Bordona about the threat of fire: Extinguish it, Bordona, or we will burn! is repeated here but not attributed to Marcos Vargas, who is now nameless after having become a legend (Chapter XVII). Yet another nameless voice invokes Canaima three times, something that had already happened five years ago, “Y era el incendio penetrando en la selva y al mismo tiempo un pequeño pájaro negro que volaba por encima de ella y cuya inmensa sombra negra errante por el suelo era él mismo, carbonizado ya por aquella llama pálida” (231). (And the flame was racing through the jungle and at the same time a small black bird was flying over it, casting an enormous black shadow that moved over the ground and which was himself, now turned to ash by that pale flame) (Kirkland 1996, 268). It is after having been turned to ash that Marcos Vargas takes Aymara as his wife and produces Marcos Vargas, the child. Fear of death? Fear of nature? When addressing the jungle, Marcos Vargas says that the jungle fears the storm and he does not, before venturing deeper into the storm, yet he worked with the rubber tappers, exploiting nature, yet he refused to eat with his hands, yet he produced a child after the jungle burned, and sent the child back to civilization.

Chapter 9

Yes, It Isn’t (What Cannot be Said) Self-Hatred in Poetry from Guayama, Puerto Rico, to Loisaida, New York

In her essay, “Don Juan ou aimer pouvoir,” the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva explores how Don Juan—the seducer, the scoundrel, the irresistible, the ridiculous portrayer of amoral eroticism—can only be expressed, or find his expression, through music, or else be a void, devoid of interiority (243).1 Similarly, racial self-hatred, or racial hatred, can and should only be expressed through poetry, or made up words, or tonal palindromes such as Ten con ten: the title of a poem by the Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos that appeared in the collection Tuntun de pasa y grifería (1937). Ten con ten is rendered as “Neither this nor That” in Julio Marzán’s anthology of twentieth century Puerto Rican poetry, Inventing a Word. In this poem, Palés refers to his green island, outlined in pirate and black. If I have opted for outlined rather than Marzán’s choice of designed to interpret the poet’s word estilizada, it is because of the two lines that follow and where Pales writes that the black man gives the island the hue and the pirate gives it the line. Certainly el negro could simply be black, the color, but here el negro is weighed against el pirata, and both are contributing to the form and contour of the island that is located: “en un sí es que no es de raza/un ten con ten de abolengo/que te hace tan antillana” (in a yes it isn’t about race/a blurriness of lineage/that makes you so Antillean). Ambivalence, incongruity, contradiction, hatred, racism, ambiguity: all components of “Ten con ten,” of the Antillean psyche, of the need to find a sound and a word to express all those souls, a hatred that cannot be named, and so much asking to be addressed and to be sung in Puerto Rican negritude poetry. Leslie Wilson lists five primordial reasons why Afro-Antillean poetry written in Spanish warrants an analytical study: to determine its origins, to describe its essential characteristics, to signal its important contribution to Latin American letters, to determine its importance and influence outside of Latin America, and finally to indicate how this poetry reflects the feelings and 145

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aspirations of the Afro-Antilleans (13). Here, the focus is on the last reason listed, not only because it encompasses all the other reasons, but also because it contains a very Palesian question: “Por qué ahora la palabra Kalahari?” (Why now the word Kalahari?) The word Kalahari can very well contain the feelings and aspirations, as well as the frustrations and the self-hatred, everything that cannot be said. The word “Kalahari” refers to an African region from where many Puerto Rican slaves originated, and for Palés, this word is: “escondida como un insecto en mi memoria;/picada como una mariposa disecada/en la caja de coleópteros de mi memoria.” Marzán’s translation of those lines is as follows: “concealed like an insect in my memory;/impaled like a mounted butterfly/ in the beetle box of my memory” (1980, 26–27). In other words, the African past concealed— silenced, trauma internalized, left for dead—needs to come out into the light, understood, felt, accepted, hated and unhated, Africa needs to speak, to express its soul or numen that Palés Matos considered to be at the frontier where the mundane touches the spiritual (Marzán 1995, 26). But it could very well be that something cannot be told or said, just as Marcos Vargas’s experience in Romulo Gallegos’s Canaima. “lo que traía de la selva no era para narrarlo” (201). (What he was bringing back from the jungle could not be told as a story.) In other words, the experience could not be put into words, or needed made up words. “y esto ni cabía en la memoria ni podía serle comunicado a otro” (Ibid.). (And this this not fit in the memory, nor could it be told to someone.) Yes, it isn’t about race, hatred of the Other, and self-hatred, division, racism, hating the other as oneself. It wants to be said poetically and with made up words. Now to the heart of the matter in this incursion into the quick of ambivalence: whether there has been a solution found, or at least a direction toward a greater understanding of the contradiction, whether what needed to be expressed was indeed expressed, or whether the answer still lies within the confines of the ambivalence in this doorway to time that leads from Guayama, the birthplace of Luis Palés Matos, to Loisaida, spiritual and cultural homeland of the Nuyorican poets, yet another made-up word, a Spanglish word for the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The comparatist Jean-Claude Bajeux affirms, somewhat unfairly, that four dates sum up the life of Luis Palés Matos: 1898, 1915, 1937, and 1959 (109). Unfortunately, such a minimalist approach does the poet no justice, 1898 and 1959 are simply the dates on each side of a hyphen that represents a life lived, and 1915 was the year that Palés Matos published Azaleas, his first collection of poetry, a collection that Bajeux judges to be commonplace, pretty, and precious (111), and that Mercedes López-Baralt sees as straddling modernism with its motifs of orientalism, spleen, and mythology, and the ironic mundaneness of postmodernism and its colonial rhetoric (2009, 10). That leaves only one significant date, 1937, the year of the publication of Tuntún de pasa

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y grifería. It is not so much that the year of birth and of death lack importance, but barring suicide 1959 remained outside the realm of choice, and the poet had no say when it came to 1898, even if this would have been an excellent if not symbolic choice of a birthdate, that of a pivotal year in the history of the Caribbean, a year that coincided with Puerto Rican independence from Spain as well as with the invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States. Such was the political backdrop at the time of the birth of the poet Luis Palés Matos. Up until that moment, Puerto Rico had been on a path toward autonomy, a path initiated shortly after slavery was abolished in 1873. After much strife and many deliberations, Spain finally granted the newly formed Puerto Rican government an autonomy that the historian Lisa Pierce Flores describes as approaching that of Canada (67). But this victory was short-lived and erased by the quasi-immediate U.S. invasion of the island that, in turn, led to U.S. military occupation from October 1898 to May 1900, and subsequently to the enactment of the Foraker Act, followed by the Jones Act, and total U.S. control of the island. While the historian Arturo Morales Carrión demonstrates that the invaders knew little about Puerto Rico by citing the American geologist Robert T. Hill who was surprised that the sum total of the literature on the island would hardly fill a page in a book (130), another historian, Jay Hinsbruner, argues that the U.S. occupation subjected the island’s colored society to an alien and deeply odious race prejudice precisely because whites in post–Civil War United States considered any person with the slightest degree of black blood to be legally black and subject to the full weight of discrimination (9). According to Hinsbruner, U.S. racism produced two broad results in Puerto Rico. While the first result gave a new meaning to the quest for whiteness and exacerbated tensions between those who were white and those who were not, the second result, more significant in my opinion, discouraged Puerto Ricans of African descent from acknowledging or even attempting to understand their heritage (10–11). It still should be noted that, despite the numerous arguments for minimal racial discrimination in Puerto Rico before U.S. occupation, racial discrimination did in fact exist before U.S. occupation, the United States simply added fresh foreign fuel to the existing inferno. It holds true, however, that the impact of United States racial attitudes that Hinsbruner describes as nefarious because they dissuaded Puerto Ricans of African descent from associating with the civil rights movement and embarking upon a quest for self-identity, did not prevent Luis Palés Matos from initiating what Leslie Wilson refers to as “la modalidad poética negra” (the black poetic modality) in 1925 (11). Hence, a pivotal date in the life of Luis Palés Matos that Bajeux chose not to mention: 1925, the year that for some marked the birth of poesía negra, or black poetry in Spanish, for lack of a better term or a better year (and admitting the arguments against such a

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classification). For if Leslie Wilson is correct, there is no such thing as poesía negra: “La poesía negra es poesía pura. La poesía pura no tiene color. [. . .] Lo que hay de negro en esta poesía es la transparencia lírica del sentir de las Antillas” (12). (Black poetry is pure poetry. Pure poetry has no color. [. . .] What constitutes blackness in this poetry is the lyrical transparency of the texture of the Antilles.) Bajeux adds that black poetry, and more specifically the black poetry of Palés, is at the intersection of the vision and the reality, and that far from being an escapist vision of Africa, it is a prophetic revelation that renders Africa surreal as opposed to unreal (115). It was approximately two years after the publication of Azaleas that Palés began to write poesía negra. López-Baralt affirms that the 1917 poem titled “Danzarina africana” marks a hiatus in Caribbean literary history and renders Palés the indisputable initiator of the negritude movement in the Spanishspeaking Antilles (1997, 95). Although this is a “who-came-first” type of argument, it is important to bear it in mind when studying Palesian poesía negra, simply because Palés has often been accused of only approaching the African question from a European perspective, in other words from a distance. Castro de Moux points out that the black woman rendered by Palés in his early years, was not so much the Antillean woman, but rather the biblical Queen of Saba from the Judeo-Christian tradition (6). In fact, this likening of the black woman to the Queen of Saba seemed to be widespread at the time since another Puerto Rican poet, Luis Llorens Torres (1878–1944), also sung the black woman via bible-inspired themes, again the song of songs of King Solomon. But this biblical approach at times appears to be only an attempt to mask an erotic obsession with the black woman. In a poem titled “La Negra” (1914) (The Black Woman), Llorens Torres lauds the raw sexuality of, “La caliente potranca;/hecha para subir sobre ella en pelo/la cuesta de la noche a la mañana;/digna de ensangrentar en sus ijares/mis espuelas de plata” (Albornoz 1980, 88). (This hot mare/made to be ridden bareback/along the coast from night to morning/worthy of bloodstaining in her flanks/my silver spurs.) The critic Ian Smart remarks that the Cuban Nicolás Guillén would be made uncomfortable with the influence that such poems had had on lightskinned Cubans. For the poets who had penned poems of the sort had “gone into an almost frenzied state of creativity, producing exotic, erotic verses in which the black female persona of generously proportioned hips and nalgas (posterior) literally held sway, exuding earthy, sultry sensuality” (Smart 33). Despite being labeled a cultured poet, Palés was among the poets accused of spreading this so-called contagion. Now to the 1918 poem “Danzarina Africana,” in hopes of pinpointing the origins of the so-called pandemic. According to Castro de Moux, “Danzarina

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africana” is not representative of Palesian negritude because it was written within the framework of the modernist literary standards (96), and because it adheres to the stereotype of the black woman as a savage (6). What Castro de Moux is making reference to in “Danzarina Africana” are the lines: “¡Oh negra densa y bárbara! Tu seno/esconde el salomónico veneno./Y desatas terribles espirales,/cuando alrededor del macho resistente,/revuelves, porosa y absorbente,/como la arena de tus arenales.” (Oh, corpulent and barbarian negress! Your breast/hides Solomon’s venom/And you unleash terrible spirals/when around the resistant male/you turn, absorbent and porous/like the sand from your sand dunes.) Again, all roads lead to ambivalence: the nascent poesía negra sung the black woman’s raw sexuality, the erotic proximity to the bestial. Anything African was necessarily primitive and pulled on the primal impulses of unconsciousness. The result is a desirable woman often described with what the critic Ian Smart refers to as clichéd expressions such as grupa and anca, which normally refer to the hindquarters of animals (132). The same ambivalence goes for cultured versus popular. Time and again, critics such as Margot Arce de Vásquez and Tomás Blanco reiterated that Palés Matos was a cultured poet, lest anyone forget. In fact, the word culto (cultured) came up so often in reference to Palés, as opposed to popular when it came to Nicolás Guillén, that it began to ring much like a reminder that Palés was white, and therefore unworthy of such lowliness, or incapable of seeing black from within, or of translating the spirit of the black race. In other words, the analogy was that cultured was to white what popular was to black. So perhaps Palés wasn’t all that serious about black poetry, or meant something else when he wrote black poetry, or was attracted to the mud, or decided to write black poems because he was bored with Western civilization. Consequently, his Afro-Antillean poems were deemed “merely the literary postures of a man too sophisticated to really believe the romanticism he was espousing” (Marzán 1995, 28). Bajeux considered all the above-mentioned objections to be useless because they overlooked what was essential: “le poème dans sa specificité, en tant que langage clos sur lui-même, réalité particulière et autonome irreductible à toute analyse qui ne soit, à proprement parler, littéraire” (the poem in its specificity, as language in a closed circuit within itself, a particular and autonomous reality that eludes all extra-literary analyses) (125). It is precisely for that reason that Bajeux judged useless all talk of Palés’s race and all considerations as to whether or not a sizeable community of former black slaves had once thrived in Guayama. However, if not for the purpose of an analysis of Palesian poetry itself, Guayama in the beginning of the twentieth century may be taken into consideration for better understanding Luis Palés Matos, the bard from Guayama.

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Critics such as Castro de Moux do indeed dwell on Guayama as one of the keys to understanding why Palés would break away from the criollista movement and come to the conclusion that Puerto Rican and consequently Antillean identity should be sought in Africa rather than in Iberia, and also why Palés would eventually identify with the mulattos of Guayama instead of with the white ruling class (11). Known as the city of the sorcerers because of the influence of the slaves and their descendants, Guayama was once at the center of the sugar cane industry (Ibid., 7). Thus, Palés’s formative years were spent in a racially divided, economically and socially elitist and prejudiced society “donde no ocurre nada,/ todo esto se muere, se cae, se desmorona,/a fuerza de ser cómodo y estar a sus anchas,” or in English, “where nothing happens,/all this dies, falls, collapses/from living easy and content with one’s lot” (Marzán 2000, 15). At the time, as was the case throughout the island, the breaking news and vital issues concerned the forfeiture of independence, therefore no shift into the postcolonial, the replacement of one colonizer by another, the dilemma of cultures and languages (whether to opt for the English or the Spanish), and the racial problem that was social, economic, and cultural. There were also the difficulties involved in determining race, for it was not merely a question of black or white, but also of all the hues in-between. Furthermore, there was a dual nature to race and/or skin color, one composed by the internal choice or identity, the other being the reflection in the mirror, what others said out loud or whispered, keeping in mind that the two could be in eternal conflict. Such conflictive dualities would eventually mold the Palesian discourse. In such a society, or in such a town, although racially black poets did exist, they were either in an oral or a musical tradition (Marzán 2000, xi). Castro de Moux offers the explanation that if blacks were not writing poetry it was because of poverty and lack of access to formal education (29). Such a fate did not necessarily befall the mulattos who belonged to all different strata of society. It was in fact the mulattos and not the blacks who were influential in Palés’s formative years in Guayama, among them: Tomás Carrión Maduro, a chronicler of the fights for autonomy, Tomás Bernardini de la Huerta, a distant relative of Palés’s and a theater owner, Manuel Mártines Dávila, journalist and critic, and Luis Felipe Dessús, editor and poet whose pseudonym was Danton, in honor of the French Revolution, and who expressed racial and social consciousness in many poems, notably “Indiana,” as cited by Castro de Moux: “Yo soy indio y africano/borincano,/donde razas muy ardientes confluyeron;” (I am Indian and African/from Borinquen/where very ardent races coalesced) (28). On the one hand, in Guayama there appeared to be friends, teachers, different social classes, intellectual effervescence, and cultural and political debates, on the other, a surface tedium and conformity, all of which

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contributed to the Palesian discourse. The poetic voice could very well have been galvanized by an initial feeling of exclusion, by socio-economic inferiority, and also by a growing concern for the disempowered. Consequently, there was a shift, a need to find an identity in order to work toward expressing an identity, as well as a call for countercultural expression. Having to choose between Spanish culture and U.S. culture, Palés chose none of the above. Initially, he toyed with criollismo which basically consisted of choosing the native, Spanish-speaking, white Puerto Rican peasant over the racially prejudiced, strong and superior U.S. invader and his English language. But criollismo did not satisfy the need for a deeper level of understanding, and Palés eventually chose Africa. Initially, the approach was indeed from a European and intellectual distance. Eventually, the understanding would become more authentic, as in the 1921 poem “Esta noche he pasado” (Tonight I Passed) and the 1925 poem “Pueblo Negro” (Black Town) that, for many critics, does mark the definite beginning of Palesian negritude. Palés’s poem “Esta noche he pasado” depicts the experience of passing through a black town. Immediately, there is the suggestion that the passerby or traveler has chanced upon this town, since this “caserío inmundo” (disgusting hamlet) (1971, 105) provokes dismay and outrage. In other words, the passerby did not seem to be expecting to see such a place, so the question that arises is: How did the passerby get there? It does not appear to be by choice, so it has to be by accident. Suddenly, the gaze shifts in the second stanza, from being the observer the passerby becomes the observed: “Los hombres me miran hostilmente,/y en sus ojos de agudas miradas agresivas,/arde un fuego africano y bermellón de cólera” (The men stare at me with hostility/ and in their sharp, aggressive gaze,/burns the African fire of vermillion and rage.) (Ibid.). The third stanza brings more images of what is referred to as a “barrio oscuro” (dark neighborhood), making this poem the very first barrio poem, a harbinger of other barrio poems to come with the Nuyorican poets’ movement. Such a choleric and dismal atmosphere in the dark barrio makes the passerby wonder if a group of sorcerers and warriors is dancing around a fire nearby. But this cannot be, because: “La pompa jocunda de estas tribus ha muerto” (The jocular pomp of these tribes has died) (Ibid., 106), and the people in this dark barrio are left only with a remote sadness, a passion for alcohol, a hatred of the white man, and the insatiable lust of crude and primitive impulses. This is very far from the image of the corpulent black woman with swaying hips. Here, the images emerge from reality rather than from books, as critics such as José Robles Pazos often implied. Again, Palés’s mastery of the language and psychological insights have often been overlooked or disregarded. Instead, critics have focused on the poet’s race and education, just to prove that he was incapable of approaching the black theme with authenticity.

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In the introduction to Palés’s Poesía, 1915–1959, Federico de Onís makes reference to Robles who affirmed that a popular poetry would have surged from the direct observation of “los negritos borinqueños” (little Puerto Rican blacks) (8), instead of coming from, as the critic Tomás Blanco declared, the “exotic Negro of travelers, missionaries, slaves, explorers, and ethnographers, with an admixture of Haitian royalty, Cuban ñañigos, childhood reminiscences of slave songs, and other West Indian flavorings” (de Onís 12). Tomás Blanco did, however, deem the 1924 poem “Pueblo Negro” to be Palés’s first Negroid poem, best work, and attainment of real originality (Blanco 1930, 12). Similar in its languid first lines to “Esta noche he pasado” and beginning with the same two words, “Esta noche” (tonight), in “Pueblo Negro” the poet is again obsessed with the vision of a black town (pueblo negro). But in this poem, the black town becomes a “pueblo de sueño (fantasy town) with exotic names, as if words, sounds, and the sound of exotic places were the only possible doorway to this place. Africa has been internalized, as is conveyed with words such as “sueños” and “brumas interiores” (dreams, internal mistiness). Initially, the poet depicts the scene under a raging light blanketing the landscape, and then in a more tranquil mood, as if in a sad effort to find a paradise lost, to arrive at the quick of the soul: animals, sounds, and a black woman singing in the shade of the coconut palms. While listening to her song: “todo se va extinguiendo,/y solo queda en mi alma/la ú profunda del diptongo fiero,/ en cuya curva maternal se esconde/la armonía prólifica del sexo” (Palés, Poesía, 113). (everything starts to switch off,/and the only sound left in my soul/is the deep U of the feral diphthong/in whose maternal curve lurks/the prolific harmony of sex.) In an effort to explain why critics either doubted Palés’s intentions when it came to his poesía negra, or mocked “la sangre crudita del blanco catédratico” (the vulgar vein of the white academic) (López-Baralt 2002, 22), or simply disregarded it, or declared that black art had nothing to do with Puerto Rico, de Onís explains that it was not so much the value of the poetry that was questioned, but rather the significance of its black aspect weighed against Puerto Rican reality and the ideological debate concerning poetry’s role in defining the national character. In this critic’s opinion it was just as wrong to identify Antillean reality with negritude as it was to totally alienate negritude from this same reality (13). Furthermore, any attempt to consider the Antilles as one was both wrong and right because it overlooked the cultural and historical differences between the Antillean nations. There is a deal of truth in that statement, since there continues to be debate as to which countries or territories are effectively Caribbean or Antillean. While, as Thomas Boswell explains, to most U.S. geographers the Caribbean consists of the islands in the Caribbean, plus the Bahamas, and

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the Turks and Caicos, excluding the Caribbean littoral of South and Central America and Mexico, for European geographers and residents of the nonHispanic islands the Caribbean is defined all the islands between North America and South America to the east of Central America and Mexico, plus Belize, Guyana, and French Guyana (19). Boswell adds that in an attempt to better define the Caribbean, the geographer Gary Elbow has suggested three concentric zones: the core, which consists of all the islands everyone agrees on; the fringe, which consists of the islands outside of that core; and the periphery, which extends all the way to the northern coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, and the eastern coasts of Panama, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, as well as southern Mexico. Such recommendations much resemble those of defining family and deciding in which concentric zone to put the cousins, second cousins, in-laws, and exes. The blurry boundaries described above demonstrate that the polemic is as alive in the present time as it was in 1933 when Tomás Blanco addressed the question of Palés’s negritude once again and asserted that the black man in the poem “Numen” for example, was hypothetical and abstract, and in fact a black man who would be totally exotic in the Antilles. As to Palés’s expression of Africanness and his poetic vision, it was not only the vision of a white man, but that of a blond man in the Antilles (27). Such critique carries the weight of condemnation for having dared define the national character in terms of the African, as well as for having sought out the most beautiful, appropriate and expressive words. The Palesian numen is the essence, the soul, and at times the question is whether it was the search for the soul of poesía negra or if the writing of poesía negra represented in itself the search for the soul. In “Numen” it suffices to pronounce words such as Tembandumba and Macandal to cross the threshold to this other place, the numinous site. For Marzán, Tembandumba and Macandal are numina or defining principles that are either evoked or invoked when the poet thinks about Africa (76). An argument for these names being numina is the fact that Macandal, the poisoner, eventually became the poison itself when packets of poison were referred to as macandals. The invocation is the spell that makes names and words glide into other dimensional places. The invocation catapults the poet into being and expands his consciousness so that it approaches the essence of thought. So does the dance, the candombe in “Numen” that, “despierta el tótem ancestral” (awakens the ancestral totem). This may indeed appear to be Africa fantasized, a non-existent Africa, but the poet is well aware of that, in fact, “Baila el negro en la soledad./sobre el candombe su alma va/al limbo oscuro donde impera/” (The black man dances in solitude. Crossing immense expansions, his soul goes over the candombe toward the dark limbo ruled over by the numinal formula of black) (Palés, Poesía 207). For Marzán, more than a description of black reality in Puerto

