Latin American Novels of the Conquest : Reinventing the New World [1 ed.] 9780826263223, 9780826214089

Citation preview

Latin American Novels of the Conquest

Latin American Novels of the Conquest Reinventing the New World

Kimberle S. López

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2002 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 06 05 04 03 02 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data López, Kimberle S. Latin American novels of the Conquest : reinventing the New World / Kimberle S. López. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1408-8 (alk. paper) 1. Historical fiction, Spanish American—History and criticism. 2. Spanish American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Conquerors in literature. 4. Latin America—In literature. 1. Title. PQ7082.H57 L67 2002 863.0810998—dc21 2002023838  ™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printer and Binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Typefaces: Bodoni Book and GoudyCatDCD

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments

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Introduction. Colonial Desire and the Anxiety of Identification in the New Latin American Novel of the Conquest 1 1. Loving Cannibalism Cannibalism and Colonial Desire in Juan José Saer’s El entenado

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2. Violence and the Sacred Idolatry and Human Sacrifice in Homero Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo

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3. Eros and Colonization Homosocial Colonial Desire in Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán 95

4. Colonial Desire for the Amerindian and Converso Other in Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante 114 5. Ambivalence toward Converso Self and Conquered Other in Homero Aridjis’s 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo 138 Conclusion. Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Conquest in the New Latin American Historical Novel 175 Notes 179 Bibliography 223 Index 257

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Preface

f the five Spanish American novels discussed in the following chapters, only two have been translated, whereas the translations of passages from the other novels are mine. Thus, in Chapter 1, the first page reference in parentheses refers to Juan José Saer’s El entenado and the second to Margaret Jull Costa’s translation, The Witness; in Chapter 2, translations of Homero Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo are mine, and the page number in parentheses refers to Aridjis’s novel; in Chapter 3, translations from Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán are mine, and the page number in parentheses refers to Martínez’s novel; in Chapter 4, translations of passages from Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante are mine, and page numbers refer to Posse’s novel; and in Chapter 5, in the first half, the first page number in parentheses refers to Homero Aridjis’s 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla and the second page number to Betty Ferber’s translation, 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile, and in the second half of Chapter 5, page numbers in parentheses refer to Homero Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo and translations are mine.

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Acknowledgments

would like to acknowledge the following people for reading all or part of my manuscript, and for their support, advice, references, and ideas, and dedicate this book to them. I thank all my colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico for their support. I especially wish to acknowledge departmental chairs Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, John Lipski, and Anthony Cárdenas for their encouragement as I worked on this project. For references and reading part or all of the manuscript, in particular I am grateful to my departmental colleagues Judy Maloof, Kathryn McKnight, Michael Kidd, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Margo Milleret, and Jon Tolman. I especially thank and dedicate this book in memoriam to Antony Higgins—a great scholar, a great colleague, and a great friend. I thank the following colleagues in other departments at the University of New Mexico for reading all or part of the manuscript and for their support during the writing process: Ruth Salvaggio, Minrose Gwin, Diana Robins, Monica Cyrino, Beverly Burris, Shane Phelan, Gail Houston, Lorie Brau, Melissa Axelrod, Susan Dever, Pamela Cheek, and Deborah Jenson. I appreciate the contributions of the following colleagues at other universities who read all or part of the manuscript or provided useful references: Maureen Ahern, Mark Hernández, Carrie Chorba, Antonio Vera-León, Arturo Arias, Phyllis Zatlin, Asela Rodríguez de Laguna Díaz, Cristina Ferreira-Pinto, Leila Lehnen, Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Manuel Sosa-Ramírez, María Estévez Ruiz, and Joan TorresPou, and in particular my professors from the University of California at Berkeley, Francine Masiello, Gwen Kirkpatrick, and Emilie Bergmann, for all their encouragement. I am grateful to student readers and researchers Suzanne Schadl, Paul Goldberg, Jean Silesky, Laura Addison, Jesús and Lourdes Rodríguez, Jorge Andrade, Michelle Fontanez, and Irena Nezˇic´, and to all of the graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico, for their research, which greatly enriches my own. I thank Mina Jane Grothey and Russ Davidson for all their efforts in the Zimmerman Library Reference and Latin American Collections Development, and the Interlibrary Loan Department, without whose resources this book would have been impossible. I am grateful to Administrative Assistants Rosario Johnson, Martha Hurd, and Katharine Merrill for their patience and kindness during the writing process.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Acquisitions Editor Clair Willcox, Managing Editor Jane Lago, copy editor Annette Wenda, and everyone at the University of Missouri Press for their infinite wisdom and patience. I am grateful for the following grants received to work on this project: the Oregon Humanities Center Summer Research Fellowship, 1996; and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1995. And for inspiration I especially dedicate this book to all my friends, who know who they are and what a great help they have been to me during this process; to my high school English teacher Larry Conner, who taught me everything I know about literary criticism; to my brother Jim Schumock, for his frequent phone calls that inspired and motivated me; and most of all to my husband, Miguel López Lozano, for bearing with me through it all. Parts of my Chapters 3 and 4 have appeared previously in print, with permission to reprint generously granted by these sources. A version of Chapter 3 appeared as “Eros and Colonization: Homosocial Colonial Desire and the Gendered Rhetoric of Conquest in Herminio Martíniez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán,” Chasqui 30.1 (May 2001): 94–114. Versions of sections of Chapter 4 appeared previously in Spanish as “Transculturación, deseo colonial y heterogeneidad conflictiva en El largo atardecer del caminante de Abel Posse,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 25.49 (1999): 41–62; and in English as “Naked in the Wilderness: The Transculturation of Cabeza de Vaca in Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante,” in A Twice-Told Tale: Re-inventing the Encounter in Iberian/Iberian-American Literature and Film, ed. Santiago Juan-Navarro and Theodore Robert Young (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 149–65. I wish to thank the editors of these sources for their permissions to reprint.

Latin American Novels of the Conquest

Introduction

Colonial Desire and the Anxiety of Identification in the New Latin American Novel of the Conquest

Un conocido chiste . . . es aquel del mexicano que increpa al español recién llegado queriendo cargar sobre sus espaldas todos los crímenes perpetrados en América por sus antepasados. La respuesta del peninsular es recordarle que, en todo caso, los genocidas habrán sido los ancestros del mexicano y no los de él, porque sus abuelos nunca salieron de España. (A well-known joke . . . is the one about the Mexican who reproaches the recently arrived Spaniard and wishes to place upon his shoulders the burden of all the crimes perpetrated in the Americas by his ancestors. The Spaniard responds by reminding him that, in any event, the genocides would have been the work of the Mexican’s ancestors and not his own, since his forefathers never left Spain.) —Ricardo Herren, La conquista erótica de las Indias

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he above epigraph tells the story of a Mexican who asks a recently arrived Spaniard whether he is ashamed of the atrocities committed by his ancestors in the conquest of the Americas. The Spaniard responds that his family remained in Spain, and thus, ironically, the conquistadors were not his ancestors, but those of his Mexican interlocutor.1 This anecdote raises the central question dealt with here: that of Latin American culture as the product of a transculturation born not from peaceful cohabitation but rather from violent conflict, and the issue of whether contemporary Latin American writers most identify with the colonized or the colonizer. The following analysis addresses the question of how Latin American novelists represent their own dual cultural heritage in novels that re-create the historical moment of the conquest as they imagine it might have been perceived through the “imperial eyes” of the conquistadors. The five chapters explore how recent novels that represent the

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conquest from the fictionalized perspective of the conquistadors ultimately deconstruct the rhetoric of empire through the use of what Robert Young has designated “colonial desire,” as well as the dynamic I am calling the “anxiety of identification.” In these novels we can observe the use of the literary imagination by Latin American authors who “reinvent the New World” as they write new creation myths to explain their cultural origins.2 As Carmen Boullosa’s narrator observes in her novel Llanto: Novelas imposibles (Tears: Impossible novels, 1992), in which three women find Moctezuma alive and well and sleeping in a park in modern-day Mexico City, Latin Americans find themselves in the ambiguous situation of being descendants of both the conqueror and the conquered: Los conquistadores somos nosotros. . . . [S]omos hechos de la sangre que nos destruyó y de la sangre que perdió a los dioses, somos hechos de todo, del que ganó y del que perdió, del que triunfó y del derrotado, del que destrozó y del que fue destrozado, de la resistencia y valentía de la parte vencida y de la derrota del ganador, sobre todo de estos dos últimos elementos. Es imposible que entendamos: necesitamos entender. (We are the conquistadors. . . . [W]e are made of the blood that destroyed us and of the blood that lost the gods, we are made of everything, of he who won and he who lost, of the triumphant and of the defeated, of he who destroyed and he who was destroyed, of the resistance and valor on the part of the vanquished and of the defeat of the winner, especially of these last two elements. It is impossible for us to understand: we must understand.)3

The subtitle of Boullosa’s novel and the final words in the above citation point both to the impossibility of understanding the origins of Latin America’s transcultural identity and to the necessity of confronting the violence of the conquest in an effort to understand. In the years surrounding the quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage, dozens of Latin American authors wrote novels re-creating the chronicles of the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas, vying to publish these historical fictions in the year 1992 or as close to it as possible. Curiously, few of these narratives attempt to reconstruct the indigenous perspective on the conquest, and most focus instead on representing the European conquerors. Most retain the traditional historical novel’s emphasis on the “great men” of history, although their tale is often told from the point of view of fictional marginal characters. Several of the novels are narrated from the first-person voices of the conquistadors themselves, while subtle irony within these voices challenges the ostensibly univocal rhetoric of empire. The present study examines this corpus of Latin American novels that deconstruct the rhetoric of conquest from within by representing this critical historical moment through the eyes of the conquerors and using irony to point to the gaps in that imagined perspective.

Introduction

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Traditional and New Historical Novels That Rewrite the Conquest According to Seymour Menton, the new historical novel has emerged as a dominant trend in Latin American narrative since 1979. Most of the novels examined here meet Menton’s criteria for “new historical novels”: many use famous historical characters as protagonists, whereas others revert to the more traditional pattern of inventing fictional characters whose lives are intertwined with those of famous historical figures; they problematize the category of history; they distort the representation of historical events through exaggeration and anachronisms; they use metafiction, self-conscious narration, and intertextuality; and they employ Bakhtinian concepts such as the carnivalesque, parody, heteroglossia, and the dialogic, which significantly allow for the representation of multiple perspectives on historical events.4 The novels analyzed in the following chapters also generally correspond to Fernando Aínsa’s definition of the “nueva novela histórica”: they critically reread history and question official historiography; they abolish “epic distance” and deconstruct national myths; some follow the historical record with painstaking attention to detail and documentation, whereas others take creative liberties in rewriting historical events; they superimpose different time periods; they question the notion of historical truth by employing multiple perspectives on events; and they use parody, pastiche, and metafiction to demythologize the past.5 Seymour Menton also notes that the new historical novel corresponds to Linda Hutcheon’s definition of postmodern historiographic metafiction, which involves the use of many of the above-mentioned narrative techniques for the purpose of problematizing historiographic representation. The new historical novel also demonstrates Hayden White’s theory regarding the narrative quality of historiographic discourse, in that the corpus stands as evidence of the notion that there exists no single truth of historical events, but rather a series of versions of those events narrated from different perspectives. Referring specifically to the corpus of novels that revisit the discovery and conquest of the Americas, Viviana Plotnik observes, “[T]his type of novel signals a shift in perspective as well as a lack of belief in master narratives characteristic of the postmodern sensibility.”6 According to Menton, the new Latin American historical novel emerged in anticipation of the 1992 commemoration of five hundred years of intercultural contact between the Old and New Worlds; this is especially true of the subcorpus of novels that rewrite the chronicles of the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas.7 This subcorpus, which is the focus of the present study, consists of several dozen Latin American novels published since the late 1970s that are set in the period of the conquest and colony. Rather than offering simple, one-sided responses to the cultural controversy surrounding the 1492–1992 quincentenary, most of these novels develop sophisticated, multivalent critical perspectives on the conquest through the

