Arguedas: Hope, Violence, and Despair

The Pongo's Dream reads almost like a parable. We are introduced, early on, to the lord and his lowly servant, the pongo, whom the lord treats, quite literally, like a dog. Ironically, most of the scenes in the story involve the lord's household in its daily prayers, led, of course, by the lord. The lord insists on humiliating the pongo before the rest of his household during these prayers, something which seems entirely at odds with the purpose of prayer itself. Indeed, rather than use prayer as a way of equalizing the household, of making himself one more member of his community, the lord uses these times to remind everyone of the hierarchy, and of their immutable place within it. His sadistic pleasure in the humiliation of others is palpable.

When the quiet pongo finally speaks, it is to let his master know of a dream he has had, a dream of the hereafter in which St. Francis, who is popularly associated with both animals and the downtrodden, plays a key role. In this dream, the role of master and servant in the afterlife at first appear very much as they had in this world. Then comes the almost comical twist: the pongo is to lick the sweet honey in which the master's body has been covered for eternity, while the master is to literally eat shit for all time. This subversive tale is softened somewhat when cast in religious overtones. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the Lucan parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). In a society as hierarchical as the one in which Arguedas lived and died, however, where church and state long conspired to keep people "in their place" (with notable exceptions, of course), this tale must have been shocking, indeed.

Puppy Love is shocking for entirely different reasons. Here, we see Arguedas integrating Quechua language and culture beautifully into the story, without ever romanticizing the subject-matter. Indeed, the snippet of time and place that we see in this short story is almost unbearably painful. A young girl, only 14 years old, has been raped by the landowner. There is nothing anyone can do about it. The young men who are in love with her (each in his own way), contemplate murdering her because that's what white men would do. The violence, it seems, flows downward. One of the young men takes out his anger and frustrations on the tenderest calfs, whipping them until they are half-dead. There is no reprieve, no escape in this world of suffering and grief, where love and connection are impossible. Violence is all these characters see, and some, it seems, choose to emulate it blindly, unthinkingly, while others simply abandon all hope.

Pedro Paramo -- Memories and Ghosts of the Past

Anyone whose parents or grandparents fled Fascism or Communism is familiar with the syndrome: there are three countries in their past. There is the country in the history books, dry and political, the details of its past told and re-told dispassionately in dusty books. Historians take great pride, after all, in not judging, but in understanding, the suffering that those with power can cause. There is the country of our parents' memories, of faded photographs and loving conversations about those long-ago days so often bathed in warmth and golden light. And there is the country we have invented in our minds. Never having been to the place of our parents' and grandparents' memories, we create our own Neverland, a place where our ancestors were born and grew up in perfect love and harmony, where nothing ever went wrong, where things were always better, the scenery more beautiful, the furniture more comfortable, the homes warmer, the food tasted better, the music more harmonious . . .

Juan Preciado goes on a journey to his mother's hometown after her death, hoping to reclaim his birthright. He is, after all, the only legitimate son and heir of town chieftain Pedro Paramo. Instead of finding a place bathed in warmth and golden light, filled with love and harmony, Preciado finds himself in Comala, a place which is quite literally hotter than hell, filled with the soulless ghosts of the dead, a town which is dead, barren, deliberately left to die years before by Pedro Paramo himself.

Author Juan Rulfo uses a unique narrative technique in this novel; narration shifts from the perspective of Juan Preciado to a third person omniscient point of view (telling the story of Pedro Paramo). This allows the author to shift the story in time, from the present of Preciado's ghost-filled Comala to the past of Paramo's Comala, a town filled with violence and injustice against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution (which Paramo's men join with a cynicism which would be awe-inspiring, were it not for the "true" Revolutionaries's own utter lack of understanding of their own cause). What, exactly, is the birthright that Dolores Preciado has asked her son to claim? Murder, rape, injustice, and theft? Barrenness and death? Unrepentant sin? Unrequited love? For just as Pedro Paramo never loved Dolores Preciado, and shunned her, Susana San Juan never loved Pedro Paramo, and, in her own delirium, never took this man, who was never refused by any woman, into her bed.