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Rico, this endeavor to grasp the numen is an incursion into the spiritual world, which in turn is a world beyond words. “Between it and the mundane world, the world of sounds and silence, stands the doorway to the numinous world: the song without words, the poem” (84). Thus, the faraway land becomes the essence, and Africa becomes Palesian poetics. In fact, the Palesian poem contains everything, even the mundane, the tedium, the political, the landscape, the cultural confusion, the hatred and the self-hatred, the dilemma of English and Spanish, the Antillean, the Puerto Rican. For Jaime Benítez the Puerto Rican subconscious is characterized by a spiritual despondency, and a sense of uselessness, of impotence, and of failure, and the poetry of Palés Matos addresses this spiritual despondency (169, 191). There is a distinct possibility that this malaise is tied to history and to the fact that Puerto Rico is indeed, as D’Agostino affirmed, an anomaly (91). Again, Puerto Rico never gained independence, and the enactment of the Jones Act in 1917 granted U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans and at the same time more closely integrated Puerto Rican economy with U.S. economy. Over the next forty years, and despite efforts at increased autonomy, Puerto Rico grew increasingly dependent on the U.S. as a source of capital and at the same time much resembled the other “welfare colonies” of the region (Ibid., 93). The result being that between 1955 and 1970, approximately one-third of the Puerto Rican population moved off the island. Dennis Conway writes that in 1970 over one million Puerto Ricans had moved to the United States, mostly to New York City, Miami, or Chicago (341). If historical facts and some population statistics have been included in this analysis of racism and hatred in Afro-Puerto Rican poetry, it is because the poets who came after Palés were born in Puerto Rico’s twentieth century, when the island’s fate was unfolding and the above-mentioned events were occurring. The history also explains Puerto Rican migration to the U.S., Puerto Rican’s reactions to exile and nationalism, the ambivalence of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations, as well as the terms Nuyorican and AmeRican. In the poem titled “Puerto Rican Obituary,” the poet Pedro Pietri depicts anonymous Puerto Ricans—Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga—who, “All died yesterday today/and will die again tomorrow/” (120). These were people who worked very menial jobs such as mailroom assistant to the assistant. And they all died hating each other for different reasons, all having to do with envy, someone’s used car being in better condition than someone else’s, someone having a color television set, someone else making more money on the same job, and Manuel died hating all of them because they spoke English better than he did (that is, broken English). And they all died in the United States, unaware of, “the geography of their complexion” (Ibid., 124). The complexion remains, but in this poetic obituary the exigencies of life in the barrio took precedence over self-image and racial identity. Furthermore,

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those anonymous names were so removed from the rest of society, so utterly erased, insignificant, and unseen, that they turned against themselves or their own people, simply because no one else was watching them. Thus, Manuel dying, hating his fellow Puerto Ricans, becomes an expression of self-hatred. Now I turn toward other Puerto Rican poets in order to read this national poetry in light of itself, its itinerary, its route, its fate, and its direction. Often included in anthologies, “Ay Ay Ay de la Grifa Negra” by Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) who was almost a generation younger than Palés but who predeceased Palés by a few years. Here again, the words grifo/grifa, as in Tuntún de pasa y grifería. This is not a totemic word, and much less a poetic or numinous one. It can be judged an ugly word, un feismo, that has everything to do with self-image and racial discrimination. There was a time when grifo/ grifa was used to denote the child of a black person and of a native Antillean (Taíno, Arawak). Eventually the word came to mean kinky hair, or black things (grifería). It was most likely kinky before it was related to being black, since it probably comes from the French word for claw or talon, la griffe. Since kinky hair is scratchy, and it is curled much like a talon, this could very well be at the origins of the word grifo, a claw of sorts. Julia de Burgos’s poem begins much like a lament. In fact, the sounds Ay Ay Ay do imply weeping, pain, and lament. Initially, upon embarking upon this reading, there is a sense of disappointment, instead of black pride there seems to be nothing but dismay over being a black woman with kinky hair, thick lips, and a flat nose. While Guillén’s negro bembón (thick-lipped black man) got angry when they called him bembón, Julia de Burgos’s black woman weeps: “Ay ay ay que soy grifa y pura negra: grifería en mi pelo, cafrería en mis labios;” (de Albornoz 182). (Ay ay ay I am kinky and pure black, my lips are thick/) Only once in this first stanza does she weep and laugh at the same time: “Negra de intacto tinte, lloro y río.” (Black of pure hue, I cry and I laugh/the vibration of being a black statue.) For López-Baralt this poem represents the fusion of de Burgos’s three levels of consciousness: the sexual, the social, and the racial that allows her to celebrate her condition of being female and mulatta (1997, 84). Although I see no celebration here, only dismay, I do agree with López-Baralt when she affirms that this poem can be read as a response to Palés’s Tuntún that had been published a year earlier. Although Palés often expressed the sensuality of black woman, there is no example throughout his work of such plaintive weeping over racial facial characteristics. If there is anything in Palés that could be interpreted as racial slight, there would be instances in “Preludio en Boricua” (Prelude in Boricua) where there is indeed reference to “tuntún” which alludes to betún or black shoe polish. In the Antilles, blacks, if they are very black, can be called “negritos de betún” or black shoe polish blacks. However, the word tuntún may also be an onomatopoeia: the pounding repetition of the drum.

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Other racially questionable lines can be found in “Preludio en Boricua” where there is an allusion to “aristocracia macaca” (aristocracy of monkeys) and to the little black Cuban breaking the mulatta mare (2002, 87). However, these depictions are from without, whereas the one rendered by Julia de Burgos appears to be from within. Another difference is that while Julia de Burgos was never chastised for thoughts, opinions, or expressions, Palés was mocked even by fellow poets such as Clara Lair in her 1950 poem, “Trópico amargo” (Bitter Tropics). What Clara Lair chose to convey in “Trópico amargo” was her immense disdain for Palés’s love affair with the mulatta of the “Filí-Melé” cycle as well as for the mulatta herself: “Al salir a la calle topé a la negra bestia/que tu inflaste de hyperbole” (Upon going out I ran into the black beast in the street/ the one you inflated with hyperbole) (López-Baralt 1997, 88). By “black beast” the poet is referring to Palés’s mulatta that Clara Lair did not consider to be as sensual and impressive as Palés described her, on the contrary, nothing but a modest-looking, submissive girl, a “chimpancé lampiño” (Ibid.), (a hairless chimpanzee) that Palés created out of nothing. The poetics of a poem such as this one seems to defy poetry itself, even mocking the notion of extracting beauty from nothingness. Appearances again and again, the white man finding beauty in the mulatta, and the white woman poet finding nothing, nothing but a plain girl and an object of contempt, or even reacting to the mulatta as the poets Julia de Burgos, Willie Perdomo, and Martin Espada reacted to their own reflections: lost in the house of mirrors, de Burgos and Perdomo occupied by self-consciousness, and Espada trying to remove the racist alter ego from his wound. De Burgos’s poem is similar in tone and mood to Willie Perdomo’s “Nigger-Reecan Blues” (Santiago 91). Willie Perdomo, however, wrote in English, and Spanglish at times, and instead of being a child of the Caribbean island, he was a product of the north, of the United States of America. Perhaps Miguel Algarín would have labeled Perdomo a “mongo.” In the poem “A Mongo Affair,” Algarín describes the mongo as the Puerto Rican who has been moved to the inner-city jungles, “of north American cities/ mongo is the rican who survives/in the tar jungle of Chicago” (1995, 109). Unfortunately, survival comes at a price, so Algarín implores the “viejo negro africano” (old African man) not to believe the deadly game of believing in life improvement (Ibid., 110). Willie Perdomo’s subject finds himself in similar circumstances. The title of the poem, “Nigger-Reecan Blues,” contains the word blues, which is a reference to music with African roots. The blues sang the deep sadness of a silenced and subjected race. Hence: to feel blue. Here, the poet has the Nigger-Reecan blues. A shift has occurred, from Puerto Rican to Nuyorican to AmeRican to Nigger-Reecan, a shift that seems to leave all the other

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Puerto Ricans trailing behind when it comes to blues. The poem begins as would a dialogue in a dark barrio, “Hey, Willie. What are you, man? Boricua? Moreno? Que?” It is written or spoken in English, with Spanish thrown here and there. Here, the English language has prevailed. Unfortunately, the result is “a Black man with an accent” who talks about himself in Spanglish, he is Boricua, he is African, and he assures himself that he is not lying. “Yo soy Boricua! Yo soy Africano! Pero mi pelo is kinky y kurly y mi skin no es negra pero it can pass.” He hates himself for being black and for not looking black, yet he is not black, and he looks black, he speaks English, but he cannot totally express himself in English, yet he doesn’t know Spanish all that well, and suddenly curly is spelled with a k, just like kinky. In fact, nothing has changed; this is the realm of Palés Matos’s “Ten con ten.” Perdomo’s poem closes with renewed ambivalence. Initially there was an emotive reaction to the mirror, the barrio’s racism and the racism of the “madam blankeeta de madeeson avenue.” The answer to why the boy has the Nigger-Reecan blues is that he is referred to as a Spic: “Spic! Spic! I ain’t nooooo different than a Nigger.” The indiscreet blue lines speak for themselves. The irony is that the rant against racism, this outrage at being the object of discrimination, finally reveals profound racism, a racism that turns against itself, an I-don’t-deserve-to-be-considered-black, an auto-racism as in autobiography, a closed circuit. But perhaps this continues the quarrel of the popular versus the cultivated, the raving slam being a popular way of approaching the matter, as well as the quarrel of the black versus the white and the black versus the black, and of the English versus the Spanish, from bilingual to nilingual. Remarkably, Palés focused more on the black body than on the black face, whereas many contemporary poets still trod down to the sound of negro bembón. The poet Martin Espada does, however, struggle to find a reaction other than shame or anger when confronted with the slur. In the poem “Niggerlips” the poet remembers that in high school he was often called niggerlips by someone named Douglas whose favorite pastime was driving around black neighborhoods with an unloaded gun in order to scare the black people, as he would scare crows. Feeling unhomed by the racial slur, the poet, in turn, remembers that he got his lips from his great grandfather Luis whom the family kept secret, but who remains, “a fly in milk” (152). The conclusion and the message of hope here is that a fly in the milk is worth more than an unloaded gun. Although Palés often experienced similar spiritual dislocation or unhomeliness, an ever-fleeting lack of identity, and a sensation of being either humiliated or erased by the Other’s gaze, he expressed it otherwise, or more carefully. For example, in “Lamento,” the tone is plaintive and the white man is depicted as a white shadow capable of harming the baby in his crib.

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It is as if a choice forever had to be made, and there was no possibility of a compromise, or a synthesis, not even in the mulatto who carried the different cultures. However, Benítez affirms that there was a message of hope in Palés’s last negroid poem “Mulata Antilla.” According to Benítez, the message conveyed in this poem is that the white man will eventually let go of his nostalgia for Europe and fully accept the Antillian. It is no longer a question of being black or white, it is of being of color, not “de color” because in Spanish that particular term has bad connotations, but being of some color, in this case kissed by the Antillean sun could be enough. Benítez, however, remained guarded since only the future would say if there was any possibility of overcoming the spiritual despondency of Puerto Rico (191). Palés’s preoccupations and themes continued to be expressed in Puerto Rican poetry well after his death: nationhood, self-image, identity, race, language, and the feeling of spiritual despondency that Benítez addressed at a conference at the University of Puerto Rico in 1938. The difference is that for some later poets, particularly those who left the island, language and culture were lost and some concerns eventually changed into hatred and self-hatred. The result was a more popular poetry that perhaps dared to say more, but oftentimes said less. A good example is in the poem “The Sounds of Sixth Street” by the Nuyorican poet Martita Morales. Often anthologized, this poem begins as an attempt to answer a child’s question: Mommy, why are you white and daddy’s tan? (8). Although this is a young child who does not yet have total command of the language, the child in this poem has command of neither language, and has been raised straddling the two, choosing whatever word comes first. The poet herself was probably raised in a similar fashion, and odds are that she has limited command of the Spanish since she made a grammatical error with the word porqué, unless of course that was a voluntary mistake. Initially, the answer to the questions enumerates what the child cannot understand, for example that someone being called Chocolate wasn’t being called by his name, but by his skin color, and that many Puerto Rican people are a mixture of many different races. Soon, the tone changes into that of hatred and resentment for the “honky Ass-bourgeoisie” who will not allow their daughter to have a boyfriend with an Afro or who looks black. Finally, the poem begins to unravel with a shout, “MOTHER FUCKING white ass/ this is a Puerto Rican girl.” The last nine lines repeat that she is a Puerto Rican girl who rebels and will continue to fight because she knows she is right. The only stone left unturned is whether the child was satisfied with the answer. Such concerns and ambivalent feeling for the United States and the white man are by no means unique to the twentieth century. Towards the end of the nineteeth century, the poet José de Diego expressed this same frustration

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but in a less personal and more militant tone: “We shun concepts that would reduce us to an island of/Thieves./We shun, despite your historical reversals, the language and the/spirit of the Anglo people./We speak another language, with other thoughts” (26). In the end the poet bids the U.S. to go to the devil and leave the Puerto Ricans with God. The historian María Teresa Babín wrote that José de Diego (1867–1918) was considered by some critics to be a precursor of modernism and an initiator, and that his poetry and speeches carried the message “embodied in the flag, the coat of arms, the historical and legendary past, and the dream of independence” (331). Comparable thoughts and feelings were expressed by Puerto Rican poets living in the United States in the seventies and eighties. In “Situation Heavy,” Angel Berrocales sends an ambivalent message to democracy, Congress, and the entire United States, accusing them of creating today, and yesterday, and the sorrows of tomorrow, “You taught me how to manipulate the so-called great/and how to have a good debate./And I’ll keep next to you by going to your schools” (79–80). Such attitudes are indeed questionable and debatable. Analogous in tone is Miguel Piñero’s poem, “The Book of Genesis According to San Miguelito” where God created the people while riding around Harlem in a gypsy cab and then created capitalism to keep these people company. Capitalism, in turn, begat racism that begat exploitation that begat chauvinism that begat imperialism that begat colonialism that begat “wall street” (63). Although there could be debate as to the order of lineage, these lines convey the message of disappointment and resentment tied to U.S.-Puerto Rican relations. A founder of the Nuyorican poets’ movements along with his close friend Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero was born in Puerto Rico in 1946 and raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the Nuyorican poets pursued the racial, social, and economic discourse in exile. Before his untimely death in 1988, Piñero immortalized the Lower East Side when he asked that his ashes be scattered from Houston to 14th Street and from Second Avenue to the mighty D, as well as where, “the hustlers and suckers meet,” just so that “the faggots and freaks will all get high/on the ashes that have been scattered/thru the Lower East Side” (Algarín 1994, 5–6). Bimbo Rivas (1939–1992), another one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, was considered to be the one who coined the term Loisaida. In the poem titled “Loisaida,” Rivas describes this neighborhood in Spanish in the fourth stanza as an incredible mixture of decent people of all races (361), and in English in the last stanza, “O what a ‘hood . . ./even with your drug infected/pocket parks, playgrounds” (Ibid., 362). With the Nuyoricans many issues having to do with race, nation, and identity remained somewhat similar to those addressed by Palés, but a new popular expression of these issues emerged. The everyday problems the

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Puerto Ricans abroad faced were expressed in everyday terms, and they had to do with debt and joblessness, and carving out a place in a hostile or uncaring society, an effort that called for a wide range of alternative behaviors that could go anywhere from the very positive such as entrepreneurship and creative endeavors, to hustling, substance abuse, and criminal behavior. Furthermore, by the 1980s, as can be seen in some of the poems cited above, several new matters surfaced and suddenly the Puerto Ricans were no longer dealing merely with racial and social discrimination at home and abroad, suddenly there was also a focus on drugs, H.I.V., and homosexuality. Written in Spanglish, Piñero’s “La Metadona Está Cabrona (Methadone is a bitch)” alludes to drug addiction and its consequences, “can’t yell out ghettocide since you did abide & signed/on the dotted line/to an agreement of shame who’s to blame” (66). This poem is significant in the sense that it is not necessarily casting out the blame on the Other. On the contrary, here the subject assumes responsibilities for his actions, and even fails to take his plight completely seriously, since the poem ends with some humor and a suggestion that there is definite understanding of how the outside world turns, that he was no longer on drugs but rather on medication (Ibid.). Another approach to the ambivalent past, and the conflict of languages, cultures and races, can be found in the only Latina woman poet included in the list of founders of the Nuyorican movement. Sandra María Esteves takes on topics such as crime and H.I.V. as well, but with a language that assuages the battle of the cultured versus the popular. In “It Is Raining Today,” Esteves asks the rain where her people’s history is, and then implores the rain, “Give me back my rituals/Give back truth/Return the remnants of my identity” (19). In “Blanket Weaver” Esteves implores the weaver to “weave us a song of many threads/that will dance with the colors of our people/and cover us with the warmth of peace” (135). In such poems, the search for identity begins with an utter lack of self and of home and builds from that point onward. For a time, everything appears to have been lost, a condition that approaches a feeling akin to a crisis, a loss of self, disturbance, unhappiness, estrangement, an odd feeling of humiliation, of being nothing other than a commodity, in other words unhomeliness. Esteves also expresses such feelings in “I look for peace great graveyard” where “new york spits my eye/oil dragged hummingbird, is there no peace/sometimes I want to die I feel just die” (136). In fact, from the nineteenth century to the present the unhomely has been a focus of reflective thought. It was alienation for Marx and the notat-home,—or the fundamental character of our being in the world,—for Heidegger. Das Unheimliche was the title of Freud’s 1919 essay, which was translated into English as The Uncanny. For Homi Bhabha, das Unheimliche is precisely the unhomely, which he considers to be a paradigmatic colonial and postcolonial condition (9). By taking into consideration

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the different meanings of the word homely Freud points out how the term becomes increasingly ambivalent. “until it finally merges with its antonym unheimlich. The uncanny (das umheimliche, the unhomely) is in some way a species of the familiar (das heimliche, the homely)” (134). This paradox, however, does not express a tautology. Rather, this slipping and sliding of meaning suggests the identity of a difference and the difference of an identity. The terms homely and unhomely never fuse; they remain apart, and this being apart allows them to come into contact with each other at different moments in time. Unhomely is the way of being at home in the world, and also at home, in privacy. Homely is the way of not being at home in the world. The result is the sheer terror and anxiety that Esteves expresses in “I look for peace great graveyard,” and Palés renders in many poems, markedly in “Humus” where the poet is beleaguered by an abysmal vision: “un vaho oscuro de sueño y de cansancio./Estoy completamente solo frente a mi abismo . . ./¡Qué horror, qué aroma rancio!” (1971, 130). (a dark breath of somnolence and lethargy./I stand alone before my abyss . . ./What horror, what rancid an odor!) This experience of horror will induce the poet to wonder if it is all worthwhile and if it would be better to die. Such expressions of unhomeliness appear to be the numen of Afro-Puerto Rican poetry from Guayama to Loisaida, as is the need to create words to further the expression. Among some of the words, names, and sounds created and repeated by Palés are many that mimic the sound of the drum, as well as names for characters he created such as Tembandumba de la Quimbamba, Mulata-Antilla, Lepromonida, and Fili-Melé. López-Baralt mentions that Puerto Rican imagination has already entered one of these names into the lexicon: Tembandumba, used to refer to good looking mulattas, and of utmost importance for Puerto Rican national identity since it marks the poetic beginnings of the celebration of African female beauty and is a harbinger of the U.S. slogan of the 1960s black is beautiful (2009, 22). The character Mulata-Antilla also lauds the beauty of the African woman. There are in fact two poems titled “Mulata-Antilla” in the Tuntún, the original from the first edition of the collection (1937), and a second version dated 1949. The second version is longer and contains almost the entirety of the first, except for the last two stanzas. Both poems address mulatta-Antilla who becomes both a woman and the landscape itself, mother nature, the past, the present, and the future, in other words a goddess who is and at the same time announces the awakening of the Antilles. The second version delves deeper into this character. One moment Mulata-Antilla is an empress who uses the coconut and the plantain as artillery, but she is also a Walkyrie and the Biblical Shunammite taken to David’s harem in hopes of reviving his failing powers.