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use of narrative techniques associated with postmodern historiographic metafiction such as irony, parody, intertextuality, the dialogic, and self-conscious narration.8 In the years leading up to the 1992 quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, there was much discussion regarding whether this historic moment should be commemorated with celebration or with mourning.9 When October 12, 1992, rolled around, it was observed with both parades and protest marches in different locations throughout the Americas. The tremendous influence of social and literary indigenism, combined with the fact that Latin American literature of the past several decades has tended to privilege marginal perspectives on culture, might lead the reader to expect that the novels published around this same time would attempt to represent the conquest from the indigenous perspective, and would fall univocally into the category of Columbus-bashing. In practice, however, the overwhelming majority of texts in this corpus of new historical novels represent the conquest from the perspective of the conquistadors, although they generally locate a marginal vantage point from within which to ironically deconstruct this perspective. The effort to rewrite the early years of contact between European and Amerindian peoples began in the nineteenth century, with novels representing the subgenre of romantic Indianism, such as the anonymous Jicoténcal (1826), which tells the story of the encounter of the king of Tlaxcala with Hernán Cortés; Cuban author Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Guatimozín (1846), on the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc; Brazilian José de Alencar’s O Guarani (1857) and Iracema (1865), each dealing with the origins of Brazil in terms of racial miscegenation; novels by Argentine authors Rosa Guerra and Eduarda Mansilla, both originally published in 1860, on Lucía Miranda, a Spanish woman who according to legend was captured and killed by South American natives in the early sixteenth century; Mexican Ireneo Paz’s Amor y suplicio (Love and torment, 1873) and Doña Marina (1883), the second of which focuses on the figure of Hernán Cortés’s interpreter, la Malinche; and Dominican author Manuel de Jesús Galván’s Enriquillo (1879 –1882), which centers on Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas’s denunciation of the abuses of the Spanish settlers on Hispaniola and the indigenous rebellion under the leader Guarocuya, baptized Enriquillo.10 During the nineteenth century, the Indianist tradition served as an important part of literary and cultural projects of national formation.11 Latin American novelists wrote of indigenous characters from the colonial period and pre-Columbian past to highlight their difference from the European colonizer, “in order to exalt the cultural roots of the new independent Spanish American nations and to help create the appropriate mentality for the consolidation of a national consciousness.”12 Within the larger context of the corpus examined here, it is significant to note that Jicoténcal, which is held to be the first Spanish American historical novel, is set in the period of the conquest and has an Amerindian protagonist. However, most of these nineteenthcentury novels—including many of those that feature indigenous title characters—

Introduction

5

still retain a major focus on Spanish figures such as conquistador Hernán Cortés. In the twentieth century, historical novels continue to serve the purpose of constructing national identities that underscore the difference between colonized and colonizer, although they generally do so by decentering traditional historical figures through the representation of marginality.13 Throughout the twentieth century, numerous historical novels dealing with the conquest and colony were published by well-known Latin American authors. The early and midcentury saw the publication of Argentine Roberto J. Payró’s 1927 novel on the expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís; Venezuelan Arturo Uslar Pietri’s 1948 narrative on the quest for El Dorado; and Argentine Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 Zama on the bureaucracy of the late colony. In the second half of the century, but prior to the prequincentennial fervor, the year 1969 marked the publication of Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Maladrón, which highlights the contact between Europeans and Amerindian peoples in the conquest, and Cuban Reinaldo Arenas’s novel on the historical figure of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier in late colonial Mexico. In particular since the 1970s, well-known Latin American authors have made a concerted effort to reevaluate this important historical period.14 Since the mid-twentieth century, there has also emerged the notion that the chronicles of discovery and conquest themselves were literary in nature.15 Many novels from the 1970s and 1980s demonstrate an awareness of this through intertextuality with the chronicles of conquest and colonization. Mexican Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975); Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (1975), published in translation as The Autumn of the Patriarch; Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s El arpa y la sombra (1979), published in translation as The Harp and the Shadow; Colombian Albalucía Ángel’s Las andariegas (The wandering women, 1983); Argentine Griselda Gambaro’s Lo impenetrable (1984); and Mexican Margo Glantz’s Síndrome de naufragios (Shipwreck syndrome, 1984) do not represent linear historical narratives, nor do they deal exclusively with the conquest, but they do draw heavily upon the colonial chronicles in the formation of innovative narratives that transcend particular chronological periods. Of these, Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975) is of key importance because it underscores the necessity of contextualizing the trauma of the conquest by reexamining sixteenth-century European history. Fuentes takes considerable liberties with history in Terra Nostra by de-emphasizing the Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel, and also erasing Emperor Carlos V, and instead representing the discovery of the New World as if it took place during the reign of Felipe II, whom Fuentes portrays as the son of Felipe I and Juana la Loca and husband of Elizabeth Tudor. Fuentes’s 1975 novel is relevant to the discussion of memory in historical narratives that rewrite the conquest because in Terra Nostra, Felipe II denies the existence of the New World, and the character who has discovered the Americas and conquered

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the Aztec empire “forgets” the conquest, which he enacted in a dreamlike state. Through his narrative, Fuentes highlights the importance of recovering this memory, and thus inspires the later novels that revisit this critical historical moment. A more recent novel by Carlos Fuentes that has a unique intertextual relationship with Christopher Columbus is Cristóbal Nonato (1987), published in translation as Christopher Unborn, in which the first narrative strand describes Cristóbal’s parents calculating his conception so that he will win the prize for being born in the first minute of October 12, 1992. The contest announcement reads: Sepan cuantos: El niño de sexo masculino que nazca precisamente a las 0:00 horas del día 12 de octubre de 1992 y cuyo nombre de familia, aparte del nombre de pila (seguramente, lo estimamos bien, Cristóbal) más semejanzas guarde con el Ilustre Navegante será proclamado Hijo Pródigo de la Patria. . . . ¡[E]ntonces óyeme macho mexicano, embaraza a tu señora, pero ya! (To whom it may concern: The male child born precisely at the stroke of midnight on October 12, and whose family name, not including his first name (it goes without saying the boy will be named Christopher), most resembles that of the Illustrious Navigator, shall be proclaimed Prodigal Son of the Nation. . . . [P]ay close attention: Mexican machos, impregnate your wives—right away!)16

Like Cristóbal’s parents, Latin American authors sought to give birth to a literary creation that would appear in print during the year commemorating the quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage. Although many missed the target publication date of 1992, beginning in the late 1970s, through the 1980s and 1990s, and into the twenty-first century, Latin American authors have continued to publish novels that engage the moment of conquest of the Americas. Though 1992 was a pivotal date for cultural and literary manifestations in Spain, Spanish America, and North America, for Brazil a greater historical significance was attached to the 2000 quincentenary of Pedro Álvares Cabral’s landing on Brazilian soil in 1500, which in turn could be combined with millennium celebrations. Thus, whereas publication of novels on the conquest and colony in both Spain and Spanish America witnessed a boom in the years surrounding 1992, the production of Brazilian historical novels began to accelerate somewhat later, in anticipation of the year 2000.17 These include Paulo Saab’s 1500 (1991); three novels by Ana Miranda, Boca do inferno (1989) (published in translation as Bay of All Saints and Every Conceivable Sin), O retrato do rei (Portrait of the king, 1991), and Desmundo (Unworld, 1996); José Roberto Torero and Marcus Aurelius Pimenta’s Terra Papagalli (Land of the parrots, 1997); Clovis Bulcão’s A quarta parte do mundo (The fourth part of the world, 1999); Ruy Tapioca’s A república dos bugres (Native republic, 1999); Glauco Ortolano’s Domingos Vera Cruz (memórias de um antropófago lisboense no Brasil) (Domingos Vera Cruz [memoirs of a Portuguese cannibal in Brazil], 2000); and Antônio Torres’s Meu querido canibal (My dear cannibal, 2000). These novels

Introduction

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deal with various moments in the colonial and imperial periods, and many focus on the sixteenth century. There is also an entire corpus of theatrical works that represent the conquest, a large portion of which were published in the 1980s and 1990s by Mexicans Sabina Berman, Vicente Leñero, and Víctor Castillo Bautista; Colombians Enrique Buenaventura and Patricia Ariza; Ecuadoran Jorge Enrique Adoum; and Spaniards Jaime Salom and José Sanchis Sinisterra. Their plays treat Spanish figures Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Lope de Aguirre, Nuño de Guzmán, Cabeza de Vaca, Gonzalo Guerrero, and Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as Amerindian figures such as la Malinche, Moctezuma, Cuauhtémoc, and Huayna Cápac. Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s La aprendiz de bruja (The witch’s apprentice, 1956), as well as numerous Mexican plays—Sergio Magaña’s Moctezuma II (1953) and Cortés y la Malinche (1967), Rodolfo Usigli’s Corona de fuego (Crown of fire, 1960), Salvador Novo’s Cuauhtémoc (1962), and Carlos Fuentes’s Todos los gatos son pardos (All cats are gray, 1970) and his later Ceremonias del alba (Ceremonies of the dawn, 1991)—are examples of enduring interest in plays rewriting the conquest using innovative dramatic techniques.18 The idea of dramatizing the Euro-American encounter of cultures is not new, since by the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, Spanish playwright Lope de Vega was composing his comedia titled El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (The New World discovered by Christopher Columbus), and fellow Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina was writing his trilogy of plays on the brothers Pizarro as well as a dramatic text on the Amazon women. The years leading to the Columbus quincentenary also saw an increase in film production representing the discovery, exploration, and conquest of the Americas, with numerous films produced staging this encounter with a focus on the figures of Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, and Lope de Aguirre. Two important transatlantic productions are Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Peru–West Germany, 1973) and Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca (Mexico-Spain, 1991). In addition to films, plays, and full-length novels, there are also shorter literary pieces on the conquest. Notable in this category of shorter fiction is Carlos Fuentes’s El naranjo (The orange tree, 1993), a collection of five novellas, three of which reproduce fictionalized fragments of Columbus’s diary; a monologue from the perspective of Hernán Cortés’s interpreter Jerónimo de Aguilar; and a dialogue between two sons of Cortés, the mestizo Martín Cortés born of the indigenous interpreter known as la Malinche, and his legitimate son, also named Martín Cortés, born later of his Spanish wife. Other short literary pieces and essays on the conquest by various authors have been compiled in collections such as Columbus’ Egg, edited by Nick Caistor, and The Discovery of America and Other Myths, edited by Thomas Christensen and Carol Christensen. Another trend can be found in novels that include the period of the conquest and colonization as one of multiple time frames represented. These encompass some of the earlier novels such as Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975), Alejo Carpentier’s El

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arpa y la sombra (1979), and Mexican Gustavo Sainz’s Fantasmas aztecas (Aztec phantoms, 1982), as well as more recent Mexican novels such as Homero Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles (The legend of the suns, 1993), Luis Humberto Crosthwaite’s 1994 novel translated as The Moon Will Forever Be a Distant Love, and Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra (Heaven on earth, 1997), all of which alternate between the different combinations of past, present, and future time frames. Some novels, such as Mexican Carmen Boullosa’s Llanto: Novelas imposibles (1992); Argentine Rosa Boldori’s La morada de los cuatro vientos (The dwelling of the four winds, 1992); Nicaraguan Rosario Aguilar’s 1992 novel translated as The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma; Chilean Eduardo Labarca’s Butamalón (1994); and Brazilian Antônio Torres’s Meu querido canibal, incorporate a present setting in which a self-conscious narrator representing an author, transcriber, or translator relates the complex process of writing a historical novel.19 In terms of chronological shifting, numerous also are the literary works in this corpus that employ blatant anachronisms and make explicit and implicit references to twentieth-century politics.20 Others may use the setting of the colonial period as a smoke screen for dealing with issues that cannot be addressed directly during a period of censorship.21 The extent to which historical novels set in the colonial period serve to make comparisons between the conquest and contemporary forms of oppression is an area that has been the object of some scholarly attention, and merits further exploration.22 There is also an entire subcorpus of novels that engage the conquest and colonization in the process of tracing a broad, sweeping history of the Western world, Latin America, or a particular country or region, often portrayed through the perspective of multiple generations of the same family, or a single individual who travels in time or lives continuously over a period of several centuries. These novels include Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974), published in translation as View of Dawn in the Tropics; Argentine Pedro Orgambide’s Aventuras de Edmund Ziller en tierras del Nuevo Mundo (Adventures of Edmund Ziller in the lands of the New World, 1977); Argentine Abel Posse’s Daimón (1978); Colombian Albalucía Ángel’s Las andariegas (1983); Brazilian Moacyr Scliar’s A Estranha Nação de Rafael Mendes (1983), published in translation as The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes; Brazilian João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s Viva o povo brasileiro (1984), published in translation as An Invincible Memory; Guatemalan Arturo Arias’s Jaguar en llamas (Jaguar in flames, 1989); Venezuelan Alicia Freilich’s Colombina descubierta (Columbina discovered, 1991); and Brazilian Glauco Ortolano’s Domingos Vera Cruz (2000).23 Two recent novels of this type are those by Puerto Rican Olga Nolla (1996), whose fiction has Juan Ponce de León discovering the fountain of youth and living to witness several centuries of Puerto Rican history and participate in the Spanish-American War, and by Argentine Alicia Dujovne Ortiz (1997), whose autobiographical novel creates a fictionalized version of her own genealogy. In many of these novels, a fictional character meets important historical figures such as Christo-