It is an understatement to say that Pedro Paramo is not a good person. He is selfish and cruel, living only for his own wants and needs, caring not at all for others, unable even to shed a tear when his son, Miguel, dies. He carries a torch for Susana San Juan for years, has her father killed in order to possess her, worries endlessly about her in her madness, yet does little for her, watching her writhe in her suffering. After she dies, he allows Comala to lie fallow in revenge, caring nothing even for the land he has lied, cheated, and stolen to possess. And Paramo himself dries out, becoming a shell of his former self, staring out of empty eyes at barren land, barely noticing, let alone caring about, his own senseless murder.

This is the birthright, the legacy of Comala, a town that has taken the wrong path at every turn, a town whose people have always been lost in their own decisions and delusions, and who, long since dead and buried, seek only to be heard from their graves, as they tell their stories endlessly, senselessly, their voices, moans, and murmurs, sometimes barely distinguishable, sometimes more real than last night's dream.

La ultima niebla -- the mists of sex and spirituality

At first glance, Maria Luisa Bombal's La Ultima Niebla is a sad tale of a loveless, upper-class marriage, doomed not so much by lack of communication as it is by the inherent differences in the way that men and women communicate, view the world, and use language itself. Daniel and the narrator seem to inhabit parallel universes: they see each other, speak to each other, even touch each other on occasion, but they do not, cannot connect. Indeed, from the moment Daniel brings his new bride (a cousin) home (having lost his first wife, the great love of his life, after only three months of marriage), it is obvious that he has said nothing to his household staff about the apparently momentous decision to marry this woman he has known his entire life. And from the moment she enters her new home, this new wife, saved from the "oddness" of spinsterhood by her cousin, falls into silence, into a fog of sleep.

After drinking much wine over dinner one autumnal evening, the wife is awakened one foggy night in town and tells her husband that she is "going out". Through the mists, she meets a mysterious stranger in the town's plaza, and follows him to his home, where the shutters are closed. Upstairs, she is seduced, and finally experiences the ecstasies of the flesh she has longed for. The stranger smells of vegetable and fruit. The entire experience -- the wine, the mists, the sex, the association with vegetable and fruit -- has an eerie, mystical quality to it. It is as if the wife is experiencing, on some level, a Dionysian mystery rite.

The affair leads the wife to a sort of self-awakening. She takes a naked swim in the local stream, letting her usually pinned up hair loose, and stares at her own breasts for the first time. For a woman in her circumstances, this must have been a bit like those women in the 1970s who had "empowerment" parties to put mirrors between their legs and take a shy, blushing peek. And where her mystery lover smelled of vegetable, her surroundings smell of water. As does Andres, the young caretaker who comes upon her. Interestingly, she does not hide her nudity from him, especially because she thinks Andres, like her, sees her lover's car in the distance, and sees her lover smile at her. This belief that the young Andres has seen the lover smile at her becomes important to her, since Daniel insists she never left the room that long-ago, misty night.

It should be noted that the only time the wife is able to return to her lover's home is years later, again, in an altered state, when she has been given some sort of sedative in the hospital where her sister-in-law Regina is recovering from her own attempted suicide. That the lover was really more a concoction of the wife's own repressed desires for sexual (and spiritual) satisfaction in a life and society that had reduced her to habit and form is fairly clear at this point, but it is not altogether important. Perhaps Daniel had chosen this wife, among all his cousins, because she was the most malleable, the one he could most turn into a copy of his late, great love. This empty vessel seeks desperately to be filled, and in her despair, what takes hold is not entirely of this world.

The wife (well, really, both the wife and Regina) in this story is haunted by love, by a husband who cannot reach her, by a lover who proves ephemeral (and if her husband barely notices her, how must she feel when she realizes that her fantasy lover was blind all along -- even in fantasy or half-madness, this woman could not entirely conceive of a man who really saw her and wanted her for who she was). And we, the readers, are haunted by these women; by the wife who seemingly lives a nebulous fantasy of an affair, and by Regina, who almost destroys herself by living the reality of a love affair gone wrong.

In the end, the narrator implies that her life with her husband Daniel continues as before. While Regina lies ruined on the outside, crying desperately for the lover she has lost, our narrator is an empty shell, who will grow old prettily at the side of a husband she suddenly barely recognizes. She has learned the art of smiling emptily at all the appropriate moments; her life a triumph of form over function, with no one ever knowing her substance.