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Lepromonida, in turn, is yet another name or word of Palés’s making, perhaps a fusion of the words lepra (leprosy) and demonio (demon). Again, there are several versions of the poem itself. In the Tuntún edited by Mercedes López-Baralt, Lepromonida approaches the avatar of the Haitian Erzulie that personifies darkness. Lepromonida may also be a riddle: the riddle of evil, of death, of fear, of hatred, and of ambiguity, since she is a black queen with white feet who reigns over red tribes. She is also a spider of darkness, of dreams, and of nightmares. Lepromonida is: “Incendios, pestes, gritos, narcóticos azules,/venenos, horcas, fetos, muertes” (Fires, plagues, shrieks, blue narcotics,/venoms, gallows, fetuses, deaths) (2002, 145). Again, Lepromonida herself is the riddle of pestilence, of blue narcotics and the possible answers to the riddle: venoms, fetuses. At the same time the poem contains a proverb or counsel of prudent action: to beware of and to fear Lepromonida. There exist different interpretations of another name created by Palés, that of Fili-Melé. Although the Fili-Melé cycle does not necessarily fall under the rubric of poesía negra, these poems do make reference to the young, mulatta university student of whom Palés became enamored in 1949. For critics such as López-Baralt and Alfredo Villanueva, Fili-Melé could very well be an anagram for Filomela, or the Philomele of Greek mythology who was raped then mutilated by her brother-in-law, and who was finally turned into a nightingale by the gods who took pity on her. In zoology, Philomel refers to a genus of birds including the nightingale. On the other hand, the name contains the Greek word philo (I love), but there is debate as to the etymon of mele. Villanueva is of the opinion that it means song (López-Baralt 2009, 40). For Miguel Enguinados, who claims to have heard it from Palés Matos himself, Fili signifies sweet and delicate, while the French melé refers to mixed blood. The French could very well be, but it would seem perilous to take into account the sounds produced by other languages, if not for the simple reason that in that case the possibilities would be endless. What matters above all is the need to create new words in order to better grasp or express the numen. As to the Nuyoricans, after having become a word themselves, and forced Spanish into English, as in Loisaida, they also created new words such as “Dusmic” that, according to Algarín, “defines the process of transforming aggression being directed at you by another person (or, more generally, society) into your strength” (1975, 129). When it comes to these created words, it is a pity that fortune or history did not give Puerto Rico (or Cuba, or the Dominican Republic for that matter) a historical character or a word such as Malinche. Had this been the case Malinche would have been a portal, much like Tembandumba or Lepromonida or Fili-Melé. It would have sufficed to name her in order to cross the threshold. Or perhaps the history of these islands did produce a Malinche, but she simply remained unwritten, and the task has therefore been to find a word for someone representing the different

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cultures and the different languages in one person: the Indian (for lack of a better word), the black, the mulatto, the mestizo, the white, the English language, the Spanish language. Someone who belongs, someone who defines a culture and at the same time hates and betrays a culture. What is it about? Has it changed? Evolved? Metamorphosed? Yes, it is not a question of language, of social class, of unhomeliness, of money, of acceptance, of insecurity, of education, of pretty words, ugly words, of kinky hair, of thick lips, of self-hatred, it is not a question of self-image, of being two times or three times removed, or even of despair. Yes, as the bard from Guayama expressed so well, it is not a question of race, it is one of hate. NOTE 1. Another version of this essay was previously published in Voces del Caribe, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2016.

Chapter 10

Biophilia, Ecophobia, Eco-Odium A Coupling with the Nonhuman, Extinction, and a Loop of Vampiric Mosquitos Threatening the Anthropocene

In Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton analyses the word weird. From the Old Norse urth, meaning twisted, in a loop, the term can also mean causal, “the winding of the spool of fate” (5), as well as destiny or magical power and the wielders of that power. “And what is dark ecology?” Morton then asks, only to define it as ecological awareness, ecognosis, a knowing that knows itself. “Knowing is a loop, a weird knowing” (5). Morton adds that place also has a loop (10). Four novels set in a place, local and nonlocal, the jungle, a hyperobject, four novels that have everything to do with speaking, language or lack thereof, knowing, unknowing, impossibility of knowing, four novels that take the form of a strange loop that Timothy Morton would consider to be “weirdly weird” (5). Henán Robleto’s novel Una mujer en la selva (A Woman in the Jungle) (1936) is not so much the impossibility of returning to nature, but rather of returning to civilization after repeated sexual encounters with nonhuman nature that makes Emilia Rivera, “campo de experimentación para que algún día se predique la verdad de las relaciones sexuales” (A field of investigation so that one day truth be told about sexual relationships) (Robleto 91). A woman sequestered and raped by a gorilla develops a passion for nature and for her captor. She finds paper and pen and tells her experience in the jungle. Both the jungle and the gorilla become hyperobjects, a term coined by Timothy Morton to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans (2013, 1). Mario Vargas Llosa’s El hablador (1987) (“The Talker” translated into English as The Storyteller) could have a mouth as emblematic illustration. The mouth as hyperobject, different mouths take turns talking: Vargas Llosa, 165

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author and narrator, arguing for progress and further exploitation of the Peruvian Amazon; Mascarita (not his real name), an ethnologist whose intent is to keep the Machiguenga tribe from becoming extinct or, worse yet, civilized; the Machiguenga people voicing their present and their past through Mascarita’s mouth. Mascarita speaks with wrath; he is livid; he hates the nuns, the missionaries, anyone exploiting the Machiguengas and taking their forest away from them. Above all, Mascarita hates the linguists. “Tus lingüistas son más refinados, los quieren matar de otro modo” (Your linguists are more refined, they want to kill them another way) (94). For Doris Sommer, this novel constantly conjures, “memories of talk” (96). Mayra Montero’s novel Tú, la oscuridad (1995) (You, darkness)—that has a very important and significant red frog on the cover—can also be represented by a mouth. The herpetologist, the Haitian, and what Simon Estok would consider to be ecomedia, a trio that take turns talking, hating linguists, and describing the Haitian natural environment, its people, and its animals, a world on the brink of extinction. Lastly, Rafael Bernal’s Su nombre era muerte (1947) (translatable as His Name was Death, but also Her or Your) also involves mouths. A protagonist, suffering from what Michael Soulé would label neurotic biophilia (443) learns the language of mosquitos in order to communicate with them and then wage a vampiric war against the white race, perhaps because whites pose a threat to the hubristic linguist—the narrator—ensconced in the natural world. Such an extremist attitude defies Stephen Kellert’s conclusions drawn as to how big a sacrifice people are willing to make to protect nature. For Kellert, the value of nature is only recognized to a limited extent (65), not so for Bernal’s eco-neurotic protagonist who is so ready for the end of Anthropocene and perhaps the end of the world. In many chapters of this book I stayed away from terms such as biophilia and ecophobia, particularly when focusing on late medieval literature, literature of the Conquest, Golden Age literature, and nineteenth-century literature. In this chapter, I will be reading biophilia, ecophobia, and eco-odium into the four above-mentioned novels. I am running the risk of applying contemporary hypotheses to novels published in 1936 and 1947. The fact is that those two novels do not belong to their time and therefore allow me to consider Simon Estok’s weighing of biophilia and ecophobia, as well as his rejection of biophilia. Lastly, via the reading of these novels I will be arguing for eco-odium and questioning the proposed Anthropocene, the inconvenient Anthropocene (Morton 2018, 12). Biophilia: from bio, life, and philia, friendly or loving. The term was made popular in the 1960s by the psychoanalyst Eric Fromm who defined it as the passionate love of life and all that is alive, the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group (406). Biophilia is

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the opposite of necrophilia that Fromm sees as the pure passion to destroy, when unalloyed with sex (366). While for Freud both tendencies had an equal rank, Fromm understood necrophilia as a psychopathological phenomenon, a crippledness, and biophilia as a capacity that man is endowed with (406–407). Extended by Edward O. Wilson in the 1970s, the biophilia hypothesis suggests that humans tend to subconsciously seek connections with the rest of life and would not knowingly allow any species or race to go extinct (1999, 351). Some examples of what Wilson calls biophilia include (1999, 349–350): 1. Phobias acquired because they threaten humans in natural environments: heights, closed spaces, open spaces, wolves, spiders, snakes. Wilson adds that humans rarely form phobias to recently invented contrivances such as knives, guns, and automobiles. 2. The fact that people are both repelled and fascinated by snakes. (I believe that this ambivalence could be emblematic of mankind’s relationship to nature.) 3. The fact that most people prefer to live near water, on heights, from which parkland can be viewed. 4. The fact that a large portion of the populace backpacks, hunts, fishes, visit zoos, and crowds to national parks. In an essay titled “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” Wilson explains that biophilia, if it exists (and he believes it does), is an innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms, innate meaning hereditary, and that biophilia is not a single instinct but rather a complex of learning rules (31). For Simon Estok, in addition to being unproven and perhaps unprovable, the biophilia hypothesis doesn’t quite work because it cannot account for the realities of the world, the factory farms, the rain forest destruction, and cannot explain exploitation, homophobia, and sexism (2018, 9). On the obverse side of biophilia—and another point on what Estok considers to be the spectrum of our ethical relationship with the natural world—is ecophobia that Estok defines as, “an irrational and groundless hatred (often fear) of the natural world that is as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism” (Ibid., 10). Scott DeVries points to a good example of the war between biophilia and ecophobia when comparing Rivera’s La vorágine to Robleto’s Una mujer en la selva. Despite being inspired by La vorágine, Una mujer en la selva transmits a totally different message. “And the representation of nature and the “autobiographical” descriptions by Emilia are quite different from what is in La vorágine: in the latter, there is fear and dread and madness in the jungle, but the former has the experience of nature and the forest as thoroughly

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positive, a wilderness more Edenic than savage, more healthful than deadly” (148–149). Indeed, in Robleto’s novel, even the deadly becomes redemptive and educational, as when Emilia writes, “Yo he aprendido muchas cosas en la selva. He sabido de las costumbres de las fieras, de la complejidad de la vida de estos seres repugnantes que se arrastran, como cordones de aceite” (76–77). (I have learned many things in the jungle. I have learned about the life of the wild beasts, and about the complexity of the life of those repugnant beings that slither, like a film of oil.) The verb arrastrarse implies movement on the ground with an absence of extremities, hence, snakes. For Wilson, the biophilia hypothesis can be made explicit by the human relation to snakes. Wilson expresses the ophidian version of the biophilia hypothesis in its briefest form, “constant exposure through evolutionary time to the malign influence of snakes, the repeated experience encoded by natural selection as a hereditary aversion and fascination, which in turn is manifested in the dreams and stories of evolving cultures” (1993, 34). Captive in the jungle, momentarily separated from her captor/lover/ protector, Emilia encounters an enormous boa that slowly begins to tighten its body around her. Although the scene is terrifying, Emilia describes it as a quasi-sexual encounter, “El cilindro fatídico ha penetrado entre mis muslos. [. . .] La cabeza guia al resto del cuerpo y ahora va por mi vientre, lamiendo pasajeramente el ombligo” (83). (The fateful cylinder had penetrated between my thighs [. . .] the head was leading the rest of the body and it is now on my belly, licking my belly in passing.) Emilia knows what will happen as the snake continues to coil itself around her. “Y entonces comenzarán a quebrarse mis huesos” (Then my bones will start to break) (Ibid.). Suddenly, Emilia’s captor appears, and the first thing he does, “como con raciocinio humano,” (as with human reasoning) (84), is to search for the boa’s head, which he finds and succeeds in liberating Emilia, only to put himself in peril. After reciting a brief Lord’s Prayer, Emilia seizes an axe and succeeds in liberating the ape from the snake’s deadly embrace. The snake dead, Emilia calls the ape, and he comes like a harmless dog. “Lo acaricio; pego mi cara a la de él; lo beso” (I caress him; I put my face next to his; I kiss him) (84). Una mujer en la selva was published in 1936, three years after the first film version of King Kong was released, and thirty years before the psychoanalyst and philosopher Eric Fromm used the term biophilia in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness and described it as “a passionate love of life and all that is alive” (365). The term, the behavior, or the attitude, however, remains Latin, a dead language, and can be applied to Robleto’s long-forgotten novela de la selva. José Eustacio Rivera’s La vorágine survived the test of time and of the canon, as did Romulos Gallegos’s Canaima and Doña Bárbara, while

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the Nicaraguan Hernán Robleto’s novels are buried in the stacks of a few libraries, in Spanish with no translation. Similar to La vorágine, Una mujer en la selva is structured as a found manuscript. An explorer separated from his party seeks refuge from a tropical storm in a cave where he finds a manuscript that he immediately determines to have been written by a woman. And the explorer asks himself, “¿Qué sino condenó a Emilia Rivera al aislamiento en la montaña?” (13). (What fate condemned Emilia Rivera to isolation in the mountain?) After having spent the night reading the manuscript, the explorer is rescued the next morning and taken back to the village, where his relatives weep because, todos conocen la atracción, la serie de peligros de la selva. Pero, ¿esto que queda ahora es la selva? Selva de entonces. Cuando fue realidad la leyenda que hoy suena en las bocas descreídas, a pesar de que las viejas, al rememorarla, se santigüen. (They all know the attraction, the series of dangers of the jungle. But, is this that remains now the jungle? The jungle from another time. When the legend told by incredulous mouths was a reality, even if old ladies still make the sign of the cross when they recall it.) (15)

Before becoming a legend, a mujer-mono, a monkey-woman, Emilia Rivera liked to read and to observe the monkeys and the washerwomen in her town on the edge of the Nicaraguan jungle shooing the monkeys away. Her father warned her about the dangers of reading too much that could lead to her believing all those stories were true (27). Nonetheless, Emilia continues to read, to have dreams about the souls of the monkeys (32), and eventually to begin fearing monkeys (33) and other natural phenomena. Just as Estok defines ecophobia as a human psychological condition that prompts antipathy toward nature (2018, 1), Emilia begins to fear sex, excrement, everything natural (34), and at the same time feels attracted to what frightens her, to the point that she ventures away from her village, to the other side of the river, deeper and deeper into the jungle where she encounters a gigantic monkey. Before she knew it, “Ya está sobre mí, ya está en mí” (41). (He is already on top of me, he is already inside of me.) After the rape, Emilia awakens, to find herself alive, high up on a tree, in a green prison. She remembers her great-grandfather, the pirate who refused to return to civilization after having been captured and tattooed by savages because he was too ashamed of the capture and of the tattoos, and she realizes that she is the woman trapped by the jungle with a primitive destiny awaiting her, less than primitive, “porque esto ya es caso de encantada zoología” (Because this is a case of bewitched zoology) (45). She evens stops to ask herself, what if? “¿Y si de esta mezcla de celulas . . . ? ¡No! ¡Eso

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sería horroroso!” (And if from this combination of cells? No! That would be horrifying!) (Ibid.). Emilia did not necessarily know that a monkey would be incapable of impregnating a woman. She probably had no knowledge of chromosome count. In fact, it was not until 1955 that it became obvious that there were twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in human cells. The question, which will remain unanswered, is whether Robleto considered the possibility of interbreeding. In 1932, the film Island of Lost Souls—an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau—was released. Both the novel and the film were about a mad scientist on a remote island, Dr. Moreau, conducting genetic experiments on humans and animals. The initial horror, the smell of the ape, the thought of being impregnated by the ape, will eventually fade, Emilia begins to get used to living in the jungle. She gives her captor/spouse a name, wishes he could speak, and comes to the realization that he no longer disgusts her. Having lost all sense of social time, her clothes, and even her smile, Emilia goes from one point of the spectrum to the opposite other: from experiencing an antipathy toward nature, fearing monkeys, the jungle, and bodily processes, to what I would call extreme biophilia, something akin to the tremendismo that Nicasio Urbina refers to in his article about Robleto’s Trópico de sangre, an exaggerated approach that could have perhaps taken away from Robleto’s novels. In Una mujer en la selva, Emilia’s doctor hints at hysteria from excessive reading that will perhaps be cured once she is married. Once married to her monkey-captor, Emilia feels that trees become friends and protectors (113), admits to loving life, even her own (47), sheds her feelings of repulsion (51), and when she caresses her monkey, he ceases to be a monster, and she had nothing to fear (50), her hysteria seems to have vanished. Suddenly, trees become individuals with names, such as El Viejito (The Little Old Man) whom Emilia believes has a soul and loves her company (111). “Aquí he aprendido,” Emilia writes, “la bella cualidad de ser salvaje y casi ya no me atrae el pueblo ni la vida humanizada” (Here I have learned the beautiful quality of being a savage and I am barely attracted to the village or the human way of life) (93). Instead of describing the failure of the return to nature as José Eustacio Rivera and Romulo Gallegos do, Robleto points to this impossibility of returning to civilization. The fear of nature becomes the fear of humans that Emilia experiences for the first time when she hears the name Francisco being uttered and coming from up above the trees, only to discover, to her great relief, that this voice comes not from men but from a parrot who had undoubtedly been held captive in a house where a Francisco dwelled. “There is a war between biophilia and ecophobia,” Estok wrote in 2018, long after the publication of Robleto’s novel, “and the current state of the world shows which is winning” (23). In Emilia’s jungle, however, there is little or no room for ecophobia.

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For Morton, on the other hand, the current state of the world has everything to do with the possibility of extinction, whether it be of men or of animals. “What does it mean to study something?” Stephan Palmié asks in the introduction to his book, The Cooking of History (xiii). Palmié admits to having said, once upon a time, that he studied Afro-Cuban religion, but at the time of the writing of his book, he was no longer sure that he in fact studied AfroCuban religion because one can only discover or find what one presumes to be there. This conviction is a far cry from Morton’s assertion that things really do exist beyond our mind (2013, 39). Whether the subject of the study is presumed to be there, or actually there, in El hablador, the narrator studies himself and his childhood friend nicknamed Mascarita (little mask) because of the birthmark on his face. Mascarita, in turn, gave up studying human anatomy only to become an ethnologist and to study an Amazonian tribe. Soon enough, however, Mascarita will begin to question the discipline, ethnology, and eventually realize that this type of research is an untenable as exploitation. In Tú, la oscuridad, a herpetologist studies and searches for a red frog called the Eleutherodactylus sanguineus in danger of extinction, and another character named Sarah has but one obsession, to find the female flower Pereskia that she has studied her entire life and has been hoping to find in the Haitian jungle for the past six years. The Haitian, Thierry, compares a Haiti that no longer exists, when the sea was wider, deeper, and more beloved by the fish (25) to the ecologically ravaged Haiti of the Tonton Macoutes. Traveling through the Peruvian Amazon, the narrator of El hablador recalls his debates with Saúl Zuratas (Mascarita). “¿Qué ilusión era aquella de querer preservar a estas tribus, tal como eran, tal como vivían? En primer lugar, no era possible. Una más lentamente, otras más de prisa, todas estaban contaminándose de influencias occidentales y mestizas. Y, además, ¿era deseable aquella químerica preservación?” (What an illusion to want to keep these tribes as they were, as they used to live? In the first place, it was not possible. They were all being contaminated by occidental and mestizo influences, some slowly, others faster) (72). What José Castro Urioste sees here is a discourse of conquest, conquest being understood in a broader sense, referring to acquisition of territory that had previously belonged to another people. “El hablador contains one of the major images of power expressed in the discourse of conquest, the dichotomy civilization/barbarism” (243). While civilization is in the center, barbarism is in the periphery, in the jungle. Besides expressing space, Urioste adds that the dichotomy expresses time, civilization being the present and the future, and barbarism the past (244). The dichotomy is rendered throughout the narrator’s and Mascarita’s debates. Uriosta concludes that for Vargas Llosa, the defence of indigenous cultures does not have any legitimacy and is an obstacle to be overcome (251).

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From the moment he falls under the spell of the Amazonian tribe, Mascarita, the defender of a tribe at risk of extinction, protests: Where can they go? They have been pushed out of their land for centuries. It’s incredible that they have not yet disappeared (22). The narrator retorts: Did the rest of Peru have to abstain from exploiting the Amazon so they could remain in the Stone Age, continue shrinking heads, and worshipping the boa? Did commerce and agriculture have to be ignored so that some ethnologists be allowed to pursue their study of these people? “No, Mascarita, el país tenía que desarrolllarse. ¿No había dicho Marx que el progreso vendría chorreando sangre?” (No, Mascarita, the country needed to continue developing. Didn’t Marx say that progress would come with bloodshed?) (24). Moreover, weren’t these tribes exploiting the Amazon as well? Weren’t they the ones who invented fishing with poisons? Mascarita is considering the future of the Machiguenga people in urgent terms. Like plants, animals, and the natural world in which they live, they are facing diminishment or erasure. The mere contact with the ethnologists puts them at risk of contamination. Here, I would echo Stephan Palmié when he exclaims “as if there ever had existed uncontaminated ones!” (145). Mascarita’s sense of urgency is so extreme that he ends up doubting the value of his ethnological research, judges it immoral, and realizes that its actions resemble those of the rubber tappers, missionaries, linguists, and loggers (34). In his reflections on how not to study Afro-Cuban religions, Stephan Palmié examines what he calls the ethnographic interface and the issues involving ethnological research and field work. Although Palmié admits to sharing fellow ethnologist’s Richard Price’s feelings about the moral responsibilities that ethnographers face when interfering with another culture, Palmié prefers to ask himself why the anthropological knowledge or study is perceived as problematic in the first place. “There is nothing inherently wrong with an anthropology locked in mutually referential relationships with native discourses,” Palmié writes. “Both represent historically conditioned and deployed modes of interested symbolic practices” (144–145). The narrator, one of the many mouths of El hablador, would concur with Palmié by arguing that the least that could be said about ethnologists was that, despite their myopia, “estaban perfectamente conscientes de la necesidad de entender en sus propios términos la manera de ver el mundo de los indígenas de la selva” (They were perfectly aware of the need to understand in their own terms the way that the people of the jungle saw the world.) (35). The narrator then stops to consider the vilification of the Linguistic Institute (El Instituto Lingüístico). According to its enemies, the institute was a branch of North American imperialism that, under the pretext of scientific investigation, was carrying out a project of neo-colonial cultural penetration. Even some anthropologists accused linguists of contaminating (that word again!) aboriginal

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cultures and of trying to westernize them (70). Founded in the 1950s by North American Evangelical Protestants known as the Wycliffe Bible Translators who shared McCarthy’s anti-communist mission, Doris Sommer explains, the Summer Linguistics Institute counted on USAID and the CIA to establish bases throughout Latin America, strategically study indigenous languages, establish language schools, and vaccinate the indigenous population (101). Sommer adds that its most devout purpose, however, was conversion, indigenous languages mattering because they were potential vehicles for the Bible (Ibid.). Interestingly, and this has everything to do with more mouths, it was a husband-wife linguistic team, the Schneils, that mentioned very early on to the narrator what they perceived to be the disintegration of the Machiguenga people (80), as well as the existence of a rare character among the Machiguenga, neither a priest nor a healer, rather a talker, un hablador (89) and the absence of any serious ethnographic study of them (80). “El hablador, o los habladores, debían de ser algo así como los correos de la humanidad. Personajes que se desplazaban de uno a otro caserío [. . .] refiriendo a unos lo que hacían los otros” (The speaker, or the speakers, resembled couriers of humanity. People who would go from one settlement to another [. . .] talking about what the others were doing.) (90). Years later, when everyone seemed to be pretending that the habladores never existed, and the narrator suggests that they are perhaps taboo, the linguist Schneil first feigns surprise, “¿Los habladores?” (167), then finally gives in and refers to them as “los speakers” (168) when the narrator will not take feigned ignorance for an answer. Their name defined them, their function was simply to talk. “Sus bocas eran los vínculos aglutinantes de esa sociedad a la que la lucha por la supervivencia había obligado a resquebrajarse y desperdigarse a los cuatro vientos” (Their mouths were the binding agents of a society forced in its struggle for survival to crumble and scatter in the wind) (91). Like troubadours and jugglers, the talkers not only talked about the present, they were also the memory of their community. After hearing about them, the narrator decides to write a novel about a talker, but many years later he still finds himself incapable of doing so. The reason was, “la dificultad que significaba inventar, en español, y dentro de esquemas intelectuales lógicos, una forma literaria que verisímilmente sugiriese la manera de contar de un hombre primitivo (152). (How difficult it would be to invent, in Spanish, and within logical intellectual views, a literary form that would suggest how a primitive man tells a story in a credible way.) With such qualms, the narrator concurs with Kant’s basic argument and with the object-oriented ontologist Timothy Morton who writes, “I believe that there is a drastic finitude that restricts my access to things in themselves. The finitude is drastic because it is irreducible. I can’t bust through it” (2018, 16).