Introduction

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pher Columbus. Because the corpus of historical literature revisiting the conquest and colonization of the New World is so extensive, the present study will focus only on recent Latin American historical novels that portray the conquistadors during the moment of first contact, thus eliminating works in other genres that treat this theme, as well as bracketing off novels set in the later period of the colony. Marginal Perspectives in the New Novel of the Conquest The majority of the novels in this corpus have European male protagonists representing historically documented explorers and conquistadors, or fictional foot soldiers and cabin boys who accompany them on their expeditions. In spite of the historical fact that there were few European women in the Americas during the early years of the conquest and colonization, there has been considerable literary interest in recovering the memory of some significant female figures. Novels in this vein with sixteenth-century Spanish female protagonists include Argentine Josefina Cruz’s 1960 novel on doña Mencía de Calderón, famous for bringing a group of Spanish women to the Americas to marry the conquistadors. The widow Inés de Suárez, who accompanied Pedro de Valdivia on his expedition to conquer the territory that would later be known as Chile, is the protagonist of a 1968 novel by Argentine Josefina Cruz as well as of Chilean Jorge Guzmán’s 1993 Ay Mamá Inés. There are also several novels, mostly by Argentine authors writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that narrate the story of a Spanish woman by the name of Lucía Miranda, who according to myth came to South America on Sebastian Cabot’s voyage, only to be captured and killed by natives. Though popular a century ago, this racially charged legend not surprisingly failed to resuscitate interest in the quincentennial period.24 A historical Spanish woman named Beatriz de la Cueva—the wife of conquistador Pedro de Alvarado who briefly succeeded him as governor of Guatemala before dying shortly after he did—is the subject of a 1990 novel in English by Anita McAndrews, published later in Spanish translation, and is also a primary figure in Nicaraguan Rosario Aguilar’s 1992 novel, published in English translation as The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma. There are also novels with fictional female narrators such as Argentine Libertad Demitrópulos’s 1981 novel published in translation as River of Sorrows, and Brazilian Ana Miranda’s Desmundo, both of which include a character similar to the historical doña Mencía de Calderón, who brings a group of European women to South America to marry. Both novels use this theme as a point of departure to develop fictions that examine conflicts between Europeans and Amerindians in the latter half of the sixteenth century from a female perspective. One Spanish woman who has recently received a great deal of creative and critical attention is Catalina de Erauso, the “Monja Alférez,” who in the early seventeenth century dressed like a man and served as a soldier in colonial Peru.25 A loose liter-

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest

ary adaptation of the story of this phenomenal woman, known in English as the ensign nun or lieutenant nun, can be found in Mexican Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme (Sleeping beauty, 1994). The lack of historically documented European women in the Americas during the period of the conquest explains to a certain extent the relative paucity of novels about female characters, with the above-mentioned figures standing as notable exceptions. If there are few European women from the period of conquest and colonization of the Americas whose names have been documented, there are even fewer sixteenthcentury indigenous women whose names have been recorded for posterity and immortalized in literature. In this case, clearly it was not because Amerindian women were not present in large numbers, but rather because the chroniclers rarely took the trouble to register their names. Recent novels and historical biographies by both female and male authors on the figure of Cortés’s indigenous interpreter-lover, la Malinche (also referred to as Malintzín, Malinalli, or by her baptismal name, doña Marina), endeavor to salvage the humanity of this historical figure and vindicate her of the charge that she betrayed her people.26 Perhaps the slipperiest aspect of this enterprise in ideological terms is the question of how to defend la Malinche while remaining critical of Cortés and his conquest of Mexico.27 Another female historical figure who has been much maligned by historians and literary writers alike, and who has also begun to be reexamined in recent decades, is the seventeenth-century Chilean woman known as la Quintrala, a mixed-race landowner considered by her contemporaries to be a murderess and a witch. La Quintrala has been the object of a steady stream of literary works, such that nearly every decade since the late nineteenth century has seen the publication of a creative work focusing on this mestiza figure.28 The fact that Latin American literature of the last several decades has tended to focus on marginal perspectives, while literary indigenism has been a major trend since the late nineteenth century, might lead the reader to expect that the historical novels published around 1992 would attempt to reconstruct the indigenous perspective on the conquest. These novels foil that expectation, however, as the overwhelming majority have European protagonists. The few recent historical novels highlighting a fictionalized indigenous perspective on the conquest include The Indian Chronicles (1993), by Cuban American author José Barreiro, narrated from the perspective of a Taino interpreter who travels to Spain with Columbus on his return from the first voyage, and Uruguayan author Alejandro Paternain’s Crónica del descubrimiento (Chronicle of the discovery, 1980), which recounts the tale of a group of Caribbean natives who embark in three canoes and discover Europe in 1492 precisely before Columbus sets sail. Still, although they may question the enterprise of colonialism, these two novels do not radically decenter the European historical subject in their retelling of the discovery from a marginal perspective: Columbus is still a main focal point of The Indian Chronicles, and Paternain’s Crónica del descubri-

Introduction

11

miento really reaffirms the “great man” approach to history more than it questions it, as one of the Amerindians in his novel assumes the role of a traditional Columbus figure, represented as a foreigner and a romantic visionary.29 In like terms, Tenochtitlán (1986), by Costa Rican author José León Sánchez, promises a literary reconstruction of the conquest of the Aztec capital based on indigenous testimonies. While the narrative perspectives feature those of several Amerindians, and both Spanish and indigenous women, Hernán Cortés nevertheless remains a central figure around whom the narrative Tenochtitlán revolves.30 Another novel, La conquista del Ibero-Suyo (The conquest of the Ibero-Andes, 1994), by Peruvian Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, promises to be based on quipus, the Andean system of recording messages with knotted cords, but at the same time facetiously declares that the history transcribed from the quipus confirms the rumor that Christopher Columbus had an affair with Queen Isabel.31 Thus, even the novels that go to the greatest lengths to incorporate an indigenous perspective on the conquest still evince a preoccupation with major European historical figures. There are also novels by women authors that, like Tenochtitlán, employ multiple marginal narrators to deconstruct the presumably univocal rhetoric of conquest. Nicaraguan Rosario Aguilar’s 1992 novel translated as The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma and Argentine Libertad Demitrópulos’s 1981 novel translated as River of Sorrows have several narrators each. In Aguilar’s novel, the narrators are all women, and include historical and fictional female characters who are Spanish, indigenous, and of mixed race. In Demitrópulos’s novel, the narrators are a mestizo soldier and two criollas. By representing the conquest from decentered perspectives, such novels create the expectation that marginal characters will identify with one another; this is not necessarily the case, however, as various subaltern groups may also compete with each another to identify with the colonizer. In novels with marginal narrators, then, we see a much more ambiguous identification than we might expect between, for example, women and Amerindians, an identification that can be characterized as colonial desire. Another novel in this corpus that stands out for its tremendous effort to examine both male and female, indigenous and European, perspectives on the conquest is Mexican Ignacio Solares’s Nen, la inútil (Nen, the useless, 1994), whose fictional protagonists are the Aztec woman Nencihuatl and Spanish conquistador Felipe. Nencihuatl, or Nen, is a clairvoyant who has visions predicting key scenes in the conquest of Tenochtitlan and later important moments in Mexican history. The novel suggests the violent origins of racial miscegenation in the rape of Nen by Felipe, resulting in a representation that deromanticizes and further problematizes the enduring Mexican ideal of mestizaje.32 In the face of efforts such as the aforementioned, however, the majority of new historical novels that rewrite the conquest and colony still tend to privilege the perspective of the “great (European) men” of history, erasing and silencing the voices of women and Amerindians. Notwithstanding a few no-

12

Latin American Novels of the Conquest

table exceptions, then, both women and Amerindians remain invisible, silent, and nameless Others within the majority of Latin American historical novels set in the period of the conquest, despite the corpus’s marked emphasis on the representation of marginality.33 Rather than looking for a marginal voice in the vision of the vanquished, then, most late-twentieth-century Latin American authors reinvent the New World by turning their eyes back toward Europe, but identifying marginal voices from within the imperial enterprise. The most extreme example of this dual effort to examine the conquest from the perspective of the colonizer yet represent the individual conquistadors as outsiders within European culture can be found in Venezuelan Alicia Freilich’s Colombina descubierta. In this fiction, the discoverer is marginalized on the counts of gender, ethnicity, class, age, and mental state, since this literary representation portrays Columbus as an old, poor Jewish woman with multiple personalities living out her final days in a psychiatric hospital in 1992 after witnessing five centuries of history. A less dramatic, but equally significant, statement of the desire to incorporate marginality in historical novels rewriting the conquest appears in Argentine Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s El árbol de la gitana (The gypsy woman’s tree, 1997). This autobiographical fiction, alternating between the contemporary period and the past, traces the genealogy of the narrator, whose name is identical to that of the author. The character Alicia is an Argentine journalist in exile who is writing a novel about her “antepasados reales y fantásticos” (real and fictitious ancestors). Dujovne Ortiz identifies with marginal groups to the extent that she strains to include secret indigenous and crypto-Jewish ancestors in her fictionalized family tree. While Alicia is Russian Jewish on her father’s side, she ardently desires to find Jewish ancestry also in her Spanish maternal lineage: “Por simple espíritu de contradicción, a mí me encantaría no resultar semita por mi rama paterna sino por el costado de mi madre, hispánico y cristiano” (Out of a sheer spirit of contradiction, I would be overjoyed to turn out to be Semitic not on my paternal side, but on the side of my Christian Hispanic mother).34 Throughout the novel she feels instinctively that her ancestry includes a crypto-Jew burned at the stake, and longs for this to be true, while at the same time she painfully remembers that she has another ancestor who was an inquisitor. Whereas in the era of multiculturalism, belonging to a group that has historically been marginalized carries with it a certain cultural cachet, in previous generations it was something to be hidden. In Dujovne Ortiz’s fictionalized autobiography, a genealogist brings the narrator records that reconstruct her crypto-Jewish ancestry that had been expurgated from official records, confirming that she is indeed the descendant of a crypto-Jew burned at the stake. Alicia also traces her roots back to another hidden ancestor, an indigenous slave woman who in this fictionalized account has a sexual encounter with one of Alicia’s forefathers on his wedding night; nine months later, children are born to both the Charrúa slave woman and to the European wife,

Introduction

13

but only one baby survives. The gypsy woman who tells the narrator these stories about her family tree points out that because the child who survived could have been born to either mother, Alicia has the freedom to choose her own lineage: “Eligí tu respuesta y tu sangre. ¿De quién querés descender? ¿De Inquisidores, de marranos, de charrúas, de todos ellos a la vez? Servite de lo que gustes y no temas errar” (Choose your own answer and your own blood. From whom do you wish to descend? From inquisitors, from crypto-Jews, from Charrúas, from them all at the same time? Pick whichever you wish and don’t be afraid of making a mistake).35 Whereas in the years surrounding the wars of independence and incipient national formation writers looked to indigenous culture as an essential core for Latin American identity, in the years leading to the quincentenary of the initiation of EuroAmerican contact, there emerged a new effort to confront head-on the paradox of Latin America’s dual heritage, without attempting to erase the violence of its origins. Although Dujovne Ortiz’s narrator chooses to recognize one indigenous ancestor, her lineage is primarily European, as she is the descendant of Spanish Catholic and Russian Jewish immigrants. The desire to identify autochthonous roots is present in the novel, however, in the narrator’s daughter, who as a teenager living in exile with her mother in France decides to move to the Amazon in order to search for her roots; when she proposes this, Alicia sarcastically responds that in the Amazon the only roots her daughter will find will belong to the foliage. For generations, Latin American writers have been looking for autochthonous cultural roots, while often neglecting to critically examine their European cultural ancestry. In Dujovne Ortiz’s novel, the narrator repeatedly expresses a consciousness of the contradiction of being the daughter of both inquisitor and crypto-Jew, conqueror and conquered; though her preference is to identify with the victimized, Alicia recognizes that she must deal with the ambivalence of being also descended from the victimizer.36 As Viviana Plotnik observes, Latin American authors experience a sense of exile and orphanhood as a result of Latin America’s ambivalent position in Western history. They thus rewrite the conquest to explore the origins of their national “birth trauma,” and in so doing often contradict the official histories of their parentage. Dujovne Ortiz’s narration exemplifies what Plotnik describes in reference to this corpus overall: “Orphanhood implies the absence of authority and a break with one’s origins and ancestral determinism as well as a new beginning. The orphan represents a blank slate where history can begin to be written, or perhaps a pen that inscribes history in a blank space.” As Plotnik observes, this liberty allows characters to contradict their parents or ignore their origins, or, I would add, to invent new parents, by reimagining the European conquerors themselves as marginalized.37 This freedom to identify with an ethnic heritage regardless of actual bloodlines— manifest in Dujovne Ortiz’s fictionalization of her own ancestry—demonstrates the tremendous power of the literary imagination for reinventing a new cultural lineage for Latin America. Whereas earlier generations looked to indigenous culture for the

14

Latin American Novels of the Conquest

key to Latin American autochthony, the authors in this corpus primarily look to Europe for their cultural roots; rather than identify with the hegemonic project of conquest, though, they invent a cultural ancestry in which they are the children of Europeans who were marginalized within their own society. In a sense, all of the novels that revisit the conquest are “creation myths” for Latin America that attempt not so much to reconstruct the actual historical origins of racial and cultural mestizaje as to invent a potential heritage based on a literary reconstruction of a marginalized European perspective on the conquest. These new creation myths address the needs of a turn-of-the-millennium climate of multiculturalism that looks askance at official history in order to recognize heterogeneity and privilege diverse perspectives on culture.38 Deconstructing the Conquest of the Americas from Within Rather than identifying directly with the Amerindians, then, the majority of the new novels of the conquest deconstruct the imperial enterprise indirectly, through the representation of marginal protagonists from within European culture. There is a historical basis to this representation of the conquistadors as marginalized, because at the time of the conquest of the Americas, the system of primogeniture made it such that the eldest son inherited the familial estate, whereas segundones—second sons and by extension all sons after the first—had to search to make their own living. They generally sought an occupation either in the church or in the military, two fields open to noblemen, for whom manual labor as well as the profession of merchant were regarded as beneath the dignity of even the pobres hidalgos of the lower nobility. From the sixteenth century onward, the Americas represented a new world of opportunity for segundones to seek their fate as explorers and conquistadors, or later as administrators, settlers, and indianos or peruleros, men who came to the Indies to make a name and a fortune and return to Spain.39 Although some of the new novels of the conquest focus on the conquistadors as outsiders for socioeconomic reasons—for example, Francisco Pizarro as the illegitimate son of a pig farmer—most emphasize other forms of social and cultural marginalization.40 The most prominent of these emblems of alterity consists of the representation of protagonists who are conversos, or Jewish converts to Christianity.41 Whereas New Christians were legally prohibited from emigrating to Spanish America due to mandates requiring certificates of limpieza de sangre, or proof of Old Christian lineage, some Sephardic Jews did manage to settle in the New World.42 Numerous historical novels have New Christian protagonists, focusing on the importance of historical conversos in financing the voyages of discovery or emphasizing Jewish presence in the colonies.43 Characters of Jewish descent are so omnipresent in new historical novels set in the colonial period that the converso can truly be called a “significant Other” in this corpus.44

Introduction

15

In the chapters that follow, I contend that the late-twentieth-century Latin American authors in this corpus look back to sixteenth-century Europe for master tropes of difference that are emblematic of their own sense of Latin America’s marginality within the Western world. The converso is a significant Other in early modern Europe due to the ambivalence of a position categorized as “neither fish nor fowl,” that is, neither Jew nor Old Christian. Other emblems of alterity highlighted in this corpus include cannibalism, sodomy, idolatry, human sacrifice, and syphilis. Although these would appear to be wholly unrelated categories—some involve ethnicity, religion, and ritual practice, whereas others involve sexuality and disease—these signs of difference have often been conflated in the Western imagination. Notably, the trio cannibalism, sodomy, and idolatry was united in the mentality of the prototypical conquistador: for example, upon approaching each new group in Mesoamerica, conquistador Hernán Cortés admonished them to abandon the practices of human sacrifice, cannibalism, idolatry, and sodomy, thus revealing his assumption that these were all practiced in unison by every native culture.45 Other, even more unusual, combinations of these master tropes have been conflated in the Western imaginary: for example, scholars note that during historical crises in Europe, Jews were accused of cannibalism; Jewishness has at times in European history been conflated with homosexuality; and homosexuals have a long history of being associated with cannibals. Clearly, these combinations have no basis in reason, but rather are based on the logic of fear of the Other and the need to scapegoat marginal groups for occurrences such as wars and natural disasters.46 The year 1492 was pivotal in the designation of difference in the Iberian Peninsula, because in addition to marking the initial contact between Europeans and Amerindians, it was the year that ended nearly eight centuries of Moorish occupation, and also the year that the Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel expelled the Jews from Spain. This effort to expel these internal Others from the Iberian Peninsula foreshadows the violence of European treatment of the Amerindian Other.47 Thus, in order to examine their own sense of marginality within the Western world, Latin Americans look to this key moment in the history of Europe, and identify with the groups whom Europeans held to be both their internal and their external Others. In the critical reevaluation of their cultural ancestry, Latin American authors embrace what in the context of the rhetoric of empire had served as emblems of a presumed cultural inferiority manipulated to conquer and oppress the Other, and turn them instead into symbols of empowerment.48 By far, the largest subcategory of new historical novels that represent the first contact between Old and New Worlds is composed of the fictionalized biographies and autobiographies of Christopher Columbus, nearly all of which represent him as marginalized due to his status as a foreigner and potentially as a converso.49 These novels include Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s El arpa y la sombra (1979); Argentine Abel Posse’s Los perros del paraíso (1983), published in translation as The Dogs of Par-

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest

adise; Mexican Julián Meza’s La huella del conejo (The rabbit’s track, 1991); Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos’s Vigilia del almirante (The admiral’s vigil, 1992); Mexican Herminio Martínez’s Las puertas del mundo: Una autobiografía hipócrita del Almirante (Doors of the world: The admiral’s hypocritical autobiography, 1992); and the novella on the Genovese sailor in Carlos Fuentes’s collection El naranjo (1993). Although Columbus is the central figure in all of these works, he is also paradoxically represented as marginal within the voyages of discovery due to his presumed Jewish background.50 Most traditional and new historical novels continue to focus on the “great men” of the conquest, although they are often represented as marginalized by virtue of their identification with the indigenous culture, as in the case of the fictionalized versions of Cabeza de Vaca or Gonzalo Guerrero, or even by dint of excessive identification with the goals of conquest, as in the case of Lope de Aguirre. For example, Mexican biographical novels on Gonzalo Guerrero represent the life of the Spaniard stranded in Mayan territory in the early sixteenth century who—unlike fellow expedition survivor Jerónimo de Aguilar who with his ability to interpret aided Cortés in the conquest of Mexico—had become invested in the local culture to the extent that he chose to remain with his Mayan family. Marginalized for his very excess of identification with the goals of conquest, in contrast, renegade Lope de Aguirre is the title character of several novels, including Argentine Abel Posse’s 1978 Daimón.51 In this novel, the maverick conquistador succeeds in establishing his own autonomous empire in the Amazon and survives to the present day, living through five centuries of history. It is significant that the marginality of this character is due not to his ostracism from the enterprise of conquest, but precisely to his overidentification with that same enterprise. Yet another category of new historical novels deflects attention from the “great men” of history, such as Columbus, Magellan, Pizarro, and Cortés, by recounting the story of exploration and conquest from the perspective of fictional marginal characters. This trend has produced a steady stream of novels beginning in the late 1970s with Cuban Antonio Benítez Rojo’s El mar de las lentejas (Sea of lentils, 1979), followed by Argentine Libertad Demitrópulos’s Río de las congojas (River of sorrows, 1981); Mexican Eugenio Partida’s La ballesta de Dios (God’s crossbow, 1981); Mexican Julián Meza’s La huella del conejo (1991); Mexican Olivier Debroise’s Crónica de las destrucciones (Chronicle of destructions, 1998); Peruvian Jarque Fietta’s Yo me perdono (I forgive myself, 1998); Ecuadoran Juan Cárdenas Miño’s En busca del paraíso (In search of paradise, 1998); and Mexican Marisol Martín del Campo’s Amor y conquista (Love and conquest, 1999). These novels, many of which mix first- and third-person narrative voices, deconstruct the rhetoric of conquest by exploring it from the perspective of multiple marginal characters who are primarily European and male, with a few female, indigenous, and mestizo protagonists.

Introduction

17

Other novels of this type, such as Argentine Juan José Saer’s El entenado (The witness, 1983); Mexican Homero Aridjis’s 1985 and 1988 Juan Cabezón novels; Uruguayan Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León’s Maluco (1990); Argentine Antonio Elio Brailovsky’s Esta maldita lujuria (This cursed lasciviousness, 1991); Terra Papagalli (1997), by Brazilians José Roberto Torero and Marcus Aurelius Pimenta; PeruvianArgentine Hugo Müller’s El cronista perdido (The lost chronicler, 1998); and Mexican Herminio Martínez’s Invasores del paraíso (Invaders of paradise, 1998) and El regreso (The return, 1999), are each narrated by a single marginal narrator, most often a cabin boy, foot soldier, or scribe on a historical or fictional voyage of exploration and conquest. These first-person narratives generally point to a subversive version of historical events that contradicts the official record by examining the conquest from a marginal perspective. The novels that constitute the focus of the present study retain an emphasis on the European colonizers, but marginalize them by portraying them as social outsiders torn by a simultaneous desire for and rejection of Amerindian culture. Within this category are all of the narratives examined in the following chapters: Argentine author Juan José Saer’s El entenado; Mexican Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán (Accursed diary of Nuño de Guzmán, 1990); Argentine Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante (The long twilight of the wanderer, 1992); and 1492 (1985) and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo (Memories of the New World, 1988), both by Mexican Homero Aridjis. Although these novels maintain a focus on major historical figures, they deconstruct the rhetoric of empire through the representation of the dynamic of colonial desire and what I am calling the anxiety of identification. In this corpus, then, the novels that concentrate on well-known historical figures and those narrated from the perspective of fictional characters both tend to problematize traditional historiography through the representation of marginal protagonists. The most notable trend is to represent major and minor players in the voyages of exploration and conquest as conversos, or new Jewish converts to Christianity, a socially marginalized group in early modern Iberia. Another trend is to represent the conquistadors as intrigued by Amerindian religious, sexual, or dietary difference. These representations deconstruct the rhetoric of empire by pointing to inconsistencies within it: if the colonizers persecute the American natives on the basis of ethnic, religious, or cultural difference, yet the conquistadors themselves are portrayed as New Christians, this would point to an ideological contradiction within the rhetoric of conquest. By like reasoning, if the conquistadors persecute cannibals and sodomites, but are themselves subject to anthropophagous and homoerotic desire, this would point to a similar paradox. According to this logic, a marginalized character within the conquest may be considered the most apt to represent the paradoxical perspective of Latin Americans on the historical events that led to their unique identity as products of cultural miscegenation born of violent conflict.