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When the narrator asks Mascarita about the talkers, Mascarita laughs (and he wasn’t expecting him to laugh). “Lo más probable es que quienes te hayan contado el cuento de los contadores de cuentos seans esos gringos. Las cosas no pueden ser como se les ocurren a ellos. Te aseguro que los gringos entienden a los machiguengas todavía menos que los misioneros” (I am sure that it was those gringos who told you that story about storytellers. Things cannot be as they appear to them. I assure you that the gringos understand the Machiguengas even less than the missionaries do) (92). Mascarita is not only insinuating that the speakers do not exist, or that they are a pure invention of the linguists, but that the effort to learn the Machiguenga language on the part of the linguists was to no avail, because they seemed to know less about the people that those who did not even speak their language. Their failure to know could be explained by their approach that Morton would describe as trying to bust through it or trying to splay things open and totally grasping them (2018, 16), Allusion to the speakers also puts Mascarita in a rage, he delivers a fierce diatribe against the Summer Linguistic Institute. The narrator describes Mascarita as being livid with fury (93). “¡Aprender las lenguas aborígenes, vaya estafa! ¿Para qué? ¿Para hacer de los indios amazónicos buenos occidentales, buenos hombres modernos, buenos capitalistas, buenos cristianos reformados? Ni siquiera eso. Sólo para borrar del mapa sus culturas, sus dioses, sus instituciones” (Learning indigenous languages, what a scam! What for? In order to make the Amazon Indians become good westerners, good modern men, good capitalists, good reformed Christians? Not even that. It is in order to erase from the map their cultures, their gods, their instituions) (95). Mascarita even insists that the linguists succeeded where no one else did in four or five hundred years. Why? Because the Machiguenga culture needed to be respected, and the only way to respect the people was to stay away from them, by learning the Machiguenga language the linguists had managed to touch the culture with their culture. “Nuestra cultura es demasiado fuerte, demasiado agresiva. Lo que toca, lo devora” (Our culture is too string, too aggressive. Whatever it touches it devours) (97). As he moved away from socialist ideals, the conservative narrator may have favored the linguists in these conservative vs. conservationist debates or memories of talk, but indigenous nationalism did win a battle against the Summer Institute of Linguistics: Brazil issued an embargo against SIL in 1977, Colombia threatened expulsion, Mexico revoked SIL’s contract in 1979 and Panama and Ecuador did the same in 1981 (Sommer 1996, 102). Nelson González Ortega delves into the question of whether El hablador is a novel or an ethnographic report and comes to the conclusion that the novel not only presents and represents themes related to the field of ethnography but also demonstrates the modus operandi commonly associated with ethnography that he defines as the science that systematically studies the ethnicities

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and cultures of people considered primitive when compared to civilized occidental societies (44). González Ortega adds that besides the discursive duality and the conflictive relationship between reality and fiction, another central theme of the novel is the deconstruction (reconstruction) of the ethnographic discourse that the narrator carries out by novelizing the objectives, techniques, and methods of the ethnographic discipline (45). While González Ortega likens El hablador to an ethnographic report, Sommer finds the novel theatrical, dramatic from the very beginning, and in perpetual movement (94). The beginning contains the end, pictures of absent faces, evacuated Indians, extinction. In the end, ethnography becomes a reflexive verb, or at least Mascarita does, in various ways, the ethnographer becomes the object of his study, a subject and an object, a speaker who, in turn, is yet another subject-object, a subject speaking, an object being heard, and the subject-object of the linguists and of the ethnographers, Mascarita has not only come full circle, a loop, but has managed to go back in time, “del pantalón y la corbata hasta el taparrabos y el tatuaje, del castellano a la crepitación aglutinante del machiguenga, de la razón a la magia y de la religion monoteista o del agnosticismo occidental al animism pagano” (From the pants and the tie to the loincloth and the tattoo, from the Castilian to the binding crepitation of the Machiguenga, from reason to magic and from monotheistic religion or occidental agnosticism to pagan animism) (233). The talker does not speak Machiguenga as the hated linguists do, “Porque hablar como habla un hablador es haber llegado a sentir y vivirlo más íntimo de esa cultura, haber calado en sus entresijos, llegado al tuétano de sus historia y su mitología, somatizado sus tabúes, reflejos, apetitos y terrores ancestrales” (Because to speak as a speaker does is to have succeeded in feeling and living the most intimate of that culture, to see through its complexities, to have arrived at the core of its history and mythology, to have somatized its taboos, reflections, appetites and ancestral terrors) (234). However, Doris Sommer does point out that for the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas storytellers could be fictional figures because Levinas, “draws the line between the sociality of Saying and the crippling control of fixing on the Said. They know that presuming to understand the Other wilfully ignores the mystery of his Saying; it razes difference and replaces it with the same” (129). Now the question is not only whether Mascarita had the right or the capacity to venture so deeply into this culture without he himself “saming” it, or watering it down, but also if he will be capable of stopping time and thwarting extinction. Having stated that the natural environment is disappearing, Edward Wilson posits that psychologists and other scholars are obligated to consider biophilia in more urgent terms: they should ask what will happen to the human psyche when the natural environment is diminished or erased (1193, 35). Aaron Katcher and Gregory Wilkins, in turn, approach extinction by asking

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why “we” exterminated so many animals and are so indifferent to their loss. “Why is biophilia, if it exists, so weak a determinant of human behaviour?” (189). Here are two angles from which to approach extinction: as the extinction of a particular species or as the extinction of the natural environment in its entirety. In Tú, la oscuridad, Mayra Montero begins by announcing the extinction of species, then of the Haitian environment and culture, and ultimately the death of nature in general. Such a threat—nature ending— however, implies that humankind would survive its demise and even live to talk about it. Books with titles such as Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, Philosophy Ecology after the End of the World, and Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene suggest that we will still be talking and writing after nature has disappeared and the world has ended. In ten scientific reports interspersed throughout the novel, and whose juxtaposition is a critique of Western culture and in particular its pragmatic and stereotypical vision of the human and natural reality of Haiti, according to Sofía Kearns (119), Montero announces the extinction of different frog species in different places in the world: 1. The bufo boreas boreas from the mountains of Colorado between 1974 and 1982 (21). 2. Four species from the forests of Queensland, Australia between 1979 and 1981 (41). 3. Millions of frogs dying in various lagoons in northern Switzerland in 1990 (71). 4. The bufo periglens disappearing from the forests of Monteverde, Costa Rica, also in 1990 (93). 5. The bufo marinus disappearing from the island of Kauai in 1992 (111). 6. Three species of coquís disappearing from Puerto Rico in 1989 (135). 7. The rana carreki disappearing from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Santa Marta, Colombia, by 1993. This was a species that would die at night and resuscitate in the morning (161). 8. The total disappearance of the rana cascadae from the lagoons of Southern California (185). 9. Four species disappearing in Honduras. For the first time, the disappearances are deemed catastrophic (2017). 10. The last specimen of the grenouille du sang was lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Grand Goave, Haiti. The herpetologist Victor Grigg and his assistant, Thierry, presumably perished, but their cadavers were never found (241). Simon Estok notes that while we are flooded with narratives of environmental crises, things are getting worse, and will continue to do so because the problem we face is ourselves (2018, 52–53). This is something that the

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herpetologist Grigg seems to ignore when he considers, throughout the narrative, the failure of his marriage—parallel to his quest for a frog in danger of extinction—as beyond him, out there, external, instead of internal. Interspersed in the story, the reports produce a sense of urgency, more and more amphibians disappearing, no explanation for the phenomenon, and seemingly no way to stop it. When analyzing narratives and films that market environmental concerns, Estok warns of the possibility of such marketing producing a backlash effect, and comes to the conclusion that ecomedia is less likely to bring about such an effect if it, “delivers instead understanding, a sense of an involvement with a living object rather than a sense of watching a dying one, a sense of immediate and personal danger, a sense that one’s self-interests are palpably at stake rather than of insularity from the future ruin of something from which we are alienated” 2018, 56). The scientific reports offer no hope, no solution, and are therefore less likely to be of any avail. Estok concludes that ecomedia is more likely to have an effect when it allows us to be participants rather than spectators and when it allows us hope (Ibid.). “El lenguaje científico, objetivo y distanciado de estos reportes,” Sofía Kearns writes, “refleja la actitud distanciada del protagonista norteamericano y de otros científicos de la misma nacionalidad respecto a la naturaleza y la realidad haitiana” (The scientific, objective, and detached language of these reports reflects the detachment of the North American protagonist and of other scientists of the same nationality towards Haitian nature and reality) (119). The protagonist that Kearns alludes to is Victor Grigg, a herpetologist in search of the grenouille du sang believed to have gone extinct in the Dominican Republic. In 1992, Grigg managed to capture an adult male believed to be the last of its species on the planet. Another protagonist is the botanist Sarah who is in search of the feminine species of a cactus in danger of extinction. Both scientists could be considered trophy hunters. Like the linguists in El hablador, they have a utilitarian vision of the world around them; they are in search of either plants, frogs, or souls to further their career. There are also two habladores in Montero’s novel: Thierry, the Haitian guide, and Dr. Emile Boukaka. While scientists prove themselves incapable of explaining extinction in their reports, for example: “Todavía se ignoran las causas” (21), (The causes remain unknown.), “Ya nunca se sabrá” (41), (Now one will never know.) and, “Para muchos biólogos, la súbita declinación de la Rana temporaria continua envuelta en el misterio” (71), both habladores appear to better understand extinction as well as the natural environment, and they would probably agree with Estok who wonders about our obsession with ourselves and the hubris implied in the term Anthropocene (57). For example, Thierry tells Victor that when he came across the grenouille du sang

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in the forest, he very well could have killed it and put it in a jar and taken it to Papa Crapaud who would have done anything to see one, but instead he left it alone. “Dejándola vivir, quizas ella fuera donde los loas, que son sus dueños naturales, y los aplacara diciéndoles que yo la había tratado bien” (By letting her live (the frog, la rana), perhaps she would go to the lwas, who are her natural owners, and placate them telling them that I had treated her well) (51). While the scientific reports seem to point the finger at Anthropos and blame Anthropos for the disappearances and extinction, Thierry suggests that nature is not so impressed by Anthropos. Dr. Boukaka takes the responsibility away from humankind when explaining disappearances and extinction; there is no Anthropocene, only the wishes of the gods of the forest. It is the god of the waters who has called the frogs to the bottom at least for a while: “Dicen que Agwé Taroyo, el dios de las aguas, ha llamado a las ranas para que se vayan por un tiempo al fondo” (131). Extinction, in fact, happened before and despite humankind. Dr. Boukaka tells Grigg, “Ustedes se inventan excusas: la lluvia ácida, los herbicidas, la deforestación. Pero las ranas desaparecen the lugares donde no ha habido nada de eso” (You make up excuses: acid rain, herbicides, deforestation. But the frogs disappear from places where that has never occurred) (132). Such a statement brings humankind down a notch and aims at taking the Anthropos out of the proposed Anthropocene. On the one side, humankind naming an epoch after itself, the Anthropocene that Sophie Christman considers to be a tragic show that results from the human disavowal of nature (x), on the other, nature threatened with the possibility of an end, this being the result of a hatred of nature because nature is only lovable if it is beautiful, tamed, and contained. “The physical beauty of nature is certainly among its most powerful appeals to the human animal” (49), Kellert writes. Some landscapes are indeed preferable to others. Ulrich notes that humans may be biologically prepared to respond with dislike to spatially restrictive settings (81) and respond positively to open savanna-like landscapes (82). Furthermore, studies on twins have proven that humans have a partly genetic predisposition to biophobia, “that is, to respond fearfully or aversively to certain living things and natural situations,” Ulrich writes before asking, “should one begin to doubt the plausibility of the biophilia hypothesis?” (86). Michael Soulé would reply that there is not just one biophilia, but a biophilia complex and also that, like human behavior, biophilia is manifold, in other words, that biophilia exists (443). Not included, however, in Table 15.1: A Tentative Classification of Biophilic Responses, is something that Soulé refers to as neurotic biophilias (Ibid.). Normally, phobias are explainable but also traumatic and neurotic, while philias, just as explainable should be the opposite of neurotic and traumatic by virtue of their explanations. Not so for Rafael Bernal’s nameless protagonist who loves out of hate, who opts for nature out of hubris and hatred of the

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human race, especially his own white race. Why? Because he does not feel recognized, or recognized enough, and aspires for immortality. For Sébastien Rutes, Su nombre era muerte is the first Mexican vampire narrative, and also a rewriting of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (249). Rutes juxtaposes the Chiapas jungle to the forests of Transylvania, and the Lacandons who idolatrize the narrator, to the Bohemians who serve Dracula blindly, and affirms that the nameless narrator’s hatred of mankind and thirst for immortality make way for, “sa collaboration avec les moustiques, l’un et les autres n’étant au final que les deux facettes d’un même être répondant aux caractéristiques traditionnelles du vampire” (His collaboration with the morquitos, one and the other being two facets of the same being at the end that comply with the traditional characteristics of the vampire) (250). Rutes uses Jean Marigny’s definition of the vampire to prove his thesis: the vampire is the absolute other who feeds on human blood, the undead who transmits diseases. One could argue that Dracula is immortal, and that the protagonist aspires for immortality, and to this argument Rutes responds that the immortal bodies of mosquitos assure immortality. However, many traits differentiate Stoker’s Count Dracula from Bernal’s neurotic consumed by hatred and frustrated ambition. This is another manuscript found and written in the jungle in the first person. While Emilia Rivera was a woman in the jungle, Bernal’s first-person singular that the Lacandons call either Kukulcán or Sabio Tecolote is, “un hombre perdido en la selva” (a man lost in the jungle) (101) who felt, “un odio inmenso que me subía a la garganta” (an immense hatred that would come up to my throat) (102), who decides to tell his story of hatred when it is almost too late, and after having considered writing and publishing a linguistic study of the language of mosquitos. Let’s call him Tecolote, because that is how he will present himself to the linguists, musicians, and ethnologists who will come and disturb his quiet hatred. Close to death, Tecolote is convinced that he will not die, that he will live on in the pages he has written and that his name will not be lost like the name of the mosquitos who followed him in his rebellion. “Por eso lo he puesto claramente en la primera página de este cuaderno y de todos los cuadernos, del que contiene la lengua mosquil y el que contiene su gramática, Mi nombre está allí para vivir durante todos los siglos” (That is why I have written it clearly on the first page of this notebook and of all the notebooks, on the one that describes the language of the mosquitos and the one that contains the grammar. My name will live on for all the centuries to come) (182). Despite this affirmation, Alberto Chimal writes that we will never know our narrator’s name and that it does not matter because the title of the novel gives us his real name or the only one that makes any sense (14). There is some ambiguity, however, in the title Su nombre era muerte; the possessive adjective su could be his, her, or the formal your, in other words it is in the third person, while the manuscript is in the first. Here

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lies the first difference between the man lost in the jungle hoping to publish a grammar of mosquito language and Count Dracula who is always preceded and announced by his name. Tecolote, on the other hand, tells the ethnologists that he prefers to be called Tecolote, because he has forgotten his other name, or prefers not to remember it (117). However, Tecolote does eventually try to reveal his real name to Miss Johnes (whose first name he will never know). “No me diga así,” Tecolote interrupts Miss Johnes when she calls him señor Tecolote, “Tengo mi nombre.” (Don’t call me by that name. I have my own name.) Tecolote even insists, “usted debería llamarme por mi nombre.” (You should call me by my name.) After he revealed his name, Miss Johnes laughed and said that she much preferred Tecolote Sabio (130). There is also the fact that Count Dracula has history, culture, and a past. “We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races,” (30), Count Dracula says to Jonathan Harker. In his journal, Tecolote writes, “La parte de mi vida que tiene importancia es muy breve: tan solo cuatro años, desde los cuarenta y cinco hasta los cuarenta y nueve que tengo ahora. Todo lo anterior fue tan solo una preparación para la amargura. [. . .] Pero no quiero contar lo anterior. Ya en la portada de este cuaderno doy my nombre” (24–25). (The part of my life that is important is very brief: only four years, from forty-five to forty-nine that I am now. Everything that came before was simply a preparation for bitterness. But I do not want to talk about the past. I already wrote my name on the cover of this notebook.) But the writer/narrator has no name, except perhaps death, in the third person, not even the first, unless of course Miss Johnes’s name is death, which was often suggested. “La mujer rubia es la que ha traído la muerte y si tú nos dejas” (The blonde woman has brought death, and if you abandon us) (153), a Lacandon says to Tecolote. Tecolote has no past either, only disgust and hatred that make him leave the city for the jungle. Rutes sees parallels between Jonathan Harker’s voyage to Transylvania and the narrator’s flight into the jungle (249–250), I fail to do so. In the beginning of his narrative, Tecolote confesses that he only harvested bitterness and hatred for the first forty-four years of his life and that it was disgust for mankind that made him embark on his journey deep into the jungle that he describes as, “la selva destructora” (25), (the destructive jungle), “la selva enemiga, la selva que suda muerte [. . .] ocultadora de amarguras y de odios, la selva bendita” (the jungle as enemy, the jungle that secretes death [. . .] that conceals bitterness and hatred, the blessed jungle) (26). Harker’s situation is much different, he is on a business trip, on his way to Transylvania to meet with a Count Dracula, much wanting to see all he could of the country (3) and to witness the beauty of the scenery while on the caliche: the swelling hills and the “slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of

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the Carpathians” (7). Harker is not the nameless narrator of Su nombre era muerte, he has a name, a fiancée, a career, and he is writing in his journal. Before long, however, the jungle of Chiapas, “n’a rien a envier aux forêts de Transylvanie” (Has no reason to envy the forests of Transylvania) (Rutes 250). Harker soon begins to doubt and to fear, at first surrounded as he is by wolves that the calèche driver seems very adept at controlling. The nameless narrator, in turn, would find life bearable in the deep jungle were it not for the mosquitos feeding on his blood every night. In this sense, if any character is comparable to Count Dracula, it is the loop of mosquitos, one character, because individuals do not count. Rutes points out that mosquitos are very seldom added to the list of animal vampires that includes bats, wolves, dogs, cats, and rats, but had mosquitos existed in central Europe they would have undoubtedly been one of Dracula’s most terrifying avatars (250). That is where the rewriting ends; Harker is not the nameless narrator, nor is the nameless narrator Count Dracula. While Tecolote is reified by the Lacandons in the caribal nearby and has nothing other to do than learn the language of mosquitos and dream of fame and fortune after the publication of his grammar and linguistics, Count Dracula is always working hard for his next meal and planning for the future. With no servants in the house, Harker realizes that the Count does all the menial jobs himself, from making beds including his own grave at dawn, writing letters, laying the table, preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner, clearing the table, controlling wolves, and even driving the calèche (29). While the Count, much like Mackandal, becomes animal, Tecolote communicates with his hyperobject, the swarm of mosquitos. I would liken the swarm or the loop to a hyperobject. As I mentioned previously, for Timothy Morton hyperobjects refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. Morton adds that this is regardless of whether these things are manufactured by humans, a hyperobject can be the Florida Everglades, the biosphere, Styrofoam, plastic bags (xi). Hyperobjects have properties such as viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity, all of which can be applied to Tecolote’s swarm of mosquitos. 1. Viscosity. “A good example of viscosity,” Morton writes, “would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can’t get rid of them” (2013, 36). As to Tecolote’s mosquitos, at night they would drink Tecolote’s blood and hammer their buzzing into his skull, and during the day they would stalk him and make him run (2013, 26). 2. Nonlocality. Neither global warming, nor nuclear radiation, nor endocrine disruptors are visible. Nor is it possible to point to a causal link that

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Timothy Morton’s cancer may have come from an endocrine disruptor. “The octopus of the hyperobject emits a cloud of ink as it withdraws from access” (2013, 39). Likewise, poison and its effect are not causally visible, nor malaria, nor disease. Bernal’s mosquito speaks, “Unos instilan un veneno que causa hinchazón y comezón, otros transmiten la malaria, el vómito negro o la oncocercosis, según el caso. Otros más llevan enfermedades que aún no conoce el hombre” (61). (Some instill a poison that causes inflammation and itching, others transmit malaria, black vomit or oncocercosis. Others carry diseases that man does not yet know.) 3. Temporal Undulation. Tecolote, the linguist, creates a hyperobject, a swarm of mosquitos whose language he speaks and who swear to protect him so long as he remains useful. The thought of being useful troubles Tecolote who still lives in his Tecolote-centric world and has not yet understood the spacetime dimension of his hyperobject. “It’s like being in a dream written by Zeno,” Morton writes. “Hyperobjects envelop us, yet they are so massively distributed in time that they seem to taper off, like a long street stretched into the distance” (2013, 55). 4. Phasing. “Phasing means to approach, then diminish, from a certain fullness,” Morton explains. “Jimi Hendrix-style guitar phasing seems to whoosh towards one’s hearing and away from it” (2013, 74). Likewise, phasing evokes the Jimi Hendrix-style of the mosquitos buzzing, and that can be heard and not necessarily seen. 5. Interobjectivity. “The bamboo forest ruthlessly bamboo-morphizes the wind, translating its pressure into movement and sound. It is an abyss of bamboo-wind” (2013, 81). Morton’s description could easily be that of a swarm of mosquitos mosquito-morphizing the wind in an abyss of mosquito-wind. Initially, Tecolote believes that he is the master of the hyperobject, that he will rule over the mosquito world and eventually over his entire universe. “El mundo está en mis manos,” he thinks to himself. “Yo soy el dueño de todo lo que tiene el hombre sobre la faz de la tierra” (123). (The world is in my hands. I am the master of everything that man has on the surface of the earth.) Tecolote also realizes that in his will for power he had ceased to hate mankind, at least until the anthropologists appeared and threatened what he believed to be his reign over the Lacandons (the humans) and the mosquitos (the animal world). In this sense, the nameless narrator striving for immortality is the Anthropocene. Soon enough, however, the mosquitos take the anthro out of the proposed geological era. Eventually, Tecolote begins to hear the mosquitos says things that disturb him, “como eso de que los lacandones pagaban un tributo de sangre; y la superioridad con la que siempre hablaban me daba la impression

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de que consideraban a los hombre como seres inferiors por más que yo daba a entender que los inferiores eran los moscos” (What about them believing that the Lacandons paid a tribute of blood; and the superiority with which they spoke always gave me the impression that they considered humans to be inferior beings no matter how much I insisted that the mosquitos were the inferior ones) (73). When he confronts the mosquitos about being determined to drink Miss Johnes’s blood, the mosquito’s reaction is, “¿Y quién eres tú para juzgar las órdenes del Gran Consejo?” (And who are you to question the orders of the Great Counsel?) (165). When Tecolote continues to refuse, the mosquito speaks again, “El Gran Consejo ha ordenado y a ti no te corresponde más que obedecer” (166). (The Great Counsel has ordered it and your duty is too obey.) Obviously, fiction, mosquitos do not speak, much less do they give orders, but just as Kafka in The Metamorphosis asks his readers to believe, not to be too quick to laugh or to smirk at the thought of a narrator waking up and finding himself transformed into an insect, Bernal or Tecolote, now “lost to the canon,” according to De Vries (157), is asking whoever finds the manuscript to take this seriously. For Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction properly conceived, “like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story” (154). Le Guin adds that in science fiction there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs. What about Emilia Rivera, lost to the canon, and alone in the jungle after the monkey’s death? Science fiction? I mentioned that this book was published four years after the film Island of Lost Souls was released (an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau), and three years after the first film version of King Kong, all funny, weirdly weird because, “Ecological awareness is weird; it has a twisted, looping form” (Morton 2018, 6), and also tragic. For DeVries, in both Robleto’s and Bernal’s novels the literary representation of biodiversity, deforestation, and environmental justice comprised conservationist tendencies and aspects of deep ecology long before such terms became conventions (157–158). All four novels also seem a distance away from what Estok refers to as narrativized science that sells books and films and spews out a lot of good information (2018, 55). However, Montero’s novel could be labeled Cli-Fi, and with all those linguists, ethnologists, missionaries, and rubber tappers, El hablador and Su nombre era muerte, no matter how weirdly weird, how buzzing, how talkative, are political science fiction, all four novels questioning the possibility of the Anthropocene long before the proposed Anthropocene.