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest The Ambivalent Vision of the Victor: Colonial Desire and the Anxiety of Identification

I coin the expression “anxiety of identification” to refer to a specific dynamic that occurs in literary representations of intercultural contact: the fear of losing the self in the Other, that is, the fear of becoming so closely identified with another individual or group so as to lose one’s own ego boundaries. This phrase points toward a Freudian orientation, as it plays on The Anxiety of Influence, in which Harold Bloom draws heavily upon Freud’s psychoanalytical theories in order to elaborate the notion that poets imitate earlier masters and then have difficulty asserting their own authority. My theory of the anxiety of identification develops this same Freudian notion of apprehension over losing one’s ego boundaries due to overidentification with another. Whereas in Bloom’s book the later poet fears overimitating a more authoritative master, the present study will explore how fictionalized colonizers fear losing their cultural identity by identifying too much with the colonized Other. Cultural difference has been a concern of Western civilization since its earliest recorded history. Fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus was one of the first to identify specific characteristics that defined the Greeks as distinct from their “barbaric” neighbors: in addition to political and linguistic variations, cultural differences such as the practice of man-eating made the “barbarians” Others in Herodotus’s eyes. It was only in the sixteenth century with Michel de Montaigne that the possibility of cultural relativism was glimpsed in regard to cannibalism; in his essay “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne envisioned the potential for a non-Eurocentric view in which cultural difference does not necessarily mean inferiority.52 Three centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his essay “On Lordship and Bondage” theorized that the master needs the slave for his own self-definition, thus introducing the notion that the Other is paradoxically required for the definition of the self, a concept that would be central to twentieth-century thought. The relationship between self and Other is further developed in the psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud, at the heart of which lies the concept of the ego. As Freud discusses in his essay on the uncanny, it is the need to maintain one’s own ego boundaries that makes the idea that one might have a double so unnerving. In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard discusses the similar dread and awe caused by twins in primitive cultures. It is because it is so basic to our understanding of human life that each individual must be separate and unique—particularly in the Western world in the modern age in which individuality has been so highly prized—that twins, the myth of doubles, and the very real possibility of clones cause us such consternation.53 Building on Freud’s psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan developed his theory of the mirror stage, which he identified as a critical juncture in human psychological development. According to Lacan, before an infant has understood its own image in the mirror, it has perceived its own body not as a whole, but as a fragmented self com-

Introduction

19

posed of the body parts an infant can observe without the aid of a mirror. But from the moment the infant can comprehend the totality of its own figure in the mirror, the child acquires a coherent identity. Significantly for the present study of the anxiety of identification, Lacan’s theory points to the notion that before the mirror stage, infants live in a world of undifferentiation, a precultural stage to which adults fear returning should they lose their ego boundaries through excessive identification with the Other.54 The Hegelian notion that the self is defined in contrast to an Other has been central to later thought. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre discusses how mainstream Western culture ambivalently defines itself in contrast to Others such as the Jew. The concept of the necessity of the Other for the definition of the self remains important to poststructural thought; for example, Michel Foucault traces how medical and legal discourses construct a normative Western identity in opposition to those whom it labels criminal, insane, or sexually deviant.55 A parallel notion is applied to the colonial context by Edward Said who, in his 1978 Orientalism, introduces the discussion of how Western discourse has fashioned its hegemonic cultural identity by constructing myths of the Other, a fundamental concept for understanding the cultural processes of the colonial mentality. My theory of the anxiety of identification as it applies to the colonial situation is informed by Robert Young’s Colonial Desire, in which he develops the concept, originating in Frantz Fanon and elaborated by Homi Bhabha, of the colonial situation as an inherently ambiguous one involving simultaneous impulses of attraction and repulsion felt by the colonizing self toward the colonized Other. Before Bhabha and Young, not only Frantz Fanon but also Albert Memmi and Octave Mannoni had applied psychoanalytical concepts to the relationship between self and Other in the colonial context.56 The present study will employ these concepts in a discussion of how recent Latin American novels deconstruct what David Spurr calls “the rhetoric of empire” by pointing to the gaps and contradictions within colonialist discourse. Drawing on Sartre and Fanon, Foucault and Said, then adding a heavy dose of Freud, Bhabha discusses the colonial situation in terms of not only otherness but also the “Other within,” making it a question of “not Self and Other but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity.” In his essays, Bhabha examines how discourses are produced through multidirectional exchange, and refers to “the productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse—that ‘otherness’ which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity.”57 It is this productive ambivalence and articulation of fantasies of Latin American origins and identity that the present study will address. Both Homi Bhabha and Sander Gilman discuss how Western culture creates stereotypes of the Other as a protection against the loss of ego boundaries in the face of anxiety over the “Other within.” As Gilman observes in Inscribing the Other, in the

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest

process of individuation and separation, we internalize stereotypes of the Other that “serve as our buffer against those hidden fears which lie deep within us.” In both The Powers of Horror and Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva discusses the alien and the abject in terms of fantasies of incorporation and the fear of the Other within the self. David Spurr notes that this fear of the “Other within” was already present in Freudian thought in the concept of psychic internalization: “The Freudian model locates savagery within us and implies a continual psychic colonization and propitiation of the dark forces of the unconscious.” Concerns over loss of ego boundaries through the incorporation of the Other and fears of the “Other within” will be evident in the discussion of the anxiety of identification in the following chapters.58 In his essay on the noble savage as fetish in Tropics of Discourse, Hayden White discusses how the Other provokes both desire and anxiety precisely because otherness originates as a projection of the self’s desires and anxieties. Robert Young’s theory of colonial desire, in turn, centers around the anxieties caused by miscegenation, in that “the races and their intermixture circulate around an ambivalent axis of desire and aversion: a structure of attraction, where people and cultures intermix and merge, transforming themselves as a result, and a structure of repulsion, where the different elements remain distinct and are set against each other dialogically.”59 What I am calling the anxiety of identification is one moment in this process of attraction and repulsion: the moment when desire for the Other and desire to be the Other merge with anxiety over the maintenance of ego boundaries. In his article on testimonial literature, Antonio Vera León identifies the “deseo de ser el otro” (desire to be the Other) as the motivation for Latin American authors’ participation in the testimonial process; moreover, he points to the vacillation between the competing desires to define oneself in contrast to the marginal Other and to identify with that same Other as a constant in the testimonial genre, and in all Spanish American literature that deals with the issue of alterity or difference. Vera León cites Sarmiento’s Facundo as an early Spanish American example of this ideological ambivalence, but it can be taken back even further chronologically, because, as Rolena Adorno observes, the issue of identity and alterity is fundamental to Latin American literature from its origins in the colonial period.60 Indeed, most Latin American literature deals on some level with the question of alterity—be it a question of ethnic, religious, sexual, cultural, or socioeconomic difference—and represents the vacillation between the impulses of desire to identify with the marginal Other and desire to differentiate the self from that same Other. This is particularly the case of the historical narratives examined in the following chapters, in which the desire to be the Other leads to the anxiety of identification. A well-known literary example of the desire to be the Other and the resulting anxiety of identification can be found in the narrative of Franz Kafka. Like Aridjis’s fictional converso conquistador Juan Cabezón discussed in Chapter 5, Kafka struggled

Introduction

21

with his identification with his Jewish ancestry, personified for the Czech German writer in the figure of his father. His novella The Metamorphosis, in which protagonist Gregor Samsa is literally transformed into a gigantic insect, can be characterized as a metaphor for the anxiety of identification, because it manifests the fear of overidentification that results from an excessive desire to be the Other. The title of Kafka’s micronarrative “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” even more specifically addresses the question of colonial desire as articulated in the present study, because the fictionalized conquistadors examined in the following chapters will all demonstrate a certain degree of identification with the indigenous Other whom they are conquering. Referring to this struggle to define self and Other in the conquest, Hispanist José Piedra points toward the anxiety of identification: As we already know, cannibals and Amazons illustrate the difficulty of differentiating the notions of love and war in the New World—in other words, the love and war between Self and Other. The Self established toward both of these exceptional variants of Otherness what in psychological terms is known as a “hostile dependency.” Cannibals and Amazons are needed by the Spanish Self to complete as well as to compete with them. . . . The fear of undifferentiation would be a panicky state of affairs for most.61

It is this panic over the possibility of returning to a state of undifferentiation to which the term anxiety of identification refers. If we were to surrender our ego boundaries by overidentifying with an Other, we fear we might revert back to the existence that characterizes life before what Lacan calls the mirror stage, that is, to an earlier precultural stage in which the self is not distinct from the Other.62 Because the corpus of Latin American historical novels that rewrite the conquest and colonization of the Americas is so extensive, I have limited this analysis to recent historical novels dealing with the early period of conquest, narrated with a focus on fictional and fictionalized conquistadors and would-be conquistadors.63 These novels are narrated either in the first person or in the third person, with a concentrated focus on the character of a particular figure within the conquest. The conquistadors highlighted in the following chapters include Martínez’s Nuño de Guzmán, based on a historical figure, and Aridjis’s Gonzalo Dávila, an entirely fictional conquistador. Both are cruel to the point of sadism, yet frail and human at times. The would-be conquistadors include Aridjis’s completely fictional “reluctant conquistador” Juan Cabezón; the nameless cabin boy stranded with a cannibalistic tribe in Saer’s novel; and Posse’s fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca, whose efforts to be a conquistador are foiled when his expedition shipwrecks, leaving him as a slave and later a shaman in North America. Each of these situations subjects the European protagonist to the ambivalent dynamic of colonial desire, and the resulting anxiety of identification.

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest

Miscegenation and Transculturation in the New Novel of the Conquest The novels examined here all deal with the encounter between colonizing self and colonized Other in the European conquest of the Americas. Several of the conquistadors and would-be conquistadors represented in this corpus cohabitate with the Amerindians for an extended period of time, and all experience some degree of transculturation. The term transculturación, coined in 1940 by Fernando Ortiz in reaction to the sociological concept of acculturation, was elaborated in reference to literature by Ángel Rama, and was further developed in reference to travel writing by Mary Louise Pratt, in her Imperial Eyes. Concepts related to transculturation include Antonio Cornejo Polar’s theory of a conflictive heterogeneity, and Néstor García Canclini’s theory of hybrid cultures. These theories contest earlier notions of mestizaje as elaborated in texts such as José Vasconcelos’s 1925 La raza cósmica, which incorporates the indigenous peoples into the cosmic race but erases their language and customs from the proposed harmonious mestizo culture.64 Concepts such as transculturation, heterogeneity, and hybridity have also been used at times to suggest a harmonious whole, but the more recent theories developed by Pratt, Cornejo Polar, and García Canclini recognize the new cultural combinations produced through intercultural contact without disavowing the coercion that underlies these encounters. In Saer’s El entenado, Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante, and Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, the protagonists live as the only Europeans in the midst of indigenous tribes for extended periods, from a year to a decade, and experience varying degrees of transculturation. All of the conquistadors and would-be conquistadors in this corpus are also marginalized within European culture to some extent: the nameless narrator of Saer’s El entenado and Juan Cabezón of Aridjis’s two novels are orphans and pícaros;65 Juan Cabezón is also a second-generation converso, that is, a child of Jewish converts to Christianity; Posse’s fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca is an Old Christian who is marginalized due to his identification with crypto-Jews in Spain and due to his transculturation that is the result of prolonged cohabitation with various indigenous populations of North America; both Aridjis’s fictional Juan Cabezón and Posse’s fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca are also marginalized by virtue of their lack of conformity with the violence of conquest; and finally, Aridjis’s fictional conquistador Gonzalo Dávila and Martínez’s fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán are, like the historical Lope de Aguirre, alienated precisely because of their overidentification with the goals of conquest and the excessive cruelty and sadism they employ in the realization of these goals. The questions of marginality and miscegenation are central to novelists’ search for the origins of Latin American cultural identity in the representation of the historical moment of the conquest. The narratives that re-create the periods of conquest and colony address the statement cited above from Boullosa’s Llanto that it is impossible