Chapter 11

Is There a Caliban in this Narrative? The Cooking and the Eating of Hate

Caliban: an anagram for the caníbal (cannibal) of Columbus and Anglería, as well as a character/concept either depicting or condemning human and animal sacrifice, imperialism, capitalism, slavery, religious wars, machismo, and fascism (Jáuregui 18–19).1 For the writer Russel Hoban, Caliban is a hungry idea asking to be put into words. For Marina Warner, because of his shape shifting, Caliban is difficult to cast and dress (99). For Rubén Darío, as for Joséphin Péladan, Caliban is the overpowering vulgarity of the United States, the United States being the land of feroces Calibáns (Bortherston 214). As to Shakespeare’s Caliban, he is the mirror opposite of Ariel, yet they are both prisoners: while Ariel is invisible, Caliban is unsightly; Ariel is sober, Caliban is drunken, Ariel is submissive, Caliban is rebellious. Ariel speaks only when spoken to. Caliban interjects and interrupts. Warner remarks that Caliban’s deficiencies in appearance are insistently reiterated, from savage and deformed slave, to misshapen knave, a freckled whelp redolent of fishiness, a tortoise, a mooncalf, a puppy-headed monster (98–99). Although defeating visualization, Caliban has been cannibalized, the meat of the kill has been cut into little pieces, and either cooked or eaten raw by his anagrams. Caníbal: one of the first neologisms produced by the European expansion as well as one of the first cover-ups of the discovery of the New World, a linguistic and ethnographic misunderstanding according to Enrique Dussel (Jáuregui 13–14). Whether it is the tenet or the act, for Peter Hulme cannibalism happens to be an aftermath rather than a performance. “At the centre of the scene is the large cooking pot, essential utensil for cannibal illustrations; and surrounding it is the evidence of cannibalism: the discarded human bones” (2). Hulme adds that we need to look within to understand why the cannibal scene means so much to us and that looking within can take many forms, “from the psychoanalytical gaze to attention to the vocabulary of 185

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cannibalism within our cultural practices, from the analysis of cannibals and vampires in popular culture and film to the self-reflective analysis of imperialism as itself a form of cannibalism” (5). To imperialism, may I add capitalism, fascism, populism, and the proposed Anthropocene. As to the horror movies, John Kraniauskas considers them to rest, especially in the Americas, on a postcolonial scenario that involves staging the return of the past as a nightmare demanding justice of the present (143). Gisela Heffes would tie Hulme’s cannibal aftermath to the relationship that we have with leftovers, or “residuos,” as well as the relationship between archeological artifacts and rubbish (76) and examine these particular spaces that lodge human residue, spaces that are referred to as camps, either concentration or refugee camps, ghettos, prisons, in this case, the space that is the cannibal aftermath in Juan José Saer’s El entenado, the banks of the river, the jungle, another nowhere place. “Habían terminado de comer;” Saer’s narrator observes, “muy pocos ya—un viejo sin dientes, una criatura—chupaban, pensativos, algún hueso. En la parilla no quedaba nada” (63). (They had finished eating; very few of them left, a toothless old man, a young boy thoughtfully chewing on bone. There was nothing left on the grill.) Someone else threw a bone in the fire. Others were lying on the ground with their mouths wide open, staring up at the sky. Yet others remained standing but seemed to be on the verge of fainting. Everyone appeared somnolent, a somnolence that was closer to a nightmare than to a dream. “Parecían atentos a lo que pasaba dentro de ellos, como si esperaran el efecto inmediato del festín y estuviesen sintiendo bajar, paso a paso, cada uno de los bocados ingeridos por los recovecos de sus cuerpos” (They seemed attentive to what was happening inside of them, as if expecting the immediate effect of the feast and downing, little by little, each one of the mouthfuls ingested by the nooks of their bodies) (63–64). Looking within, as Hulme suggests, anthropophagy is a historical truth with a symbolic dimension, the savage kills and eats humans while civilized society exploits and enslaves. Even when it is real, cannibalism remains symbolic, and when it speaks of the Other, it reflects the Self because anthropology is as much a science of the Other as of the Self (Kilani 2018, 18–19). William Arens notes that the ethnographic sites for the cannibal tour through time were the fifteenth-century Caribbean, sixteenth-century Meso-America, nineteenth-century Africa, and so on, each time serving as the latest outpost of Western expansion, “and its cannibal denizens were identified by the thenprevailing institutional creators of knowledge, beginning with the conquistadors and missionaries to the New World” (40). Anthropophagy: akin to Anthropocene. Anthropos become conquistador and missionary to the conquered world. Not the answer, according to Simon Estok. A concept of a human-dominated epoch, Anthropocene is flawed to

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the core, and it is not even something new (2018, 83). Anthropocene is a recently proposed truth, an Anthropos-centered-oriented geological epoch having cooked, literally cooked the planet, and, knife and fork in hand, feeling highly capable of consuming it. This chapter, that will serve as conclusion, is about the cannibal ready for a meal, the cooking and the eating of hate, but certainly not Stephan Palmié’s vision of cooking as the gesture of throwing the subject of knowledge into the same pot as his or her object (29). Here, to cook is to use heat, to boil, to bake, to roast, to sauté, to start from the raw, to cut, and not simply end up with something hotter, but to set off a chain of chemical reactions, to burn, to kill: anthropophagy versus anthropemy (Lévy-Strauss 387–388), assimilation versus rejection, self-hatred, hatred of the Other, hatred as Other. Initially, I wanted to read ecophobia and rejection into Juan José Saer’s (1937–2005) narrative titled El entenado, translated into English as The Witness, but more like the Stepchild or the Foundling. Eventually, I realized that the narrator had no past, and that he “became” with his first alcoholic beverage and prostitute. He was a product of chance, an accident, a foundling, a tabula rasa. Incapable of hatred, all he felt was nostalgia for an oikos that never was. Saer’s narrative draws inspiration from the discovery and exploration of the Río de la Plata, a river and estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay and Paraná Rivers. “Ese río, que atravesaba por primera vez, y que iba a ser mi horizonte y mi hogar durante diez años, viene del norte, de la selva, y va a morir en el mar que el pobre capitán llamó dulce. Ellos lo llaman padre de ríos” (That river, that I was crossing for the first time, and that would be my horizon and my home for ten years, comes from the north, from the jungle, and flows into the sea that the poor captain called sweet. They call it the father of rivers) (39). While oftentimes, the river serves as a metaphor for, “unbridled and dangerous female sexuality” (Quinn-Sánchez 117), in this narrative practically devoid of females, the river is a father figure, just as the crew members were for the foundling/narrator. Already, the tone is melancholic, it alludes to memory and indeed rescues nature as a site of memory where, “nature functions as a model of resistance and defiance” (Kushigian 57). “What kind of land is this?” Cabeza de Vaca asked himself while in the middle of a swampland that resisted and defied. A decade before Cabeza de Vaca’s foundering in the Florida Everglades, Juan Díaz de Solís set out in search of the passage between the Atlantic (Mar del Norte) and Pacific (Mar del Sur) Oceans. In early 1516, Solís reached what he called Mar Dulce (Sweet-Water Sea), the estuary that would later be called Río de la Plata. In the preface to The Improbable Conquest, Sixteenth Century Letters from the Río de la Plata, the editors Loaeza and Garrett describe how this

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brief exploration of this “sweet-water sea ended when the natives attacked, killed and allegedly devoured a landing party led by Díaz de Solís” (30). Díaz de Solís was among the members of the party killed and consumed by the natives. Even before they reached the river of the narrator’s memory, memory, as Kushigian suggests, is already bringing to the foreground apparent contradictions, “to further the individual’s working out their being-in-theworld, even when memory underscores their guilt for having survived” (55). The narrator is left behind, a survivor, he rethinks what is left for him: the abundant firmament, the dilated blue, his being-an-orphan that drew him to the ports, the day they sailed from an unnamed Salúcar de Barrameda, Spain, and crossed to the other side. In El entenado, Saer begins to write at the precise moment that history speaks no more, the silence after the massacre, but this writing is in the future. The discourse is a philosophical re-making of the discovery not only of the estuary, but of another nature and culture, the Other. To borrow from Elizabeth Rivero’s analysis of the Uruguayan José Pedro Díaz’s Los fuegos de San Telmo, the river is seen as an incentive for rememoration that makes Díaz’s oeuvre a personal philosophy on the act of remembering (15). Both Saer’s and Díaz’s narrators are obsessed with ships, gulfs, masts, and recuperating memories (Ibid., 18–19). Both are, “guided by nostalgia” (Ibid., 21). For both, “The image of the river as symbol comes in handy in order to express the impossibility of recovering a lost past” (Ibid., 22). Unlike Díaz’s narrator, however, Saer’s narrator has no grandfather, no past. It is upon arrival that Saer’s unnamed narrator is compelled to create his past, a past in the present that will later be relegated to the past when the narrator picks up his pen, as an old man. It is undoubtedly because it draws inspiration from the past—and at the same time aims to recover/re-create/re-invent the past on different levels— that El entenado has often been considered a historical novel. Nonetheless, some critics also argue that there is no intention of historical reconstruction in Saer’s narrative. I refer to different levels of efforts to recover the past. For one, as a young man, Saer’s narrator acknowledges having no past, while the older narrator attempts to recover these ten years of his life spent among the colastinés (an indigenous tribe). Saer, in turn, draws inspiration from a sixteenth-century doomed expedition but steers away from writing a historical novel. Florencia Abbate writes that this is not a historical novel on four different levels: ideological and discursive improbability (no effort to imitate the thought and language of the time, the scarcity of place names, the scarcity of historical names, and little attempt to date the narrative (17). Moreover, the narrator constantly reiterates his orphanhood, making history, or the past, an absolute void. Julio Premat avers that the cosmic orphanhood of the narrator creates a cultural, temporal, and geographical alterity and a general regression

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that will eventually call for a renaissance and the construction of affiliation (51). In this case, history is in the future, and the narrator, the European, instead of cannibalizing the Other, becomes the Other who barely escapes being cannibalized by the Other. As the Other, he has a nickname, Def-ghi, and he is the laughingstock because the colastinés (the Calibans, the natives) have humor, “Yo soy el que, en broma, te decía que te iba a comer” (I was the one who joked about eating you) (174). Beatriz Sarlo also affirms that Saer’s novel does not respond to what is called a historical novel today, and that it is, instead, a philosophical fable (314). Florencia Abbate suggests that El entenado is a philosophical fable as well, and likens it to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the narrator evokes the past, his encounter with nature, his interminable journey to the heart of nature that rendered a return to the city quasi impossible. This is the exact opposite of Robinson Crusoe’s trajectory, while Crusoe re-creates civilization in the heart of nature, Conrad’s Marlow and Saer’s narrator grow more intensely aware of civilization after their encounter with nature, with the Other (Abbate 21). Such a journey strongly suggests the geographical category, perhaps even the landscape as genre. El entenado describes what Astvaldsson would consider to be “una manera particular de relacionarse con el paisaje que nos circunda y, en fin, con la comunidad y la propia existencia humana” (A particular way of relating to the landscape that surrounds us and, finally, to the community and human existence itself) (69). Never is the narrator of El entenado what Alonso labels a “gawking, exoticizing foreigner” (94), nor is he ever an anthropologist, even if his life is spent on the outside looking in, always being the Other (even before captivity). The opening pages of El entenado are reminiscent of a picaresque novel and at the same time of Melville’s Moby Dick. The narrator, who will always remain anonymous, immediately reveals that he is now an old man who spends his time in the cities because “en ellas la vida es horizontal” (because life is horizontal there) (11). It was not always so. Being an orphan made the protagonist seek the ports, the merchants, the prostitutes, the alcohol, until the day he had his first prostitute and his first alcoholic beverage and became a man. From foundling, or niño hallado, to adult, a sudden metamorphosis and perhaps the first re-naissance, the alcohol and the prostitutes are thus instrumental in the construction of the first, very first affiliation. From that moment on, in search of another possible affiliation, the ports ceased to be enough, and the narrator immediately felt compelled, if not driven, to reach the other side, the opposite shore where fruit had to be more delicious and more real, the sun more yellow and benevolent, and human deeds more comprehensible, just, and defined (12). This yearning for the unknown, or rather the half-known, “el lugar perfecto para hacer ondular deseo y alucinación” (El entenado 13) (the perfect place to undulate desire

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and hallucination), makes the narrator of El entenado join an expedition to the Indies. This is the beginning of the sixteenth century, the age of exploration when the newly discovered Americas, much like a new planet, still needed to be invented, when nature and the natural, so absent in Europe, had yet to be discovered because it had already been conquered. The narrator of El entenado describes three months of monotonous blue, unlimited sky, empty expanse, dilated blue, and feeling small, like ants in the middle of a desert (11–15). (This is reminiscent of the “sickening boredom” that Lévi-Strauss often alludes to in Tristes Tropiques.) Just as Columbus used the colors green and brown to describe the American landscape, for lack of other descriptive adjectives, the narrator continually uses the colors blue and yellow. Living in this constant landscape of boredom, the narrator reiterates that he was an adolescent, that his shape was juvenile, his virility incomplete, that the absence of women made the honest fathers and husbands who surrounded him forget what would otherwise have been repugnant on land; the act became each day more natural (16). Instead of hating his abusers, the orphaned narrator ended up seeing them as father figures. This is perhaps a second renaissance, yet another construction of affiliation. There is enough material here for an entire narrative: a young orphan in search of the great beyond goes on an expedition to the Indies. The absence of women and the cabin boy’s youthful appearance make the members of the crew forget what they would have otherwise abhorred on land. The abusers are like father figures. The abuse is described as pleasant and natural. Up until they sight land, the orphan is a foundling, safe and abused, bored and adopted. Upon disembarking, “nos dispersamos como animales en estampida” (we dispersed like animals in a stampede) (18). “This island’s mine,” says Shakespeare’s Caliban to Prospero: Caliban, born in America, a prior owner. “I claim this land!” said just about every conquistador. The land was for the taking, the grabbing, the pillaging. While some members of the crew ran aimlessly in all directions, others jumped, others lit fires, others made fun of a bird, others chased a bird, others climbed trees, others dug the earth. The next day, “El sol teñía de rojo el mar y ennegrecía las siluetas de los barcos” (The sun dyed the water red and blackened the silhouette of the boats) (19). This sentence casts a pall, red and black, the nefarious unknown that lies ahead. Immediately, the captain decides to sail south, positing that these lands were not the Indies, merely an unknown world. From monotony to silence, the point of departure becomes what could be an unloved place, reminiscent of Cabeza de Vaca’s “land so strange,” so often described as poor. The reader of the Naufragios could surmise that the land is poor in terms of agriculture since the explorers find very little growing in the marshes. It is, however, also poor in terms of cities, and in terms of souls. “But Cabeza de Vaca also calls this land mala, bad, evil, and the people

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wretched, an impossible land, impossible to dwell in it, and impossible to escape from it” (Rivera-Barnes, 2009, 212). The reader would expect Saer’s narrator to feel quite the same way. So much for the reader’s expectations! This is not a doomed expedition or a narrative of hatred, simply because the narrator cannot feel hatred (except for once, and I will address that once later). In fact, Saer’s narrator and his crew did not arrive on Caliban’s island. Furthermore, were the natives to be Calibans, they were not the hospitable type, nor did they allow themselves to be stroked and flattered, as did Shakespeare’s Caliban. The roles are reversed, a crew of Calibans made an incursion into this natural world inhabited by former Calibans. From the moment they first saw land, the attitude of the captain in Saer’s narrative changed, he seemed to have retreated into another world. His gaze, inalterable and dignified, “iba fija en los árboles que crecían al pie de la loma, donde terminaba la playa y comenzaba la selva” (was fixated on the trees growing at the foot of the hill where the beach ends and the jungle begins) (21).Without uttering a single word, the captain continued staring into the distance. The only sounds were those of the waves breaking against the sands. Five minutes later, he let out a sigh. Sixty years have elapsed since the narrator heard this sigh, but it left such an impression on him that he feels the memory will accompany him to his dying day. The other members of the crew, in turn, felt panic. The captain finally turned around and walked back to the boat. They proceeded to sail down the coast. They sailed until they reached what the narrator described as brown and fresh waters, the mouth of a river or an estuary that would later be baptized Río de la Plata by the Italian Sebastián Gabto, and that the captain of Saer’s narrative dubbed the Sweet-Water Sea and claimed for the King of Spain with mechanical gestures.2 Each time they disembarked, the narrator compares the crew to a colony of ants coming from nothingness. He also refers to the river as a savage one, and its odor to be one of primeval beginnings, of humidity and growth. “Salir del mar monótono y penetrar en ellos fue como bajar del limbo a la tierra. Casi nos parecía ver la vida rehaciéndose del musgo en putrefacción” (Leaving the monotonous sea and entering the rivers was like going from limbo to earth. We felt that life was reborn from the putrefying mosses) (27). The narrator adds that the absence of humans augmented the feeling of primeval beginnings and repeats the word primeval again when referring to the river banks. “Después del bautismo y de la apropiación, esa tierra muda persistía en no dejar entrever ningún signo, en no mandar ninguna señal” (After the baptism and the appropriation, this silent land refused to cede any signal or to send any sign) (Saer 26). In other words, the land may have been appropriated, or so the conquerors believed, but the land refused to yield, it remained a monolithic block. The silence could very well be a product of a mutual lack of understanding.