Introduction

23

to understand the dual heritage of the cultures that emerge from the conquest, yet we must understand. As Ignacio Solares observes in his afterword to Nen, la inútil: [S]iempre sentí que nuestra condición de mexicanos implicaba sin remedio una como “otredad” no resuelta, algo que no queríamos ver, en el sentido que le dan a ese “ver” los psicoanalistas. Como aquel personaje de Rafael F. Muñoz, podríamos decir: “¡Yo soy puro mexicano! Nada tengo que ver con indios y españoles.” (I always felt that our condition as Mexicans implied something like an irremediable, unresolved “otherness,” something we didn’t want to see in the sense that psychoanalysts give to this “seeing.” Like that character invented by Rafael F. Muñoz, we could say, “I am pure Mexican! I have nothing to do with Indians and Spaniards.”)66

Solares’s comment echoes what Octavio Paz had written nearly half a century earlier: “El mexicano no quiere ser ni indio, ni español. Tampoco quiere descender de ellos. Los niega” (The Mexican does not want to be either an Indian or a Spaniard. Nor does he want to be descended from them. He denies them).67 Solares, even more explicitly than Paz, refers to twentieth-century Mexicans dealing with their dual cultural heritage in terms of the psychoanalytical concept of “denial”: Trampa del inconsciente—por volver a lo psicoanalítico—que podría referirnos a lo que Freud llamó “trauma del nacimiento,” y que por supuesto preferimos olvidar. Pero la verdad es que no lo olvidamos del todo y es el tipo de cosas que más vale trasladar a la conciencia para evitar una mala jugada. ¿Podemos conocernos los mexicanos sin mirar de frente el pasado trágico del cual surgimos? . . . Somos hijos de una tragedia y su negación no hace sino perpetuarla. (A trick of the subconscious—to return to the psychoanalytical—that could refer us to what Freud called birth trauma, and which we naturally want to forget. But the truth is that we don’t forget it altogether, and it is the kind of thing that is better to transfer to the conscious mind in order to avoid a bad scene. Can we Mexicans know ourselves without confronting face-to-face the tragic past from which we sprang? . . . We are children of a tragedy and its negation does nothing but perpetuate it.)68

Here, in order to avoid the damaging psychological effects of repression and denial, Solares suggests that Mexican authors directly address their concerns about the origins of their mestizo culture in the violence of conquest. In his own Nen, la inútil, however, Solares muddles the representation of the violence of the conquest by rewriting the conquistador Felipe’s rape of the Aztec woman Nen as an act of love and by portraying their encounters in dreamlike states and in the otherworld.69 The denial regarding Mexico’s mestizo origins that Solares describes in his afterword resembles Homi Bhabha’s description of colonial discourse as “an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences.”70

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest

Earlier twentieth-century Mexican thinkers had already observed what Solares notes in regard to this denial. In his 1950 essay on the sons of la Malinche, Octavio Paz had discussed the importance of Hernán Cortés and la Malinche in the Mexican imaginary in terms of “un conflicto secreto, que aún no hemos resuelto” (a secret conflict that we still have not resolved). Alfonso Reyes, in turn, had recorded a similar sentiment in his 1922 correspondence with fellow Mexican writer Antonio Mediz Bolio: “No hemos encontrado la cifra, la unidad de nuestra alma. Nos conformamos con sabernos hijos del conflicto entre dos razas” (We haven’t found the key to break the code, the unity of our soul. We are satisfied with knowing we are children of the conflict between two races). The novelists discussed in the following chapters are not satisfied with merely the knowledge that their culture is the product of a mestizaje born of violent conflict; rather, they seek to delve into this question by exploring their transcultural roots from different perspectives. In her novel Cielos de la tierra, Carmen Boullosa cites José Emilio Pacheco as pointing to the necessity for Mexico to resolve the unsettled questions of the sixteenth century before being able to fully enter the new millennium.71 Although they may not succeed in resolving what Paz, Solares, and Pacheco refer to as the unresolved otherness of their cultural identity, all of the novels examined in the present study explore the primal scene of transculturation by pointing to the colonial desire that colors the relationship between colonizer and colonized. This constitutes a historical and literary project that encompasses Latin American authors’ recognition of their dual cultural heritage and the violence that engendered it. This literary recognition in itself is a form of violence, a kind of symbolic parricide that repeats the wars of independence on a cultural level;72 in the words used by Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos in the prologue to his novel on Columbus: Podemos contar en lengua de hoy su historia adivinada . . . con amor-odio filial, con humor, con ironía, con el desenfado cimarrón del criollo cuyo estigma virtual son la huella del parricidio y del incesto, su idolatría del poder, su heredada vocación etnocida y colonial, su alma dúplice. (We can guess his story and tell it in today’s language . . . with filial love-hate, with humor, with irony, with the runaway ease of the criollo whose virtual stigma is the trace of parricide and incest, his idolatry of power, his inherited ethnocidal and colonial vocation, his duplicitous soul.)73

Because Latin American writers are the children of both colonizer and colonized, their efforts to rewrite the conquest are themselves products of a mestizo consciousness; as Roa Bastos says in his description of his own Columbus novel, “Éste es un relato de ficción impura, o mixta. . . . Su visión y cosmovisión son las de un mestizo de ‘dos mundos,’ de dos historias que se contradicen y se niegan” (This is a tale of impure or mixed fiction. . . . Its vision and cosmovision are those of a mestizo of “two

Introduction

25

worlds,” of two histories that contradict and negate one another). Reflecting this cultural mixing on the level of narrative, in his novel combining the fictionalization of sixteenth-century events with an examination of the process of writing about history, Brazilian Antônio Torres’s narrator describes himself as the “herdeiro do sangue e fábulas de uns e outros” (heir to the blood and tales of both one and the other); that is, Latin American writers inherit both the history and the fictions of Europeans and Amerindians.74 The question of the difficulty of sustaining a narration about the conquest from an exclusively indigenous perspective is broached by Mexican Marisol Martín del Campo in her novel Amor y conquista narrated from various first-person voices, including those of Hernán Cortés’s interpreter la Malinche; an Aztec noblewoman sent to spy on her; and this woman’s mestiza daughter, who begins the novel by asking: “¿Podré olvidar mi sangre española para hablar sólo de los vencidos con su voz, su lengua y su memoria?” (Can I forget my Spanish blood to speak only of the vanquished with their voice, their language and their memory?)75 This proves to be a formidable task, because although the novel begins by narrating from the perspective of this mestiza daughter, her voice is not sustained, but cedes to other first- and third-person voices; furthermore, whereas words in Nahuatl are used, the main language of the text clearly remains the Spanish of the conquerors. Thus, as in other parallel efforts such as Costa Rican José León Sánchez’s Tenochtitlán, the difficulty of sustaining an indigenous perspective is manifest in light of the overwhelming influence the conqueror’s language, culture, and history have exercised over five centuries. Most of the authors in this corpus recognize that they cannot deny their own inextricably European cultural roots; as Alfonso Reyes observes, Mexican criollos and mestizos have a strong desire to identify with the Mexican soil and the indigenous peoples who like them were born upon it. He realizes, nevertheless, “Pero los blancos de México somos, a pesar nuestro, colonos, mexicanos provisionales, europeos por ímpetu y dirección hereditaria” (But we whites of Mexico are, in spite of ourselves, colonizers, provisional Mexicans, European by impetus and hereditary direction).76 Although Latin American authors are from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, as Reyes acknowledges in reference to the Mexican context, they are trained in the cultural, linguistic, and literary traditions of the colonizer. One difficult task they undertake is to examine the origins of their difference without repeating the colonial gaze. As Deborah Root queries in a more general sense, “How can we learn to remember, and to think through issues of colonialism and power, without taking the position of the conquerors and without reproducing the mentalities that made conquest thinkable again and again?”77 The literary imagination is an apt instrument for problematizing these questions about Latin American identity; as Ignacio Solares observes in his afterword, “La literatura es el sitio ideal para saciar algunos de nuestros mejores deseos y resolver muchos de nuestros problemas” (Literature is the ideal place to satisfy some of our best

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest

desires and resolve many of our problems). Latin American authors write novels about the conquest because, as Colombian Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal notes in his meditation on the relationship between history and fiction, “la historia se escribe por parte de quienes triunfan, los que pierden escriben novelas” (history is written by those who win, those who lose write novels).78 As an epigraph to his novel Fantasmas aztecas, Gustavo Sainz quotes Oscar Wilde as saying that our ultimate responsibility in regard to history is to rewrite it. Augusto Roa Bastos, in turn, ends the prologue to his pseudoautobiography of Columbus by saying that an author of fiction writes the book he would like to read, and the ultimate result is a narrative about himself: “[E]se libro . . . casi siempre no oculta sino un trasfondo secreto de su propia vida” ([T]hat book . . . almost always conceals nothing but a secret background from his own life).79 This notion that novels set in the period of conquest can transcribe Latin American authors’ ambivalent feelings about their own mixed historical and cultural identities underlies the present analysis. The following chapters trace the trajectory from love to hate, from “loving cannibalism” to “converso self-hatred,” beginning with ambivalent attitudes toward emblems of Amerindian otherness and moving toward the question of marginality within European society. Chapters 1 and 2 examine how in Saer’s El entenado, Amerindian cannibalism inspires colonial desire, whereas in Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, it is indigenous idolatry and human sacrifice that attract and repel the fictional conquistador Gonzalo Dávila. In Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán, analyzed in Chapter 3, we will see a transition from a concern with the “Other without” to the “Other within,” as the fictionalized conquistador struggles between the desire to persecute both indigenous and European sodomites and the competing impulse to surrender to his own homoerotic desire. Chapter 4, in turn, explores how the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca in Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante expresses the ambivalence of colonial desire toward both the Amerindian Other and the converso, a “significant Other” within Spanish culture at the time of the conquest. And in Chapter 5, we will see the anxiety of identification turned back inward toward the self, as the protagonist Juan Cabezón in Aridjis’s 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo is a converso who feels ambivalence toward his own Judaic roots as well as toward the Amerindians. This subcorpus constitutes a new way for the empire to write back, as Latin American authors rewrite the moment of crisis that originated transculturation from the perspective of the conqueror but, through the representation of colonial desire and the anxiety of identification, make manifest the gaps in the rhetoric of conquest. Bracketing off the question of whether the subaltern can speak, the authors revisit the scene of the Old World–New World encounter in order to examine their own dual cultural heritage from the imagined perspective of the European invader. Although since the nineteenth century Latin American literature has featured literary indigenism and efforts to reconstruct the “visión del vencido” (vision of the vanquished),

Introduction

27

now, at the turn of the millennium and in particular in the years surrounding 1992, there has emerged a new effort to scrutinize the vision of the victor that had traditionally been privileged but rarely examined critically.80 Neither can these novels be said to represent the “visión del vencedor” per se, however, as they are Latin American literary re-creations that project what the perspective of the European conquistadors might have been, and they use this perspective to deconstruct the rhetoric of conquest, rather than to defend it. The novels in this corpus do not bash the conquistadors in an overt fashion. What all of the novels examined here do, however, is deconstruct the conquistadors’ perspective in order to point to the gaps and contradictions in the rhetoric of empire. Through colonial desire, in which the colonizers are portrayed as both attracted to and repulsed by the colonized Other, breaches in the colonial system are exposed. If cannibalism, sorcery, and sodomy, for example, both repel and attract the conquistadors, then they obliquely acknowledge that the Other is not so different after all. And if the conquistadors are drawn in by their identification with native rituals, then they have blurred the line that separates European self from Amerindian Other. The anxiety of identification enters the picture as a defense mechanism to protect their ego boundaries, but it is too late: in most cases, the fictionalized conquistadors have been transculturated through colonial desire, and cannot return to their former European identities.