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“Tierra es esta sin” (Land this is without) (31). Those were the captain’s last words, the ones he uttered before an arrow went through his throat. Without what? The reader will never know what the land lacked. Not only are the tropics sad and boring, but now they lack something. Soon, the narrator realizes that every member of the crew is dead and that, “con la muerte de esos hombres que habían participado en la expedición, la certidumbre de una experiencia común desaparecía y yo me quedaba solo en el mundo” (with the death of those men who had participated in the expedition, the sureness of a common experience disappeared, and I remained alone in the world) (31). Once again, the impossibility of creating a past. These are the short moments when history and the narrative meet. Juan Díaz de Solís discovered this estuary and called it The Sweet-water Sea, just like Saer’s captain. Having disembarked, the members of the crew were immediately attacked and killed by a group of indigenous peoples, either the Charrúas or the Guaraní. In El entenado this tribe goes by the name colastinés. Only a fourteen-year-old cabin boy by the name of Francisco del Puerto survived: the unnamed protagonist, the eternal add-on, adoptee, foundling of the narrative that the critic Ravetti deems to be either an anthropological proposal or a speculative anthropology (386). In her essay on cannibalism, Ravetti analyses various myths having to do with devouring the other, myths that sustained cannibalistic practices. In this effort, Ravetti makes reference to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s text O nativo relativo where the anthropologist proposes a relativism and affirms that the truth of what is relative is the relation itself, the content and the modes of exchange between the subjects (Ravetti 2011, 386). On the one hand, there is the anthropologist, on the other, the native. On the one hand, there is the experience of the anthropologist, and on the other, the experiment that Viveiros de Castro considers to be a fiction controlled by the experience. In other words, the fiction is anthropological, but its anthropology is not fictional, the warrior speaks about himself from the point of view of the consumed enemy Viveiros de Castro affirms (113). For Kilani, this means that by eating B, cannibal A assimilates not only the Other, the enemy, but also the ancestors who were consumed by B. “La récuprération des fondements de sa propre identité se réalise à travers de sa transformation par le truchement de l’autre” (The recovery of the foundations of his own identity happens through his transformation by way of the other) (87). Ravetti, in turn, finds a convergence between the issues raised by Viveiros de Castro and Saer’s speculative anthropology. As a result, Ravetti’s hypothesis is that we can re-create a system of knowledge with Saer’s El entenado as its point of departure. It is in this zone, the Río de la Plata region, that myths underpinning the practice of cannibalism can be found,“esta novela establece un nuevo paradigma de tradición, al recrear una tribu que realiza

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anualmente un festín orgiástico con carne humana que, como veremos, tiene el objetivo de recordar y celebrar la condición humana de los integrantes de la comunidad” (This novel establishes a new paradigm of tradition by re-creating a tribe that holds a yearly orgiastic feast with human flesh to remember and celebrate the human condition of the members of the community) (388). For Kilani, in order to overcome the feeling of alienation, the tribe turned to the outside, and by eating the other they learned how to distinguish between the inside and the outside. “Manger les autres, c’était témoigner enfin de sa propre existence” (To eat the other was to become a witness to one’s own existence) (76). However, this victory was never given once and for all and the fear of regression continued to torment them. Thus, the need to perform the rite every year. Florencia Abbate explores the obsessive ritualistic need of this tribe to reestablish a social being on a yearly basis. Abbate arrives at the conclusion that this ritualistic need indicates a very intense awareness of time as well as knowledge that their society is not even guaranteed a right to existence. “El apocalipsis no está al final de un recorrido de duración incierta, sino que es una amenaza permanente, y por eso la historia debe, cada tanto, recomenzar” (The apocalypse is not at the end of a journey of an undetermined duration, it is a permanent threat, and that is why history must begin again every now and then) (20). For Carlos Jáuregui and Peggy Sanday, the symbolic dimension of cannibalism overshadows the ritual or the historical truth. Jáuregui writes, “En la historia cultural latinoamericana el caníbal tiene que ver más con el pensar y el imaginar que con el comer” (In Latin American cultural history the cannibal has more to do with thinking and imagining than with eating) (16). Likewise, Peggy Sanday affirms that cannibalism is never just about eating, “but is primarily a medium for a non-gustatory message—messages having to do with the maintenance, regeneration, and, in some cases, the foundation of the cultural order” (3). It will take the narrator of El entenado a few days to begin to grasp the cultural order. As the only survivor, he is once again an orphan. It is as if he could not shed the void of the past. The headless cadavers of every single one of the paternal figures he had for a few months are now on the ground on a bed of green leaves, and their heads are not far away. The narrator understands that while some members of the tribe are charged with preparing the barbecue, others must butcher the human carcasses. He sees the captain’s head on the butcher’s lap, resembling, “un niño adormilado en el regazo de su madre, en las rodillas de su propio degollador” (A sleeping child on his mother’s lap, on the knees of the one who severed his head) (45). Suddenly becoming aware of the intensity of the narrator’s gaze, the colastiné with the head on his lap stops what he is doing and stares at the narrator, smiling, then

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laughing. It is on this plane that the symbolic dimension of cannibalism can possibly be found. Having lost the little past he had, the narrator must reconstruct an affiliation. He happens to be the only member of the crew spared by the colastinés who will soon adopt him. In this sense, the English translation of the title of the narrative is insufficient. The narrator is indeed an eternal witness, someone perpetually standing outside looking in. However, witnesses are accidental intruders, they are not usually taken in, adopted, and it is the adoption by the colastinés that allows this cabin boy to become a witness. This new state of orphanhood will be short-lived. Premat writes that the cabin boy exists in a “dinámica hiperbólica de substituciones y acumulaciones de modelos asimilados, perdidos, recuperados, elaborados: para él la cuestión de los origenes, omnipresente y obsesiva, solo parece concernir la filiación masculina” (Hyperbolic dynamic of substitutions and accumulation of assimilated models that are lost, then recuperated, the elaborated: for him the question of his origins, omnipresent and obsessive as it is, only seems concerned with masculine filiation) (66). After having tried to escape, the narrator has no choice but to return to the scene and to observe the pieces of meat cooking in an adobo made with aromatic herbs (50). “El origen humano de esa carne desaparecía, gradual, a medida que la cocción avanzaba; la piel, oscurecida y resquebrajada, dejaba ver, por sus reventones verticales, un jugo acuoso y rojizo que goteaba junto con la grasa; de las partes chamuscadas de despredían astillas de carne reseca, y los pies y las manos, encojidos por la acción del fuego, apenas si tenían un parentesco remoto con las extremidades humanas” (Gradually, the human origin of this meat disappeared as it cooked; the flesh, darkened and split, revealed in its crevices a viscous and red juice that dripped along with the grease; dried pieces of meat came off the scorched parts, and the hands and feet, shrunken by the fire, hardly resembled human extremities) (54). Instead of repulsion at the sight of the human grease dripping on the embers, the narrator finds the smell of human flesh cooking to be pleasant (54). He wonders if this is due to his hunger, or to the fact that there was about to be a feast and that he, the eternal, “extranjero, no quería quedar afuera, me vino, durante unos momentos, el deseo, que no se cumplió, de conocer el gusto real de ese animal desconocido” (eternal outsider, I did not want to be left outside, and I experienced for a few moments the desire, left unsatisfied, to taste that unknown animal) (Ibid.). The narrator even admits that the smell made his mouth water and describes the attraction and repulsion at the sight of people chewing human flesh under the intense heat and blinding sunlight. After the cooking, the eating, and the more they ate, the hungrier or the more insatiable they appeared. The narrator remembers having observed a colastiné eating, “Parecía más él la víctima que su pedazo de carne” (He

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was the one who seemed the victim rather than his piece of meat) (58). The world turned upside down, the roles reversed; the prey become predator. The narrator observes that the frenetic eating seems to impede their enjoyment of the food, “como si la culpa, tomando la apariencia del deseo, hubiese sido en ellos contemporánea del pecado” (As if in them guilt, disguised as desire, coincided with sin) (58). In the oft quoted passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s story “El informe de Brodie,” the missionary David Brodie recalled that when he chastised the Yahoo for devouring the raw cadavers of kings and magicians in order assimilate their virtue, the Yahoos, “se tocaron la boca y la barriga, tal vez para indicar que los muertos también son alimento o—pero esto acaso es demasiado sutil—para que yo entendiera que todo lo que comemos es, a la larga, carne humana” (Touched their mouths and their stomachs, perhaps to indicate that the dead are a source of nourishment as well or—and perhaps this is too subtle—to make me understand that everything we eat is, in the long run, human flesh) (417). To eat is to kill, and in this sense, all eating is ritualistic, as is sitting down at a table to eat, participating in the liturgy, crouching as the colastinés did once a year, and tearing a hot piece of human flesh with their teeth, or biting their own arms as Hans Staden’s Tupís did to signify that this was the way they intended to eat him (49). “Did they, or didn’t they?” (240) Maggi Kilgour asks. But that is not the question. According to Jáuregui, what matters is not so much the practice of eating human flesh, but rather cannibalism in culture and how it can tell us something about the culture and about ourselves (22). “El tropo caníbal funciona como un estereotipo colonial; fija o significa al Otro; produce la diferencia y, también el terror del reconocimiento en ella; en él coexisten el repudio y la afirmación del Otro” (The cannibalistic trope functions as a colonial stereotype; it congeals or signifies the Other; it produces difference as well as terror in the recognition of this difference; in this trope coexist the affirmation and the hatred of the Other) (28). While, “Did they, or didn’t they” (Kilgour 1998, 240) is not the question, “Tupi, or not Tupi?” (Andrade 1) happens to be so. For Jáuregui, Andrade’s question expresses the very being of national culture. “The question (ser o no ser cannibal/Tupi) puede ser traducida como comer o no comer lo Otro, en donde no comer (not Tupi) para una cultura significa no ser” (428). (The question (to be or not to be a cannibal/Tupi) can be translated as how to eat or not eat the Other, where not to eat (not Tupi) means not to be for a culture.) In other words, Jáuregui explains that just as for the Tupi cannibalism is a rite allowing them to appropriate the power of the enemy, national culture comes about by consuming the other to assimilate him. Lo Otro, or El Otro, is later defined as he who eats prohibited or repugnant things: Shakespeare’s Caliban, a paradigmatic alterity (461).

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But there is a dialectic and a contradiction to this alterity. Who is the Other in El entenado and where is Caliban? Better yet, is there a Caliban in this narrative? That may be the question. Eugenio Matibag remarks that one story among Lydia Cabrera’s Cuentos Negros de Cuba illustrates a form of cannibalism exemplifying self-consumption. The story is about a queen in a dungeon who runs out of cockroaches to eat and begins to consume herself. Here, Matibag sees the possibility of considering anthropophagy as an act of autophagy (26). “Cannibalism thus de-defines and re-defines the divisor line between self and other, with the consequence of transforming what was considered an antinomy into a dialectical opposition to be canceled and subsumed into a higher level of transindividual unity (Ibid., 35). It is after running for miles with his captors, that the narrator of El entenado will experience this unity. “Entenado y todo, yo nacía sin saberlo como el niño que sale, ensangrentado y atónito de esa noche oscura que es el vientre de su madre” (The foundling that I was, I was being born without knowing it, like the child who emerges bloody and surprised from the dark night that is the belly of his mother) (42). He also alludes to “el olor matricial de ese río” (Ibid.) (the matricial odor of the river) and again to a mute and desert land when he gazes at the decapitated cadavers once again being put on the grills (46). The orgiastic feast took place once a year to celebrate the human condition. What is it about the human condition that they remembered? Ravetti points out that trauma comes from what is forgotten (392). By eating human flesh, the members of the colastiné tribe remember that there was a time when they ate each other and were auto-destructive, another manifestation of hatred. This shameful past must not be forgotten lest it gain strength and become trauma, hence, the yearly feast. This is how they dominate the animal soul within themselves. Perhaps how they dominate nature? One of the members of the tribe tells the narrator how much they hate those that still eat each other, and consider them less than human, therefore edible. Did this mean that they considered the members of the crew that they consumed cannibalistic, like members of other tribes? Whatever their judgment of the crew they consumed may be, Staden considers cannibalism to be a form of manifestation of great hatred (267). In this case, the hatred must be relived and remembered, human flesh must be eaten on a yearly basis. Usually, they ate the flesh of the cannibalistic tribes they disdained because they reminded them of what they once were. Such is not the case with the European conquerors whom they did not know. However, there is an element of cannibalism in the comportment of the conqueror/explorers since they immediately claimed the land for themselves, something akin to consuming it. It could be that these explorers were no different from the savage tribes considered so edible.

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“Dos or tres días me habían bastado para comprobar de qué fondo negro tenían que subir esos indios tirando con fuerza hacia el aire transparente para poder mostrar, en lo externo de este mundo, un aspecto humano” (79), writes the narrator years later. (Two or three days were enough for me to understand from what black abyss these Indians had to emerge with force toward the open air, in order to prove their humanity.) The feast may also be a yearly re-creation of the cycle of hate, much like the cycle of lust that Shakespeare describes in Sonnet 129. From anticipation to disgust, a feast goes through three stages, the preparation, the feast itself, and the aftermath, much like Shakespeare’s sonnet: Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait

Moreover, inside that triptych there is yet another triptych, the feast itself, in three parts, the consumption of human flesh followed by the consumption of alcohol followed by the orgy. While eating human flesh, the colastinés become sadder and sadder. The consumption of alcohol and the brutal orgy exacerbate the sadness that overcomes them. The next day, the shame will be internalized for an entire year. Throughout the narrative, the words/sounds, def-ghi are being directed at the foundling. In time, the narrator comes to realize that the words have multiple meanings tied to what the tribe members expected of their foundling, something that they could not obtain with his death, rather with his constant presence (86). Once again, an affiliation has been established that will only be threatened when the narrator encounters he who will replace him, the eternal return, so much so that the narrator felt he was seeing himself, but “yo no venía en esas embarcaciones—venía, eso sí, un hombre vivo” (I was not the one arriving on those boats, but a live man indeed) (95).This man, his double, the other, whom the colastinés call defghi, gazes at the narrator with intense hatred (98). The cause for the hatred is not obvious. This prisoner, this other, seems to know exactly his role of defghi, but that is not reason enough for hatred toward the narrator who spent so much time delving into the meaning of his adoption by the colastinés. After the feast, the new prisoner is released, whereas the narrator remains with the tribe. Soon enough, he will realize that if they did not send him away, it was because they did not know where to send him, like the original Caliban, he came from a nameless island. By then, the narrator has begun to consider this “horizonte de agua, arena, plantas y cielo” (horizon of water, sand, plants and sky), as something definite, “algo definitivo” (105). The promise of leaving was erased with the years. “Cuando nos olvidamos es que hemos perdido, sin duda alguna, menos memoria que deseo. Nada no es connatural” (When we

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forget it is because we have, without a doubt, lost desire, rather than memory. Nothing is innate in us) (Ibid.). Shakespeare’s Caliban, before he was cannibalized, situated in time and space, and even given a national identity, is neither the noble savage nor the submissive slave. The Bard offers Caliban’s fluidity and ambiguity to the spectator or the readers. It will be up to them to take sides and determine who is in the right, either Prospero who claims to have taught Caliban his language and treated him well until he claimed that the island was his and tried to rape his daughter, or Caliban who resents Prospero for having stroked him, enslaved him, and taken over his island. Subsequently, the original Caliban will be cannibalized, canonized, defined, pitied, forgiven. For Aimé Césaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban will be the possibility and the construction of selfhood; for José Enrique Rodó he represented the United States. Had Friedrich Nietzsche turned his thoughts to Caliban, Caliban would have signified resentment. For Patricia Seed, Caliban is someone who hates because he was once petted. “Once petted, Caliban now remains penned like a pig” (203). Throughout the narrative, he who is writing reminds the reader, he who is reading, that he is writing sixty years later, that he is now an old man. Ten years into his stay in the jungle, he remembers the afternoon that the colastinés put him on a canoe and sent him back to his people. As usual, a member of the tribe laughs and utters the sound def-ghi, but this time the laughter is accompanied by an element of humor. Now that the narrator has been immersed in the language, he can understand his interlocutor saying and repeating as he holds his arm to his mouth and pretends to eat his own flesh, “yo soy el que, en broma, te decía que te iba a comer” (I am the one who told you jokingly that I was going to eat you) (174). There is a double or triple writing, the author Saer recreating the Latin American landscape, the old man remembering his past in the jungle, the colastinés choosing the cabin boy to be their witness. What was this tribe expecting? Where they expecting an oral rendering or a written one? To whom was the cabin boy supposed to report? To the Europeans whom they did not know? Astvaldsson writes that the more interpretations to a story make the story all the more interesting. The writing supposes reading, just as the telling supposes an ear. Astvaldsson writes that to read is to rewrite because each reading brings new meaning (74). In this case, to re-write, as Saer and his narrator do, is to re-read. “El mismo proceso se produce cuando las personas interactúan con el paisaje” (The process is the same when people interact with the landscape) (Astvaldsson 74). Does the narrative speak for nature? It does, and it does not. There is no plea for protectionism or conservation. The jungle was not yet threatened, it was threatening, and mute and deserted. Initially, I thought hatred would

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be ever-present in El entenado and that this jungle would resemble that of Marcos Vargas and Arturo Cova who both lost their sanity to the environment. With each re-reading, hatred in El entenado is replaced by melancholy, a longing for an impossible return, a longing for a rediscovery of nature. This is never an idealized nature, it is the evocation itself, the experience. Like Marlowe in The Heart of Darkness, this foundling’s destiny becomes to dream this nightmare over, and over again. The reason for this is that besides that nightmare he has no other story to tell. In Bubbles, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk writes, “Humans have never lived in a direct relationship with “nature,” and their cultures have certainly never set foot in the realm of what we call the bare facts; their existence has always been exclusively in the breathed, divided, torn-open and restored space” (46). In this case, the restored space is the narrator’s pen. Who survives? Only the nameless narrator of El entenado, the foundling with no past, lives to tell. He is the one who flourishes and emerges from this natural world unscathed, back when the jungle had yet to be exploited. Only the anonymous narrator in El entenado had this chance to restore nature and to flourish in what Sloterdijk would call the greenhouse of his autogenous atmosphere (46). Sad tropics, the hatred of nature, sadness, nature, and hate coinciding. A line from a poem by Victor Hugo reads, “Flux et reflux. La souffrance et la haine sont soeurs” (Flux and reflux, suffering and hate are sisters) (Oster 263). NOTES 1. Some paragraphs of this chapter having to do with El entenado were previously published in a chapter that appeared in Hispanic Ecocriticism, Peter Lang Publishing, edited by José Manuel Marrero Henríquez. 2. According to the International Hydrographic Organization based in Monaco, the 219-kilometer-long Río de la Plata separates Argentina from Uruguay, begins at the mouths of the Paraná and the Uruguay Rivers. At times, it is considered a gulf or a marginal sea, it is also held to be an estuary.

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Index

Note: Page numbers with “n” refer to endnotes. Abbate, Florencia, 188, 189, 193 Abel, 10, 11, 39, 40, 47, 49, 50, 56–61, 63, 64, 83; first murder, 11, 53, 54, 56, 58–60; offering, 55, 58, 59, 61; self, 62; soul, 59; story of death, 62; triumphs of logic, 55 Abelites, 56, 60 Abellán, José Luis, 54, 55 Abel Sánchez (character), 54, 55, 60 Abel Sánchez (Unamuno), 10, 53–55, 58, 59, 62, 63; Chapters XI–XIV, 60; intertextuality of, 63 “Abel Sánchez y la envidia de Unamuno” (MCGaha), 54 abomination, 122 Abraham 16:4, 4 Abraham 16:10, 4 Abram, 42 Absalom, 47–50 absent presence, 106 acheter la petite vérole, 111 Adam, 3, 24, 29, 40, 41, 47, 48, 50. See also Eve Adonhueso (king of Angola), 105 aesthetic experience, 142 affiliation, 189, 190, 194, 197 Africa, 106, 115, 116, 152–53

African: medicine, 103, 105, 108, 111; slaves, 103, 108, 110 African kings, 105 Afro-Antillean poems, 145, 149 Afro-Cuban religion, 171, 172 Aguirre, Lope de, 11, 69–72, 79, 81, 131; Herzog’s cinematic rendering, 72; pieces of, 11, 71–72, 76 Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog), 11, 69, 70, 72, 129 Algarín, Miguel, 159, 162; “A Mongo Affair,” 156 Alicia, 73, 76, 121–23, 125–27, 130, 139, 140 alienation, 106 Alonso, Carlos J., 124–26, 189 Altamirano, Luis, 75 Amazon, 126; Indians, 174; tribe, 172 Amnon, 4, 28, 47, 49 “A Mongo Affair” (Algarín), 156 amputation, 105, 106 The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Fromm), 168 anca, 149 Anderson, Mark, 8 Andrade, Oswald de, 195 Añez, Jorge, 135

217

218

Index

Angel, 42 anger, hate versus, 3 animal, 117–19, 181; vampires, 117–19 anthropemy, 13, 187 Anthropocene, 13, 134, 136, 137, 141, 166, 177, 178, 183, 186–87 anthropocentrism, 9 anthropology, 124, 172, 192; double in, 142; fiction, 192 anthropophagy, 13, 186–87 Anthropos, 178 anti-Jewish campaign, 6 Antillean: identity, 150; reality, 152; woman, 148 anti-Semitism, 5 Antonia, 63, 64 Antonovna, Sophia, 71 Apocalypse, Now (Coppola), 11, 70, 73, 75 Aracelis Vellorini. See la Bordona Arce de Vásquez, Margot, 149 archetypal motifs, 55 Arens, William, 186 Areúsa, 22, 33, 34 Ariel, 185 Aristotle, 19, 119; definition of hate, 3; definition of tragedy, 34n2 Aronson, S. L. P., 46, 47 arrogance, 59 Arroyo Yabebirí, 76 Arturo, 121, 122, 127 Assam, 111 assimilation versus rejection, 13, 187 Astarté, 43 Astvaldsson, Astvaldur, 122, 130, 131, 189, 198 Augustine’s notion of evil, 12–13, 134 Aurora, 47, 50 autobiography, 11–12, 84–85, 95; de-facement of, 99 “Autobiography as De-Facement” (De Man), 84–85 auto-racism, 157 “Ay Ay Ay de la Grifa Negra” (de Burgos), 155

Aymara, 143 Azaleas (Palés Matos), 146, 148 Babín, María Teresa, 159 Bahamas, 152 Bajeux, Jean-Claude, 146–49 Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, 127–28 Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time, 101 Baldwin, Spurgeon, 22 baptism, 5, 191 barbarism, 171 Barrera, 125 Bassett, Frederick, 49–50 Bastos, Augusto Roa, 130 Bataillon, Marcel, 18–20, 30, 33, 89, 95 Bathsheba, 47, 49 Batín, 49 Bato, 43 Becker, Ernest, 143 Benincasa, 78 Benítez, Jaime, 154, 158 Bergam, José, 60 Bernal, Gael García (Fuser), 79, 87–88 Bernal, Rafael, 178, 179, 183; mosquito, 182; Su nombre era muerte, 13, 166, 179, 181, 183 Berrocales, Angel, “Situation Heavy,” 159 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 127 Bhabha, Homi, 160 Bible, 5, 10, 39–41, 43, 54, 59, 60, 83; Adam and Eve in, 40 biblical approach, 148 biblical plays, de Vega Carpio, Lope Félix, 10, 38–40, 48 biblical story, 48, 49 biophilia, 166, 175, 176; and ecophobia, 13, 166, 167, 170; Estok, Simon C., 166, 167; Fromm, Eric, 166–68; neurotic, 166; Rivera, Emilia, 170; snake, 167; Wilson, Edward O., 167, 168. See also ecophobia

Index

“Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic” (Wilson), 167 biophobia, 138, 178 The Birth of Satan (Wray and Mobley), 4–5 Black, 101, 145, 147, 149, 150, 153, 158; in Antilles, 155; poetry, 147– 49; slave labor, 106 black color, 88, 99, 145, 158 Black Death, 5 Black man, 145, 153, 155, 157 blackness, 101, 148 black woman, 151; raw sexuality, 148, 149 Blanco, Tomás, 149, 152, 153 “Blanket Weaver” (Esteves), 160 blind man, 89–91 blindness, 86, 98 blind play, 89–90 blind travelers, 91 blind walkers, 91 Blyden, E., 101 Bohemians, 179 Bois-Caïman, 12, 102, 112, 117, 118; ceremony, 115–16 Bolivia, 79, 98 Bollaín, Icíar, También la Lluvia, 79–80 Bonilla, A., 32 “The Book of Genesis According to San Miguelito” (Piñero), 159 border, 128 Bordona, 143 Borges, Jorge Luis, 195 Boswell, Thomas, 152–53 Botta, P, 32 Boukaka, Emile, 177–78 bourgeoisie, 37–38 Bourgeois, Nicolas Louis, Voyages Intessans, 110 Brayton, Dan, 9 Browning, Robert, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 80–81 Brown, John, 76–78 Brown, Juan, 69, 76 Bubbles (Sloterdijk), 199

219

Buenaventura, Enrique, 12, 102–6, 108, 120; “Historia de una bala de plata,” 117 bufo boreas boreas, 176 bufo marinus, 176 bufo periglens, 176 burdensome texts, 70–71 Burke, James F., 17, 26, 31 Byron, Lord, 10, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61; Cain, 53, 54, 60–62 caballeros, 37 Cabeza de Vaca (Echevarría), 11, 70, 75 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núnez, 8, 11, 70, 73, 74, 79–81 Cabrera, Lydia, Cuentos Negros de Cuba, 196 Cáceres Aguilar, Dagoberto, 103, 104 Caicos, 153 Cain, 3, 10, 11, 39–42, 47–50, 53–65, 83; and fruit from Tree of Life, 61; offerings, 10, 58; soul, 59 Cain (Byron), 53, 54, 60–62 Cainites, 60 Caliban, 13, 185, 190, 191, 196–98 Calisto, 17, 19, 21–29, 31, 34 Calixto, 7, 20, 24, 49 Canaan, 4, 99, 101, 102, 104 Canaima (Gallegos), 133–40, 142, 146, 168; translating, 140 Canaima (park), 134, 141, 143 caníbal. See cannibal cannibal, 13, 185–87, 192, 193, 195; Hulme’s, 186 cannibalism, 14, 185–86, 192–96, 198 cannibalizing, 189 Canning, Elaine, 44 capitalism, 87, 159, 186; after 1450, 8; neocolonialism of late, 80 carburetor alcohol, 69, 77 Caribbean, 152–53; history of, 147; literary history, 148; medicine, 108; slavery, 113 Carilla, Emilio, 84, 95, 96

220

Index

Carpentier, Alejo, 12, 70, 102–3, 107, 108, 112, 116–20; El reino de este mundo, 104, 107–9, 113; imperfect tense, 109 Carreño, Antonio, 48–50 Carrió de La Vandera, Alonso, 84–87, 90–99; El Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, 11, 84, 88–91, 95–99; Guide for Blind Rovers, 86; Guide for Blind Traders, 86; Lazarillo of Blind Travellers, 85; Lazarillo of Blind Walkers, 11, 86, 96 Carrión, Arturo Morales, 147 Casandra, 47–50 Castigo sin venganza (de Vega Carpio), 47, 48 Castilian hatred of the Moor, 11, 56 Castilians, 56 Castro, Américo, 6, 9, 18, 20, 25, 27, 32; ferocious hatred of life, 37 catastrophic expedition, 71 catechism, 55 Catholicism, 6, 11, 70 Catholic Spain, 56 causality, 32 Celeste blue, 30 Celestina, 6, 7, 17, 19–31, 33, 34, 49; blindness, 31–32; conjuring the Pluto, 6, 33; conquest of Pármeno, 30; images of, 31; puta vieja, 31, 32 Celestina Knitting (Picasso), 33 Celestina’s Brood (Echevarría), 48 Centurio, 33–34 Cervantes, Miguel de, 38, 39 Césaire, Aimé, 198 Changó, 102, 105, 116; Curse of, 104; malediction of, 12, 103–4 Changó, el gran putas (Zapata Olivella), 116, 119 Charles V (Spanish Empire), 9 chauvinism, 159 Chiapas jungle, 179, 181 “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (Browning), 80–81 Chile, 89

Chimal, Alberto, 179 Christian-didactic school, 17–18 Christianity, 5, 76 Christians, 5–6, 45; ideology, 75; rites, 7. See also Jews Christman, Sophie, 178 Christophe, Henri, 102, 105, 116–20 Christophe, Roi, 106–8 Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, La vorágine, 11, 70 Chuquicamata, 88, 89, 92 “Cierta vez,” 112 Cilento, Fabrizio, 80 cimarrón, 113 Cirés, Ana María, 79 Ciudad Bolívar, 136 civilization, 171 Clarke, Dorothy Clotelle, 19, 22 Clavería, Carlos, 53 Clemente, Don, 72 clichéd expressions, 149 colastinés, 14, 188, 189, 192, 194–98 collective envy, 59 Coll, Pedro Emilio, 60 colonialism, 80, 85, 159 colonial stereotype, 195 color: black, 88, 99, 145, 158; blue, 30; of crow, 84, 88; race/skin, 150; white, 158 Columbus, Christopher, 73, 74, 79, 94 Comedia Famosa (de Vega Carpio), 10, 38, 42 Commander, 45–47 Compound of Alchymy (Ripley), 17 concoctions, 109, 111 Concolorcorvo (pseudonym of Carrió de La Vandera), 11, 84–86, 88, 92–94, 96 conquered race, 93 Conrad, Joseph, 9, 103, 122, 124; “Heart of Darkness,” 11, 70, 71, 73, 75, 107, 189; Under Western Eyes, 71 conservative narrator, 174 contagion, 148

Index

converted Jew, 6–7, 18, 37 Conway, Dennis, 154 cooking of hate, 187 The Cooking of History (Palmié), 171 Coppola, Francis Ford, 73; Apocalypse, Now, 11, 70, 73, 75 Cordones-Cook, Juanamaría, La tragedia del rey Christophe, 102, 105–6 Correa, Gustavo, 6, 25 Cortés, Hernán, 71–72 Cosmas, 55, 57 Count Dracula, 179–81 Cova, Arturo, 12, 72, 73, 76, 81, 121– 27, 130, 135, 139–41, 199; journey, 129, 131; language, 128; solipsistic monologue, 129; souvenir travel, 131; uprootedness, 129; whirlwind of thoughts, 129; as wrath of God, 131 criollismo, 151 criollista, 150 crow, 83, 87, 88, 99 Crusoe, Robinson, 189 Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (Quiroga), 78 Cuentos Negros de Cuba (Cabrera), 196 cultures, 160 Curse of Changó, 102 Curse of Ham, 12, 101, 102 Curto, Roxanna, 104 Cuzcos, 93–95 da Costa Fontes, Manuel, 31 D’Agostino, Thomas J., 154 Damien, 55, 57 “Danzarina Africana” poem, 148–49 dark alchemy: Celestina, 17, 19–31, 33, 34, 49; (blindness, 31–32; conjuring the Pluto, 33; conquest of Pármeno, 30; images of, 31; puta vieja, 31, 32); Rojas, Fernando de, 20, 21, 25, 28, 30–32, 45; (artistic ability, 32; contemporaries, 32, 33; Judaism, 19; La Celestina, 7, 10, 17–20, 22, 23, 31, 32; Tragicomedia de Calisto

221

y Melibea, 1, 10, 18–23, 34n1, 35n6) Dark Ecology (Morton), 3, 13, 34, 165 Das Unheimliche (Freud), 160–61 David, 47–50 Davis, Wade, 108, 111, 114 Dazille, Jean-Barthélemy, Observations sur les maladies des nègres, 110 dead geography, 136 deadly sins, 19, 20 death, 99 de Burgos, Julia, 156; “Ay Ay Ay de la Grifa Negra,” 155; poem, 156 de Carvajal, Gaspar, 69, 72, 130 Deckard, Sharae, 8 de Diego, José, 158–59 de Esquivel, Hernando, 75 Deleuze, Gilles, 115, 118 Delprat, François., 134, 135 Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (Unamuno), 62 De Man, Paul, 84, 86, 99; “Autobiography as De-Facement,” 84–85 de Niza, Fray Marcos, 74 de Paul, Francis, 97 Deren, Maya, 110, 111, 114 desert, 88–89 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 102, 105, 116, 119 destructive-constructive animation, 31 deterritorialization, 115 de Vega Carpio, Lope Félix, 39, 41, 43–45, 47; biblical plays, 10, 38–40, 48; Castigo sin venganza, 47; Comedia Famosa, 10, 38, 42; El castigo sin venganza, 10, 38, 47, 48; El peregrino en su patria, 38; Fuenteovejuna, 10, 38, 45, 46; La creación del mundo y primer culpa del hombre, 10, 38, 39; Peribáñez, 37; villanos and labradores, 37 Devil’s revenge, 39 DeVries, Scott, 122, 123, 135, 167, 183; analysis of La vorágine, 138

222

Index

Deyermond, A. D., 24–25, 29, 30 Deyo, Brian, 137 The Dialogic Imagination (Bakhtin), 127–28 dialogized heteroglossia, 128 Diarios, 91, 93, 95, 98, 99 Díaz, José Pedro, Los fuegos de San Telmo, 188 Díaz-Peterson, Rosendo, 54–56 Dinah: of Genesis, 42–44; loss of virginity, 43, 44; rape of, 39, 42–45 disability, 124 discrimination, 106, 157; racial, 147, 155, 160; self-image, 155; social, 160 disillusion, 133 distinctions, 71 The Diversity of Life (Wilson), 121 Doña Bárbara (Gallegos), 168 “Don Juan ou aimer pouvoir”(Kristeva), 145 doomed expeditions, 11, 69–81, 191; Quiroga, Horacio, 78, 79 The Double; A Psychoanalytic Study (Rank), 55–56 double in anthropology, 142 dread, 167 duality, 56–57 Duke, 47–50 Dussel, Enrique, 185 Dutty, Bouckman, 102, 112, 115–16, 118–20 eating: frenetic, 195; of hate, 187; human flesh, 195–98 Echevarría, Nicolás, Cabeza de Vaca, 11, 70, 75 Echevarría, Roberto González, 7, 38, 48, 120 ecocriticism, 2 ecognosis, 13, 165 ecological awareness, 13, 34, 71, 165, 183 ecomedia, 177 eco-odium, 166

ecophobia, 2, 9, 12–13, 121, 131, 133– 34, 166, 167, 169, 187; biophilia and, 166–67, 170; Estok, Simon C., 167, 169 The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Estok), 131 Edgar, 121 eigenlichkeit, 129 “El almohadón de plumas”(Quiroga), 78 Elbow, Gary, 153 El castigo sin venganza (de Vega Carpio), 10, 38, 47, 48 El Che, 98 El Dorado (Saura), 11, 70, 72 El entenado (Saer), 13–14, 186–90, 192, 193, 196, 199 el gozo, 28 El hablador (Vargas Llosa), 13, 165–66, 171, 174, 183; ethnography, 174–75; linguists in, 177; narrator of, 171, 172 Elicia, 17, 19, 22, 28, 33 El Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (Carrió de La Vandera), 11, 84, 88–91, 95–99 Ellis, Erle, 136; Anthropocene, 133 El manco, 77 Elman, L. L., 46 “El odio mismo del castellano al morisco” (Unamuno), 11, 56 El Otro, 195 El otro (Unamuno), 55, 57 El peregrino en su patria (de Vega Carpio), 38 El reino de este mundo (Carpentier), 104, 107–9, 113 El robo de Dina (de Vega Carpio), 10, 38, 42 Elvira, 71 English language, 151; and Spanish, 79, 154, 157, 163 Enguinados, Miguel, 162 En torno al casticismo (Unamuno), 11, 56, 58 envy, 53, 54, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65; hate versus, 3

Index

“Epitafio de un medico, en que habla la Muerte” (Quevedo), 98 Esau, 42, 43, 47, 49, 57 Escudero, Juan M., 32 Espada, Martin, 156; “Niggerlips,” 157 “Esta noche he pasado” (Palés Matos), 151, 152 Esteves, Sandra María, 160, 161; “Blanket Weaver,” 160; “It Is Raining Today,” 160 Estok, Simon C., 12, 121, 133, 134, 136–38, 170, 176, 183, 186; biophilia, 166, 167; ecomedia, 177; ecophobia, 2, 12, 131, 166–67, 169; The Ecophobia Hypothesis, 131; “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” 2, 12, 121 ethnographers, 175 ethnography, 174–75 ethnological research, 172 ethnologists, 172 European kings, 105 European medicine, 108 Eurydice, 124 Eve, 3, 24, 40, 41, 47–48, 50 Even the Rain. See También la Lluvia (Bollaín) evil, 12, 20, 24, 30, 49, 73, 74, 162, 190; Augustine’s notion, 12–13, 134; Cain, 40, 54, 65; good and, 24, 114; of the jungle, 126, 141; nature as, 12–13, 134; perpetrator, 44 exaggerations, 74, 75 exile, 104, 154 Exodus 12:23, 5 expeditions, 69, 73, 79, 190; doomed. See doomed expeditions exploitations, 92, 159, 166, 167, 171; female body, 44; poor, 80, 87 external journey, 121 extinction, 13, 166, 175–76; Anthropos, 178; cactus, 177; disappearances and, 178; of frog species, 176–77; risk or danger of, 172, 177; species, 176

223

extrañas tierras, 73 Eyzaguirre, Luis, 122, 123 farmer, 10, 11, 50, 56, 74 fascism, 185, 186 fear, 167; hate versus, 2, 170; of home, 2, 133; landscapes of, 69–70; of nature, 2, 133, 170 Federico, 47–50 Felipe II of Spain, 72 Fernández, Nancy, 128 ferocious hatred of life, 37 Fick, Carolyn E., 107, 110, 111, 115 fiction, 192 Fili-Melé, 161, 162 Filomela, 162 The Fire Next Time (Baldwin), 101 first murder, 11, 53, 54, 56, 58–60 first punishment, 41 first sin, God’s revenge of, 40 flat nose, 155, 163 Flournoy, J. J., 101 Forace, Virginia P., 94, 95 forbidden fruit, 40 Francisco, 170 Franz, Thomas R., 60, 62–64 fratricide, 11, 41, 56 French, Jennifer, 8 frenetic eating, 195 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 167; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 127; Das Unheimliche, 160–61 frog species, 178; extinction of, 176–77 Fromm, Eric: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 168; biophilia, 166–68; necrophilia, 167 frontier, 128 Fuenteovejuna (de Vega Carpio), 10, 38, 45, 46 fungi, 107–8 Fuser (Gael García Bernal), 87–88 Gallegos, Romulo, 134–36, 141, 142, 170; Canaima, 133–40, 142, 146, 168; Doña Bárbara, 168

224

Index

gang rape, 46 Garden of Eden, 3, 34 Genesis 3:14, 3 Genesis 3:16, 3 Genesis 3:24, 34 Genesis 4:10, 3 Genesis 8:7–8, 83 Genesis 9:23–25, 99 Genesis 31, 42 Genesis 34, 42 “geografía muerta,” 136 geography, 129, 137 Gerber, Jane, 5, 6 germophobia, 133, 138 Gerstinger, Heinz, 46 Gerusalemme Liberata (Tasso), 127 Gilman, Stephen, 18–20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 32 Girón, Rodrigo Téllez, 45 God, 3–4, 25, 48, 50, 60; and Adam and Eve, 47; cruelty and readiness, 58; of Exodus, 4; hatred, 3, 10, 40, 53, 54, 65; of Old Testament, 3, 10, 25, 41, 47, 54, 55, 104; revenge for first sin, 40–41; as shepherd, 63; wrath, 3, 40, 41, 69, 72, 104, 131 Goldenberg, David, 101–2 Gómez de Guzmán, Fernán, 45 Góngora, Luis de, 38 González Ortega, Nelson, 174 gozar, 27, 28 gozo, 27, 34 Granado, Alberto, 86–87, 91, 92 Greco-trajan mythology, 117 Green, Otis, 18, 48; Natura-Naturans, 25 grenouille du sang, 176–78 grifo/grifa, 155 Grigg, Victor, 176–78 gringos, 174 growth economies, 12, 121 grupa, 149 Guaranís, 75, 76 Guattari, Félix, 115, 118 Guayama, 13, 146, 149–50, 161, 163; racial problem, 150

Guayana, 135, 136, 141 Guerard, Albert, 72 Guevara, Ernesto, 85–99; Motorcycle Diaries, 11, 84, 91, 93, 95, 98, 99; Otra vez, 11, 84, 91, 98–99 Guide for Blind Rovers (Carrió de La Vandera), 86 Guide for Blind Traders (Carrió de La Vandera), 86 Guillén, Nicolás, 149, 155 Hagar, 4 Haiti, 102, 103, 111, 114, 115, 117, 171; extinction of frog species, 176 Haitian revolution, 104, 119 Ham, 4, 99, 102, 104; Curse of, 101–2 Harker, Jonathan, 180–81 Harlequin, 71 hate, 9, 20, 38, 48, 50, 61, 64, 70, 83, 87; defined, 2–3; humanity, 12; Latin American landscapes, 12, 87; love and, 47; travel and discovery, 12, 84 hating: crows, 83; dying of, 154, 155; pleasure of, 1 hatred, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 69, 79, 87, 154, 158; cannibalism, 196; defined, 2; of God, 3, 10, 53, 65; of the Indians, 95; of love, 10, 17–18; madness and, 122; of nature, 8–13, 70, 74, 75, 77, 133, 141, 178, 199; as Other, 13, 187; of the Other, 13, 146, 187, 195; primal vortex of, 73; self-, 13, 65, 146, 154–55, 158, 163, 187; stories of, 7; of white race, 178 Hazera, León, 135 Hazlitt, William, 1 healing, 109, 110 “Heart of Darkness” (Conrad), 11, 70, 71, 73, 75, 107, 189 heart of nature, 70, 189 Heffes, Gisela, 186 Helena, 57, 58, 63, 64 Henao Restrepo, Darío, 103, 104 herbal concoctions, 109, 111

Index

herbalists, 109–11, 114 herbal remedies, 108 herb doctors, 110 herbs for medicine, 107, 108, 111, 112 Herrero, Javier, 24, 33 Herzog, Werner: Aguirre, Wrath of God, 11, 69, 70, 72, 129; cinematic rendering of Aguirre, 72 Hesse, Everett, 47, 48 heteroglossia, 127–28 hidalgos, 37 Hill, Robert T., 147 Hill, Ruth, 84, 86, 97 Hinsbruner, Jay, 147 “Historia de una bala de plata” (Buenaventura), 117 home-grown texts, 71 homely, 161 homophobia, 167 houngan, 108, 110, 114 Hulme, Peter: anthropophagy, 186; cannibalism, 185–86 human alien, 124 “The Human Alien. Otherness, Humanism, and the Future of Ecocriticism” (Iovino), 124 human flesh cooking, smell of, 194 humanity, 8, 12, 98 hyperobjects, 13, 165; interobjectivity, 182; nonlocality, 181–82; phasing, 182; properties, 181–82; temporal undulation, 182; viscosity, 181 Hyperobjects, Philosophy Ecology after the End of the World (Morton), 125, 176 hysteria, 170 identity, 151, 158–61; as absent presence, 106; Antillean, 150; Spanish, 37 Ile-Ife, 102 imaginary texts, 11, 70 imagining badness in nature, 13, 134 immortality, 179 imperialism, 159, 186

225

Incan Concolorcorvo, 94, 96 indigenous languages, 173; learning, 174 indigenous nationalism, 174 indigenous tribe. See colastinés “indios pampas,” 92 Inquisition, 7, 26, 97; Spanish, 6, 9 insufferable punishment, 53 interiority, 28 internal journey, 121, 123 interobjectivity, hyperobjects, 182 intimate haters, 38–39, 45, 47, 50 Inventing a Word (Marzán), 145 Iordan, Iorgu, 2 Iovino, Serenella, “The Human Alien. Otherness, Humanism, and the Future of Ecocriticism,” 124 Iribarren, Frank Rísquez, 134 Isaac, 42 “It Is Raining Today” (Esteves), 160 Jacinta, rape of, 46, 47 Jacob, 42–45, 47, 49–50, 57 Japheth, 101 Jáuregui, Carlos, 193, 195 Jehovah, 55, 61 Jesuits, 75, 76 Jews, 5–6, 9, 18, 20, 37, 45; converted, 6, 7, 18, 37; killings of, 6; in Spain, 5–6, 20, 45 Jimi Hendrix-style guitar phasing, 182 Joffé, Roland, The Mission, 11, 70, 75, 76 Jonadab, 4, 28 Jones, Christopher, 117 Juan, Don, 77 Jubal, 41 Judaism, 5, 19 Judeo-pessimist view, 18 jungle, 124–29; barbarism, 171; burning, 73, 142; dream, 126; fear and dread and madness, 167; learning for life, 168; story, 122 Jurkevic, Gayana, 55 Kafka, Franz, The Metamorphosis, 183

226

Index

Kalahari, 146 Karlin, Daniel, 81 Kaske, R. E., “prodigious feats of interpretation,” 38 Katcher, Aaron, 175 Kearns, Sofía, 176, 177 Kellert, Stephen, 166, 178 Kilani, Mondher, 192, 193 Kilgour, Maggi, 195 kingdom of this world, 113–15, 120 King Lear (Shakespeare), 121 kinky hair, 155, 163 Kinski, Klaus, 69 Kirkland, Will, 139, 140 Klein, Melanie, 58 Kristeva, Julia, “Don Juan ou aimer pouvoir,” 145 Kukulcán, 179 Kurtz, 71–73, 76, 124 Kushigian, Julia A., 188 Laban, 42, 43 la Bordona, 139–43 Lacandons, 179, 181–83 La Celestina (Rojas), 7, 10, 17–22, 31, 32, 34n1, 35n6 La creación del mundo y primer culpa del hombre (de Vega Carpio), 10, 38, 39 Ladera, Manuel, 134, 137, 138, 140 La envidia hispánica (Unamuno), 59 La férocité littéraire (Monod), 39 Lair, Clara, “Trópico amargo,” 156 Lamech, 41 “La meningitis y su sombra” (Quiroga), 78 “La Metadona Está Cabrona” (Piñero), 160 “La miel silvestre” (Quiroga), 78 land description, 74 landscapes: of fear, 69–70; of hate, 81; Latin American, 11, 12, 87, 99, 198 “La Negra” poem, 148 language, 128, 149, 158–60, 163; English, 151, 157; and geography, 129