1 Loving Cannibalism Cannibalism and Colonial Desire in Juan José Saer’s El entenado

Cannibalism is so good to think about that the intellectual appetite is not easily satisfied. —William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth

Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and in that way is annihilated as such. The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond. —Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology

annibalism can be considered the quintessential mark of otherness. One of Western civilization’s earliest historians, Herodotus, noted that “other” cultures practiced anthropophagy, the consumption of human flesh. Argentine author Juan José Saer’s 1983 novel, El entenado, translated as The Witness, begins with an epigraph from the Greek historian, “más allá están los Andrófagos, un pueblo aparte, y después viene el desierto total” (9) (Further inland there is a vast tract which is uninhabited. Above this desolate region dwell the Cannibals, who are a people apart [7]).1 Since Herodotus, and especially since the early European explorers and conquerors of the Americas, cannibalism has been designated as the supreme emblem of alterity. Scholars often note that documents written by travelers referring to cannibalism in other cultures tend to reveal more about Western attitudes than provide useful information about

C

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Loving Cannibalism

29

the culture described: “The study of cannibalism informs us as much about the acts and attitudes of ourselves as it does about those of other peoples.”2 Cannibalism sparks the Western imagination with fantasies of this ultimate sign of difference, such that it can be considered “a deep-rooted cultural obsession” and “a powerful cultural fantasy.”3 Some of the best-known authors of the English-speaking world have written short stories, novellas, and novels on the topics of ritual cannibalism and survival cannibalism: for example, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Herman Melville’s Typee (1846), Edgar Allan Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838), and Mark Twain’s “Cannibalism in the Cars” (1868). Recent decades have also seen the production of numerous films and plays on the subject, most of which fall into the category of dark comedies. The most popular of these include the Brazilian Como era gostoso o meu francês, released in English as How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971); The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974); the Broadway musical Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979); Eating Raoul (1982); The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989); Delicatessen (1991); The Silence of the Lambs (1991); Ravenous (1999); and Hannibal (2001). As Laurence Goldman observes in his article “Pot to Polemic,” cannibalism is “a quintessential symbol of alterity, an entrenched metaphor of cultural xenophobia.”4 Anthropophagy as the absolute emblem of alterity is underscored by Robinson Crusoe’s first reaction upon discovering the remains of a cannibal feast on the beach of the island on which he has been living in isolation for more than twenty years: to give God thanks for having been born “in a part of the world where I was distinguished from such dreadful creatures as these,” thus indicating how intimately his identity is linked to his sense of difference from those who consume human flesh. Difference necessarily translates into inferiority, as Robinson Crusoe’s first thoughts after recognizing this presence all involve designs for how to destroy the cannibals and enslave their projected victim. The cannibal serves, then, as the ultimate Other against whom one can define the self.5 One anthropologist, William Arens, has taken the argument that those who tell stories of cannibalism reveal more about their own culture than about their ostensible object so far as to claim that there exist virtually no reliable anthropological reports by firsthand witnesses of ritual consumption of human flesh. In his 1979 book, The Man-Eating Myth, he observes that Western scholarship consistently dismisses any claim of cannibalism among Europeans, yet readily confirms any report of cannibalistic behavior in non-Europeans, even without scientific evidence.6 Arens significantly points out that Europeans are not alone in claiming that other cultures participate in this primitive ritual, as some so-called primitives themselves deny claims of anthropophagy in their own groups yet assert that their Others—members of different tribes and, not surprisingly, women of their own or other tribes—are man-eaters. The universal phenomenon, Arens concludes, is not the reality of cannibalism, but rather the representation of Others as cannibals.

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest

In The Man-Eating Myth, Arens reminds us that the word cannibal itself comes from a rumor about the Other, when the Arawaks indicated to Columbus that the other inhabitants of the islands, the Caribs, were anthropophagi.7 He goes on to relate that when the Spanish royal proclamation of 1503 permitted cannibals to be enslaved, the term cannibal came to signify any resistance to conquest, such that it was applied indiscriminately to any group whom the Spaniards wished to enslave or conquer. Arens believes that anthropophagy and anthropology are interdependent concepts, as the social science of anthropology emerged alongside such disparaging depictions of the Other that were used for the purpose of domination. Hulme sums up Arens’s discourse by saying, “Anthropology is seen, in other words, as merely the institutional manifestation of a more widespread desire for the existence of some touchstone of the absolutely ‘other,’ frequently represented by cannibalism.”8 In recent decades, many scholars have linked the emergence of anthropology with the enterprise of imperialism. Pioneer work on this topic appears in Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism and in the 1973 collection of essays edited by Talal Asad with the title Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Said shows how Europe first invented the myth of the Orient and then used that myth to justify colonization. Both scholars note how anthropologists have often, sometimes unwittingly, contributed to maintaining the hierarchy of power of the colonial system. As Asad observes in his introduction: “It is not a matter of dispute that social anthropology emerged as a distinctive discipline at the beginning of the colonial era, that it became a flourishing academic profession towards its close, or that throughout this period its efforts were devoted to a description and analysis—carried out by Europeans, for a European audience—of non-European societies dominated by European power.” In addition to anthropology’s need for the Other, and need to describe the Other as cannibal, the study of other cultures itself can be seen as an anthropophagous pursuit. Ethnography is inherently parasitic: it feeds off the Other, depending traditionally on the cultural “inferiority” of this Other, and reinforcing its exoticism through writing. Hulme astutely observes that the purpose of Arens’s argument is not to deny the existence of cannibalism, but to interrogate this anthropophagous basis of anthropology as a discipline.9 Hulme identifies the representation of cannibalism as a defining feature of the discourse of colonialism, one that often serves as “a projection of European fantasies, a screen for colonial violence.” Deborah Root notes, “Historically, Europeans’ tendency to attribute cannibalism to people they sought to colonize (as well as internal ‘deviants’ such as Jews and witches, both of whom were subjected to blood libels) seems to have been a way of displacing and drawing attention away from the extent to which European elites were prepared to consume bodies.” As Maggie Kilgour observes, cannibalism is an apt metaphor for colonialism, since colonial discourse disguises its own desire to appropriate other cultures by project-

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ing that same cannibalistic impulse onto the Other. Hulme points out that contemporary studies need to encompass “the self-reflective analysis of imperialism as itself a form of cannibalism.”10 If anthropophagy has been the ultimate marker of difference since the time of Herodotus, it has also been a topic that has made us question our own ethnocentrism since at least the mid-sixteenth century. After his adventures among the Tupinamba of Brazil, Jean de Léry recorded his thoughts on indigenous cannibalism, which he did not find as appalling as the European cannibalism exhibited literally in massacres, sieges, and famines, as well as metaphorically in the exercise of power. These ideas are further developed and disseminated by Michel de Montaigne in his famous essay “Of Cannibals,” in which he expresses, “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead.” Having had the opportunity to meet indigenous Brazilians in France, Montaigne elaborates a critique of ethnocentrism: “[E]ach man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.” As the urtext of cultural relativism, four and a half centuries later, Montaigne’s essay continues to inform recent discussions of the association between cannibalism and colonialism.11 Arens is careful to say not that cannibalism never existed anywhere, but simply that there are no reliable firsthand anthropological accounts of it. To make a blanket denial regarding the actual existence of anthropophagy on a global basis would be tantamount to the same kind of imperialistic imposition of Western values that is precisely what Arens aims to combat.12 This kind of revisionist history would amount to a “whitewashing” of other cultures along the lines of Western value systems.13 However, in spite of his assertion that “the question of whether or not people eat each other is taken as interesting but moot. But if the idea that they do is commonly accepted without adequate documentation, then the reason for this state of affairs is an even more intriguing problem,” Arens’s argument has remained a controversial topic for decades.14 Many scholars accept Arens’s basic theoretical premise without accepting his extreme statement that there exist no reliable firsthand accounts of anthropophagy; these scholars use his skepticism as a point of departure for a discourse analysis that closely examines the motives behind Western rhetoric on cannibalism.15 H. L. Malchow, for instance, states that we should carefully examine the discourse of explorers and travelers, who have their own agendas: “[O]ne can readily acknowledge that the testimony of missionaries appealing for subscriptions, converts looking for praise, explorers exaggerating their courage, or imperialists rationalizing their own methods of barbarism is highly prejudiced and must be treated with extraordinary skepticism.” Malchow continues by saying that even if we doubt whether we can ever arrive at any “truth” regarding ritual cannibalism, we may appreciate that

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest the depth of the cannibal obsession can be made to tell us much about the white observer. Clearly, cannibalism as a racial image conveniently served to invert reality by encoding as appetite those whom the European sought to incorporate. But beyond this obvious reversal, or transference of guilt, there is more to be learned. Whether anthropophagy is pure fantasy or based on some version of actual practice, its rhetorical manipulation as an alien racial characteristic is a rich source of information about the social fears and cultural obsessions of Europeans.16

Accounts of anthropophagy, then, can serve to tell the reader more about Western fantasies and anxieties than about indigenous realities. As Marshall Sahlins observes, “The problem, of course, is that cannibalism is always ‘symbolic,’ even when it is ‘real.’ ” In light of this, there has developed a vein of postcolonial criticism that scrutinizes the discourse on cannibalism in order to investigate what such claims tell us about the Western imagination.17 Attitudes toward cannibalism form perhaps the best example of colonial desire, since a combined attraction and repulsion are always part of the equation whenever anthropophagy is addressed. Cannibalism has long held for Westerners a certain fascination of desire mixed with loathing; as Hans Askenasy observes, the mere mention of cannibalism has always evoked in Westerners “a reaction combining unspeakable horror, revulsion, and yet a strange fascination for most of us.” But as with other types of colonial desire, with cannibalism the anxiety of identification leads to the need to distinguish the self from the Other. Since premodern times, through the conquest of the Americas, and into the modern age, the term man-eater has been used to designate an Other distinct from the self: “[O]ur interest in cannibalism may be explained by the need for a scapegoat, or what can be called the ‘barbarian just beyond the gate’ syndrome.” As William Arens notes, anthropologists always seem to arrive at a location just after the practice of anthropophagy has disappeared, so cannibals are always “on the frontiers of our time and space . . . the latest outpost of Western expansion.” Following Arens, Askenasy summarizes, “It seems that it is always someone else who indulges in our flesh and blood, or someone else who has actually observed it.”18 It is not only Westerners who distinguish themselves from their Others through the use of the label cannibal; as mentioned above, so-called primitives also distinguish themselves from other groups with the claim that neighboring tribes consume human flesh whereas they do not. Anthropologists have learned to be skeptical of this namecalling; as Michael Pickering states: “Accounts of members of one group accusing members of another group as being cannibals may not reflect experiential reality. . . . The belief that outsiders are cannibals appears to be an unconscious but effective mechanism for maintaining self-identity, social superiority, and ‘humanness.’” In a literary example, Herman Melville in Typee represents the two young British sailors, captive among the Typee, as utterly uncertain whether to believe what they have heard about this group’s anthropophagy or to believe the Typee when they say that it

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is their neighbors, the Happars, who are the eaters of human flesh. As Peter Hulme remarks, “Cannibalism is—as practice of accusation—quite simply the mark of greatest imaginable cultural difference.”19 Western fascination with the anthropophagous Other is not always one of passive observation, but includes fantasies of participation. In his account of his late-nineteenthcentury travels in Polynesia, Alfred St. Johnston records his sentiments: This subject of cannibalism has a terrible sort of fascination for me, and . . . [the skipper’s] ghastly tales, told in a straightforward simple manner that is very convincing, yet—queer is it not?—I have enjoyed them thoroughly. . . . I have no wish to appear singular when I say that I should have gloried in the rush and struggle of old Fijian times—with my hand against everybody, and everybody against me—and the fierce madness of unchecked passion and rage with which they went to battle, and the clubbing of my foes, and—I am sure I should have enjoyed the eating of them afterwards.20

Because it provokes such a strong sense of repulsion, for a Westerner to participate in a cannibal feast would be the limit case of “going native.” The reaction of Westerners toward the cannibalistic Other, then, is not simply one of fascination, but one of colonial desire, a simultaneous attraction and repulsion. W. Cooke Taylor recounts the following thirdhand anecdote of shipboard famine: A friend, whose name I am not at liberty to mention, has favoured me with notes of a conversation with a man, who, under pressure of famine at sea, had eaten a part of one of his companions. He declared, that the feeling of disgust disappeared at the second or third meal, and did not return during the five days that the crew were reduced to this horrid fare. He added, that after the lapse of many years, he never thought upon the subject without finding desire strangely mixed with loathing; and finally, that it was this instinctive feeling which rendered him most reluctant to allude to the subject.21

This ambivalence that Peter Hulme describes as “[d]isgust, but also desire; loathing, but also fascination,” will characterize most of the literature on cannibalism, as transcribed by Westerners.22 Although most Western travelers refrain from expressing a desire to participate in cannibalistic acts, a select few do entertain and act upon a desire to witness one. Nineteenth-century sailor William Endicott, for example, claims in his Wrecked among Cannibals in the Fijis that one afternoon in 1831, he got permission from his captain to go on shore because he had a “strong desire to see the manner in which they prepared and ate human flesh.” Although Endicott may have fabricated this yarn recounting details of a cannibal feast, the publication of his journal clearly demonstrates the reading public’s desire to consume such tales. In an acknowledgedly fictional example, Melville’s Typee, the narrator never does witness cannibalism, which causes him to react in the following manner: “I must confess that I experienced something like a sense of regret at having my hideous anticipations thus disappointed.”