La Poderosa, 87 La Poderosa II, 90 La Robada, 86 La Tertulia del Café Pombo (Solana), 60 Latin America, 8, 145, 173; landscape, 11–12, 87, 99, 198 La tragedia del rey Christophe (Cordones-Cook), 102, 105, 106 Laura, 57 Laurencia, abduction and rape, 46 La vorágine (Rivera), 11, 70, 72, 73, 75, 121, 122, 124–26, 130, 135, 167–69 laws for drugs and poisons, 111–12 Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (Carrió de La Vandera), 84, 88, 89 Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous), 89–91, 95 Lazarillo of Blind Travellers (Carrió de La Vandera), 85 Lazarillo of Blind Walkers (Carrió de La Vandera), 11, 86, 96 Lázaro, 89–90 Leah, 42 Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (Scranton), 176 Le Guin, Ursula K., 183 Lepromonida, 161, 162 Le Roman de la Rose, 20 Leví, 43, 44 Levinas, Emmanuel, 175 Lévi-Strauss, 83 Leviticus 11:13, 83 Lewis, Bart L., 71 Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa, 7, 18, 23, 32 Linguistic Institute, 172 linguists, 174, 175; in El hablador (Vargas Llosa), 177 literary madness, 12, 121, 131 literary success, 39 Liu, Alan, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 136 Llorens Torres, Luis, 148 Loisaida, 13, 146, 159, 161, 162

Index

Lois et Constitutions and Description Topographique (Moreau de SaintMéry), 110 Longhurst, Carlos A., 53 Lo Otro, 195 López-Baralt, Mercedes, 146, 148, 155, 161, 162; viaje a la semilla, 70, 80 López Calahorro, Inmaculada, 119 López, Dolores Romero, 99 Los desterrados (Quiroga), 135 Los fuegos de San Telmo (Díaz), 188 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 102, 104, 105, 116, 117, 119 love: and hate, 47; hatred of, 10, 17, 18. See also hate Lower East Side of Manhattan, 13, 146, 159 Lucifer, 61 Lucrecia, 22, 23, 34, 49 Luzbèl, 39–41 macandals (packets of poisons), 108, 109, 112, 113, 153 Machiguengas, 166, 173–75; culture, 174; language, 174 Mackandal, François, 103, 105–20 Maddox, John, 119 madness, 12, 57, 70, 121, 123–24, 129, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140, 167; of Canaima, 138; and hatred, 122; literary, 12, 121, 131; real, 12, 121 magic, 32–33 Maigualida, 142 malediction of Changó, 12, 103–4 maledictions, 103 Malinche, 162 Mamán Loi, 108–12 María, Julián, 64 Marigny, Jean, definition of the vampire, 179 Marín, Juan María, 37, 45 Marlow, 9, 70, 71, 73, 107, 122, 124, 189 marriage, 23 marronage, 113, 115

227

Martínez, Ferrant, 6 Martin, June Hall, 20, 21 Marzán, Julio, Inventing a Word, 145, 146, 153 Mascarita, 166, 171–75 Matibag, Eugenio, 196 Maura, Francisco Juan, 73–75 May, T. E., 47 McCarthy’s anti-communist mission, 173 MCGaha, Michael D., 58; “Abel Sánchez y la envidia de Unamuno,” 54 medical doctors, 110 Melibea, 7, 17, 19–29, 31, 34 Menard, Pierre, 130 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 83, 99 The Metamorphosis (Kafka), 183 Metanoia, 129 Métraux, Alfred, 109, 110 Mezy, Lenormand de, 118 Miampika, Landry-Wilfrid, 106, 115 migration, 154 Miguèl, San, 39, 41 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 62, 64 The Mission (Joffé), 11, 70, 75, 76 Mobley, Gregory, The Birth of Satan, 4–5 Molloy, Sylvia, 130 Monegro, Joaquín, 53–56, 58–64; ontological security, 62; self, 62; torment, 59 money, 154 Monod, Jean-Marie, 39 Montero, Mayra, 183; extinction of frog species, 176; Tú, la oscuridad, 13, 166, 171, 176; two habladores in the novel of, 177–78 Montesinos, Antonio de, 80 Moor(s), 5, 6, 9, 37, 56; Castilian hatred of the, 11, 56 Morales, Leonidas, 123, 124 Morales, Martita, “The Sounds of Sixth Street,” 158 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric-LouisElie, 109; Lois et Constitutions and Description Topographique, 110

228

Index

Morón Arroyo, Ciriaco, 18, 25 morquitos, 178 Morton, Timothy, 13, 34, 71, 125, 171, 173, 174; Dark Ecology, 3, 13, 34, 165; hyperobjects, 165, 181–82; Hyperobjects, Philosophy Ecology after the End of the World, 125, 176 mosquitos, 183; language of, 179–81; Tecolote’s swarm of, 181–82 Motorcycle Diaries (Guevara), 11, 84, 91, 93, 95, 98, 99 The Motorcycle Diaries film (Salles), 87 Mulata-Antilla (character), 161 “Mulata-Antilla” (Palés Matos), 158, 161 Musica, 38 myopia, 172 nakedness, 4, 49, 101 Napoleon, 104, 105 narrative, 14, 188, 190, 192, 194, 198; of hatred, 191 narrator, 173, 174; of El entenado, 186–91, 193–98; of El hablador, 171, 172, 175 Nasir, Muhammad al-, 88 national identity, 161 nationalism, 154 nationhood, 158 natural selection, 168 Natura-Naturans, 25 nature, 26–27, 103, 108, 110, 111, 113, 118, 125, 129, 135–43, 178, 198–99; in Anthropocene, 134; Canaima, 134; culture and, 119; ecophobia, 134; ecophobic representation, 12; as evil, 12, 134; fear of, 2, 133, 170; of hate, 2, 9, 10, 12, 13; as hated enemy, 8; hatred of, 8–13, 70, 74, 75, 77, 133, 141, 178, 199; imagining badness, 13, 134; imagining badness in, 13, 134; madness and, 124; phobia of, 121; power of, 128 Naufragios, 74, 75; reader of, 190 Navarro, Herrera, 96, 97

Neale-Silva, Eduardo, 126 necrophilia, 167 negritude movement, 148 negro bembón, 155, 157 neocolonialism, 80 Neruda, Pablo, 70 neurotic biophilia, 166, 178 neurotic phobias, 178 “neutralized better insight,” 1 new Christians, 6 Nicolás Guillén, Cuban, 148 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 198 “Niggerlips” (Espada), 157 “Nigger-Reecan Blues” (Perdomo), 156–57 nihilism, 9, 18 nihilistic school, 19 Noah, 3–4, 41, 42, 49, 50, 83, 99; wrath of, 101, 102 nobility, 37 nomenphobia, 142 nonhuman nature, 138, 165 nonlocality, hyperobjects, 181–82 North American Evangelical Protestants, 173 novela de la selva (Robleto), 168 numen (Palés Matos), 153–54 Nuyoricans, 159, 160, 162; poetry, 13 Obadiah, 5 Observations sur les maladies des nègres (Dazille), 110 Odium Dei, 10, 53, 59, 65 odium theologicum, 59, 65 Old Christians, 6, 18, 37, 45. See also new Christians old Spanish, 7 Old Testament, 25, 53, 54; archetype, 55; God of, 3, 10, 25, 41, 47, 54, 55, 104; wrath of God, 104 Oleza, Joan, 41 ontological security, 62 orgiastic feast, 196 Orinoco River, 133, 134, 136, 137 orishas, 116

Index

Orpheus, 124 Ortega, González, 175 otherness, 124, 128, 131, 142 the Other, el Otro (Unamuno), 57 Otra vez (Guevara), 11, 84, 91, 98, 99 Ovid, 88; Metamorphoses, 83, 99 Padamo River, 135 Paisajes (Unamuno), 56 Palés Matos, Luis, 13, 161; Africanness, 153; Azaleas, 146, 148; on black body, 157; black poetry of, 147–48; criollismo, 151; critics on race, 151; as cultured poet, 149; discourse, 150, 151; “Esta noche he pasado,” 151, 152; formative years, 150; language and psychology, 151; “Mulata Antilla,” 158, 161; mulatta, 156; names for characters creation, 161–62; negritude, 148, 151–53; numen, 153–54; poesía negra, 147– 49, 152, 153, 162; poetry, 154, 158; preoccupations and themes, 158; “Pueblo Negro,” 151, 152; race, 149; spiritual dislocation or unhomeliness, 157; Ten con ten, 145, 157; time of the birth, 147; Tuntún de pasa y grifería, 146–47, 155, 161 Palma, Ricardo, Tradiciones peruanas, 96 Palmié, Stephan, 171, 172; The Cooking of History, 171; ethnological research, 172; vision of cooking, 13, 187 Pancrazio, James, 106, 113 Pando, José Antonio, 96 Pando, Juan Bautista de, 96 Paradise Lost (Milton), 62, 64 Paraná River, 76, 78, 79 Pármeno, 18–20, 25, 27, 30, 31, 33 Pastor, Beatriz, 73 Paulino, 78 Paz, Octavio, 70 Pedro, Pardo, Paulino, Perulero (PPPP), 97 Pelayo, Menéndez, 32

229

Perdomo, Willie, “Nigger-Reecan Blues,” 156–57 Perera, Hilda, 121, 124, 127 Peribáñez (de Vega Carpio), 37 Perlier, Antonio, 96 Perros lazarillos, 89 Peterson, T., 101 Petro rites, 114 phasing, hyperobjects, 182 philias, 178 Phillips, Pamela, 85 Philomel, 162 philosophical fable, 189 phobias, 167, 178 physical attraction, 27 physical sensations, 26 Picasso, 30–31, 33; Celestina Knitting, 33 Pierce Flores, Lisa, 147 Pietri, Pedro, “Puerto Rican Obituary,” 154 Pila, Puente, Pan, and Peines (PPPP), 97 Piñero, Miguel: “La Metadona Está Cabrona,” 160; “The Book of Genesis According to San Miguelito,” 159 Pizarro, Francisco, 72 Pizarro, Gonzalo, expedition, 129–30 plants for healing, 108–10 pleasure, 1, 28, 34 Pleberio, 29 Pluto, 31; conjuring of, 6, 17, 21, 22, 32, 33 poesía negra (Palés Matos), 147–49, 152, 153, 162 poisoning, 5, 109 poisons, 103, 107–8, 111, 113, 114 Poitié, Louis, 117 populism, 186 Porcel, Felipe, 96 Porras, María del Carmen, 141 “Por viajar,” 88 PPPP. See Pedro, Pardo, Paulino, Perulero (PPPP); Pila, Puente, Pan, and Peines (PPPP)

230

Index

“Preludio en Boricua,” 155–56 Premat, Julio, 188, 194 present absence, 106 Price, Richard, 172 primal vortex of hatred, 73 “prodigious feats of interpretation” (Kaske), 38 Prospero, 115, 190, 198 prostitutes, 19, 33, 189 psyche functions, 55 psychiatric debility and disability, 12, 121 psycho-philosophical approach, 18 “Pueblo Negro” (Palés Matos), 151, 152 “Puerto Rican Obituary” (Pietri), 154 Puerto Ricans, 13, 147, 150–52, 154, 158–60, 162; and Antillean identity, 150; autonomy, 147, 154; black reality in, 153–54; drugs, H.I.V., and homosexuality, 160; dying of hating, 154, 155; economy, 154; girl, 158; imagination, 161; independence, 147; menial jobs, 154; migration, 154; mixture of races, 158; national identity, 161; negritude poetry, 145; newly formed government, 147; poetry, 145–46; poets, 148, 155, 159; population, 154; racial discrimination in, 147; slaves, 146; subconscious, 154; U.S. invasion of, 147 punishment, 41, 42, 49, 50; insufferable, 53 pure poetry, 148 puta vieja, 31, 32 quasi-sexual encounter, 168 Quevedo, Francisco de, 38, 84, 98 Quiroga, Horacio, 11, 70, 76–78, 80, 81, 139; Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, 78; doomed expedition, 78, 79; “La meningitis y su sombra,” 78; Los desterrados, 135; “Tacuara Mansión,” 69, 77 Quiroga, Van-Houten, 77

race, 149, 150, 158, 160 Rachel, 42, 43 racial consciousness, 148–50 racial discrimination, 147, 155, 157, 160 racial facial characteristics, 155 racial identity, 154 racially black poets, 150 racial problem, 150 racial self-hatred, 145 racism, 154, 157, 159, 167 Rada rites, 114 Rage and Time (Sloterdijk), 1 Ralph, Iris, 9 rana carreki, 176 Rank, Otto, 142; The Double; A Psychoanalytic Study, 55–56 Rape of Dinah, 39, 42–45 rat poisons, 111 raven, 83, 87, 88, 99 Ravetti, 192, 196 raw sexuality, 148, 149 real madness, 12, 121 real texts, 11, 70 Rebekah, 42 religion, 109, 110 religious practices, 109 Retamar, Roberto Fernández, 198 revenge, 40–43, 46, 48, 50, 64 Rico, Francisco, 95 ricoshombres, 37 Ripley, George, Compound of Alchymy, 17 ritualistic eating, 195 ritualistic need, 193 Rivas, Bimbo, 159 Rivera, Emilia, 165, 167, 169, 170, 179, 183; biophilia, 170; fearing monkeys, 169, 170; hysteria, 170; jungle, 169, 170; quasi-sexual encounter, 168 Rivera, José Eustacio, 12, 81, 121, 127, 129–31, 139, 170; La vorágine, 11, 70, 72, 73, 75, 121, 122, 124–26, 130, 135, 167–69; Tierra de promisión, 125–26. See also Cova, Arturo Rivero, Elizabeth, 188

Index

Rivet, monsieur, 69, 77, 78 Rizk, Beatriz J., 107, 117 Robles Pazos, José, 151, 152 Robleto, Henán, 170, 183; novela de la selva, 168; Trópico de sangre, 170; Una mujer en la selva, 13, 165, 167–70 Rodó, José Enrique, 198 Rogers, Charlotte, 124, 135, 136 Rojas, Fernando de, 1–2, 7, 20, 21, 25, 28, 30–32, 45; artistic ability, 32; contemporaries, 32, 33; Judaism, 19; La Celestina, 7, 10, 17–22, 31, 32, 34n1, 35n6; Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, 1, 10, 18–23, 34n1, 35n6 Round, Nicholas G., 62 ruins, 76 Rutes, Sébastien, 179–81 Sabio Tecolote, 179 Saeger, James Schofield, 75 Saer, Juan José, 198; El entenado, 13–14, 186–90, 192, 193, 196, 199; narrator, 191; speculative anthropology, 192 Saint-Domingue, 12, 102, 103, 110, 114, 115; revolution, 107 “of Saint Lazarus,” 91 Salles, Walter, The Motorcycle Diaries film, 11, 84, 87 Salus, Carol, 30–31, 33 Samuel, 48, 49 2 Samuel 13:5, 4 2 Samuel 15, 4 2 Samuel 17, 4 2 Samuel 24, 5 Sanday, Peggy, 193 San Ignacio Guazú, 76, 77 San Ignacio Miní, 76 Sarah (botanist), 177 Sarah (character), 171 Sarlo, Beatriz, 189 Satan, 4–7, 64, 123–25 Saul king, 48, 49 Saura, Carlos, El Dorado, 11, 70, 72 scarcity, 188

231

schools of thought, 18 science fiction, 183 Scranton, Roy, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 176 Seed, Patricia, 198 self, 62, 70, 121, 128, 160, 186, 196 self-hatred, 13, 65, 146, 154–55, 158, 163, 187; racial, 145 self-identity, 147 self-image, 154, 155, 158, 163 self-loathing, 70, 79 Sempronio, 18, 20, 25–30, 33 Serna, Ramón Gómez de la, 60 Seth, 39, 41 Severin, Dorothy S., 18, 22, 25, 30, 34, 35n6 sexism, 167 Shakespeare: Caliban, 190, 191, 195, 198; King Lear, 121; Sonnet 129, 197 Shechem, 42, 44 Sheen, Martin, 73 sheer terror, 161 Shem, 101 shepherd, 10, 11, 50, 56, 63, 74. See also farmer Silva, Clemente, 123 Simeon, 43 Siquén, 43–45 “Situation Heavy” (Berrocales), 159 skin color, 150, 158 slavery, 101, 104, 114; abolition of, 119 slaves, 111–16, 119; plantation, 106, 107 Sloterdijk, Peter, 4, 5, 40, 41, 50; Bubbles, 199; glory and hell concepts, 3; Rage and Time, 1 Smart, Ian, 148, 149 smell, of human flesh cooking, 194 Smith, Míster, 117 snake, 109, 168; biophilia, 167; ecophobia, 167 “Sobre la soberbia” (Unamuno), 58, 65 social consciousness, 150 social discrimination, 160 Solana, José, La Tertulia del Café Pombo, 60

232

Index

solipsistic monologue, 129 Solís, Juan Díaz de, 187, 188, 192 Sommer, Doris, 166, 173, 175 Sosia, 18 Soulé, Michael, 166, 178 “The Sounds of Sixth Street” (Morales), 158 souvenir travel, 126 Spain, 38, 53, 147; Catholic, 56; Jews in, 5–6, 20, 45 Spaniards, 46, 72, 76, 86, 92–95; spiritual nihilism, 9 Spanish, 128; conquest, 92, 93; culture, 9, 151; English language and, 79, 154, 157, 163; French language and, 83; identity, 37; Inquisition, 6, 9; Jew, 20; origin of the word maroon from, 113; past, burden of, 18; proverb, 7; social dynamics, 37 Spanish Golden Age, 18, 38 Spanish Guiana, 136 spiritual despondency, 158 spiritual journey, 126 spiritual nihilism, 9 Staden, Hans, cannibalism as great hatred, 14, 196 Steffan, Truman Guy, 61 Sternberg, Karin, 3, 4, 6 Sternberg, Robert J., 3–5 Stoker, Bram, Count Dracula, 179–81 Stolley, Karen, 87, 88, 99 Strauss, Lévi, Tristes Tropiques, 129 Stroud, Matthew, 42–45 Summer Linguistics Institute, 173, 174 Su nombre era muerte (Bernal), 13, 166, 179, 181, 183 supernatural illnesses, 110 superstitions, 58 Sylvia, Molloy, 126 “Tacuara Mansión” (Quiroga), 69, 77 talkers, 173–74 Tamar, 4, 28, 47, 49 También la Lluvia (Bollaín), 79–80 Tasso, Torquato, Gerusalemme Liberata, 127

Tecolote, 179–83; as hyperobject, 181–82 Tembandumba de la Quimbamba, 153, 161, 162 temporal undulation, hyperobjects, 182 Ten con ten (Palés Matos), 145, 157 A Tentative Classification of Biophilic Responses, 178 terror, 12, 108, 110, 118, 124, 195; cycle of, 112, 115, 119; sheer, 161; via organic poisons, 103; vodou and, 102, 103 texts erased/destroyed, 11, 70 textual systems, 85 theological hatred, 54 “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” (Estok), 2, 12, 121 Thierry (Haitian guide), 171, 176–78 Thomism, 55 Tierra de promisión (Rivera), 125–26 Ti Noel, 104–7, 109, 112, 114–20 Tómov, Tomás S., 38–39 torment, 58, 59 Tosar, Luis, 79 tourist attractions, 76 Trachtenberg, Joshua, 5 Tradiciones peruanas (Palma), 96 tragedy, 19, 49; defined, 34n2 Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Rojas), 1, 10, 18–23, 34n1, 35n6 traumatic phobias, 178 travel narratives, 84–85, 90, 95, 98, 99, 134 Tree of Knowledge, 56, 60 Tree of Life, 56, 60–61 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 9 Tristán, 18 Tristes Tropiques (Strauss), 129 “Trópico amargo” (Lair), 156 Trópico de sangre (Robleto), 170 Truth and Singularity (Visker), 129 Tú, la oscuridad (Montero), 13, 166, 171, 176 Tuntún de pasa y grifería (Palés Matos), 146–47, 155, 161

Index

Tupi cannibalism, 195 Turks, 153 ugly word, 155, 163 Ulrich, Robert S., 178 Una mujer en la selva (Robleto), 13, 165, 167–70 Unamuno, Miguel de, 55, 57, 58, 64, 65; Abel Sánchez, 10, 53–55, 58, 59, 62, 63; catechism, 55; Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, 62; “El odio mismo del castellano al morisco,” 11, 56; El otro, 55, 57; En torno al casticismo, 11, 56, 58; La envidia hispánica, 59; the Other, el Otro, 57; Paisajes, 56; “Sobre la soberbia,” 58, 65 Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 71 unhomeliness, 160, 161 unhomely, 161 uprootedness, 129 Urbina, Nicasio, 170 Ureña, 142 Uriah, 47, 49 Urioste, José Castro, 171 U.S.: culture, 151; racism, 147 U.S.-Puerto Rican relations, 154, 159 Vaca, Cabeza de, 187, 190 Valdivia, Pedro de, expedition, 92 vampires, 181; definition of, 179 vampiric mosquitos, 13, 179–83 vampiric war, 166 Vargas Llosa, Mario, El hablador, 13, 165–66, 171, 174, 183 Vargas, Marcos, 12, 133–43, 146, 199 Vázquez de Coronado, Francisco, 71, 74 Venezuela, history of, 134 Venezuelan Guiana, 133, 136 vengeance, 40–41, 64 viaje a la semilla, 70, 74, 79 vicissitudes of life, 56 Vidal, Agustín Sánchez, 72

233

villanos, 45, 46 Villanueva, Alfredo, 162 violent death, 45 Virgil, 124 viscosity, hyperobjects, 181 Visker, Rudi, Truth and Singularity, 129 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 192 vodou, 12, 102, 103, 109–11 Von Puttkamer, 87 vortex, 122, 123, 125, 127–29, 131, 135 Voyages Intessans (Bourgeois), 110 Warner, Marina, 185 Weaver, Karol K., 108, 110–12 White, 147, 149, 150, 158. See also Black white man, 156, 157 whiteness, 147 white race, hatred of, 178 white woman, 156 wholeness, 55 Wight, Frederick, 30 wilderness, 124, 125 Wilkins, Gregory, 175 Wilson, Edward O.: biophilia, 167, 168, 175; “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” 167; The Diversity of Life, 121 Wilson, Leslie, 145, 147–48 Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Liu), 136 wrath, of God, 3, 40, 41, 69, 72, 104, 131. See also anger Wray, T. J., The Birth of Satan, 4–5 Wycliffe Bible Translators, 173 Wylie, Lesley, 70, 135, 141 Zapata Olivella, Manuel, 12, 102–5, 112, 113, 117, 119, 120; Changó, el gran putas, 116, 119 Zelfa, 43, 44 Zuratas, Saúl, 171

About the Author

Beatriz Rivera-Barnes is associate professor of Spanish at Penn State University, Scranton campus. She is the co-author with Jerry Hoeg of Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape published in 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan and of numerous articles that have appeared in national and international journals. She is also the author of six novels and a collection of short stories published by Arte Público Press (University of Houston) and Floricanto Press (California).

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