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He later admits to feeling “a kind of morbid curiosity” to discover the remnants of a cannibal feast.23 The dynamic of colonial desire is most powerfully exemplified in the nuances of the adventures of Capt. James Cook in the Pacific in the late eighteenth century. The following passage narrates Cook’s fervent wish to become an eyewitness to cannibalism off the coast of New Zealand: [A] peice of the flesh had been broiled and eat by one of the Natives in the presince of most of the officers. The sight of the head and the relation of the circumstances just mentioned struck me with horor and filled my mind with indignation against these Canibals, but when I considered that any resentment I could shew would avail, but little and being desireous of being an eye wittness to a fact which many people had their doubts about, I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter deck where one of these Canibals eat it with a seemingly good relish before the whole ships Company.24

It is significant that, although he is not a participant in the cannibalism, neither is Cook merely an observer here, because it is actually he who instigates this act of anthropophagy. Thus we see a European’s curiosity about this ritual being taken to the furthest extent: though not consuming human flesh himself, he provokes others to do so. In the Pacific, Cook came into contact with some cultures to whom ritual cannibalism was attributed, as well as with many who appeared to have no knowledge of the practice. Among the latter, the extreme curiosity that Western explorers expressed about anthropophagy often led the natives to assume that Europeans practiced cannibalism. Indeed, when Hawaiians showed British sailors a piece of Captain Cook’s charred body, and Lt. James King asked if they had eaten him, the Hawaiians “immediately shewed [sic] as much horror at the idea, as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom amongst us?” Whereas the British interpreted the Hawaiian mortuary burning as a sign of anthropophagy, the Hawaiians likewise interpreted the Europeans’ insistent questions as a sign of intimate familiarity with the practice. The connection between cannibalism and colonialism here is apparent in the Hawaiian belief that “the British came from a country where food supplies had run out, which explained their huge and avid consumption of the island’s produce. Such beliefs could, temporarily at least, aggravate the Hawaiian fear of cannibal strangers coming from the land of ‘Brittannee.’ ”25 Whereas Westerners attribute anthropophagy to other cultures, then, European imperialism has also been conflated with cannibalism in the eyes of some colonized cultures. Anthropologists themselves have been mistaken for cannibals on occasion. Along these lines, Sri Lankan–born Gananath Obeyesekere relates the following anecdote: “[W]hen I was in the field [he does not specify where] in 1958 some children had tantrums when I approached them, sprawling on the floor and crying un-

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controllably. I soon realized that I was being used as a bogey man by mothers to scare their children into obedience.” A similar experience is related by William Wormsley in his book tellingly titled The White Man Will Eat You! Referring to his field research in New Guinea, Wormsley says, “My most intriguing role, if the least personally rewarding, was that of legendary, semimythological creature. It turned out that my mere glance, or even a distant reference to me, was sufficient to frighten children [into obedience].”26 The interconnection of cannibalism and colonialism is apparent in the above examples, because, significantly, these stories of cannibalistic monsters occur within a context of colonialism. Obeyesekere observes that around the time the Hawaiians were wondering about cannibals from “Brittannee,” the Hawaiians had just been the victims of a British massacre in which “wrathful sailors brandished before the terrified people two decapitated Hawaiian heads that they stuck on the deck of the Resolution.” If the situation were reversed, the brandishing of the heads would no doubt have led the British to the same conclusion, because, as Peter Hulme notes, human remains are often taken by Europeans as incontrovertible evidence of a cannibalistic feast.27 Likewise, Wormsley associates the believability of his status as a cannibalistic monster with the colonial context with which the New Guinean children are familiar, as they have seen or heard of members of their tribe being imprisoned or hanged by the colonizers. It is this context that lends credibility to the parents’ admonition, “Be quiet, or the White Man will eat you!”28 There are even cases reported where imperialism itself presumably led to the spread of cannibalism among groups that had not known of the practice prior to hearing of it through the increased travel and communication channels opened by colonialism. In reference to the Pacific, Eli Sagan claims, “When Captain Cook visited Tonga, the practice of cannibalism was unknown, but subsequently the Tongans learned it from the Fijians.” Regarding the Congo Basin, in 1897, Sidney Langford Hinde makes a similar claim: “Races who until lately do not seem to have been cannibals, though situated in a country surrounded by cannibal races, have, from increased intercourse with their neighbours, learned to eat human flesh.” Whether imperialism literally contributed to the spread of the practice or not, it can certainly be said that on the level of discourse, colonialism led to increased rumors of cannibalism, because, as Obeyesekere points out, “cannibalism became a ‘weapon of the weak’ to keep European intruders away from native homes and habitations. Native cannibal talk tapped in deadly fashion the European dread of being eaten by savages.”29 In all these examples, as in the above epigraph from Arens, cannibalism is revealed as something good to think about, as well as something good to write about.30 A literary example of the desire to break this deeply engrained cultural taboo can be found in Mark Twain’s short story “Cannibalism in the Cars,” in which the detailed story of survival cannibalism related by a passenger who had been stranded on a train during a snowstorm turns out to be pure fantasy. Fantasies of cannibalism reveal lit-

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tle about the Other, and more about fears of the dark side of the self, the “Other within.” As Maggie Kilgour elaborates, the act of consumption violates our ego boundaries, as we incorporate the outside world into our own body. Because it involves eating an Other who is most like the self, literally a question of “you are what you eat,” cannibalism serves as the ultimate metaphor of the desire for, and fear of, identification.31 Fascination with alterity, then, leads to the anxiety of identification, the fear of losing the self in the Other. As Robert K. Martin notes in his study of Melville’s Typee, “The danger of being eaten by cannibals is the danger of losing one’s body and soul. . . . Knowing the terror, and yet almost attracted by it, the young men extend their journey to . . . the heart of otherness, the heart of the forbidden and appealing island.”32 Regarding captivity narratives, Richard Slotkin notes that in the North American context, the Puritan fears of miscegenation and cannibalism can both be traced to a fear of merging with the Other: The Puritans’ terror of both Indian marriage and cannibalism derived from their fear of allowing themselves to adjust to and merge with the environment of the New World. . . . In cannibalism, the image of merging is heightened and intensified, is carried to a spiritual plane through its use in ritual; beginning with the acquiring of special powers by consuming parts of the slain (heart, hand), it culminates in the total absorption of the eater and the eaten in each other, a total sharing of identities.33

It is this fear of merging with the Other that I call the anxiety of identification. Faced with the anxiety of identification, the need to maintain one’s own ego boundaries kicks in: “Calling others cannibals [is] a time-honoured political strategy for raising oneself up and putting others down. . . . More generally, imputing others of cannibalism is a spectacularly effective way of exaggerating the cultural gap between Them and Us.”34 Thus, anthropophagy is the quintessential mark of otherness, dating back to the earliest recorded histories, and encompassing not only Western concepts of the colonized Other, but also “primitive” cultures’ notions about one another, as well as non-European ideas about white travelers and ethnographers. In the following analysis we will see how, although he is predisposed to confront otherness in his marginal background as an orphan, pícaro, and cabin boy, the unnamed narrator of Saer’s El entenado nevertheless reacts to Amerindian anthropophagy with a mixture of terror and fascination. Juan José Saer’s Narrator as a Pícaro and Sodomized Cabin Boy The nameless narrator of Juan José Saer’s El entenado is a highly fictionalized version of Francisco del Puerto, the cabin boy who was the lone survivor of Juan Díaz de Solís’s 1516 expedition of the Río de la Plata, then known as the Mar Dulce, and who did not leave a written record of his experiences. The novel’s reference to the Mar Dulce, the tribe name Colastiné, and the narrator’s comment that some twenty

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years have passed since the discovery that the Indies could be reached by sailing West are the only clues that help situate El entenado chronologically and geographically, in light of the notable lack of names and dates.35 Because it is what Amy Fass Emery calls the “apocryphal memoirs” of the cabin boy, the narrator can be assumed to be largely fictional. The narrator of Saer’s El entenado, like the narrators of many of the other Latin American novels that rewrite the conquest, is marginalized within the colonizing culture. This marginality within European society prepares the protagonist for the experience that most strongly challenges his ability to maintain his ethnic and ego boundaries: his lengthy cohabitation with anthropophagous Amerindians, out of contact with his own language and culture. Although there is no indication he is not an Old Christian, like the converso narrators of Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León’s Maluco and Aridjis’s 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, Saer’s protagonist is poor and something of a pícaro, and, like them, he seizes the opportunity to serve as a grumete, or cabin boy, on a ship en route to the New World.36 The narrator of El entenado begins as a human wharf rat, drawn mainly by poverty to the noise of the ports and ultimately to the adventure of the high sea: La orfandad me empujó a los puertos. El olor del mar y del cáñamo humedecido, las velas lentas y rígidas que se alejan y se aproximan, las conversaciones de viejos marineros, perfume múltiple de especias y amontonamiento de mercaderías, prostitutas, alcohol y capitanes, sonido y movimiento: todo eso me acunó, fue mi casa, me dio una educación y me ayudó a crecer, ocupando el lugar, hasta donde llega mi memoria, de un padre y una madre. (11–12) (It was being left an orphan that drove me to the ports. The smell of the sea and damp rope, the slow, stiff sails of ships arriving and departing, the conversations of old sailors, the varied perfumes of spices, the piled-up merchandise, the prostitutes, the alcohol and the ships’ captains, the noise and the bustle. All of that, as far back as I can remember, took the place of a father and mother for me: it lulled me to sleep, it was home, it gave me both shelter and education.) (9)

His picaresque character is formed in this port environment, as he serves prostitutes and sailors in petty offices much as the pícaro of the Hispanic literary tradition serves a series of masters: Mandadero de putas y marinos, changador, . . . fui dejando atrás, poco a poco, mi infancia, hasta que un día una de las putas pagó mis servicios con un acoplamiento gratuito—el primero, en mi caso—y un marino, de vuelta de un mandado, premió mi diligencia con un trago de alcohol, y de ese modo me hice, como se dice, hombre. (12) (I used to do odd jobs and run errands for whores and sailors. . . . Gradually I left my childhood behind me: then one day a whore rewarded my services with my first experience of sex, and a sailor, who I had run an errand for, repaid my diligence with a swig of hard liquor. In this way, as they say, I became a man.) (9)

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The narrator’s career as a landlubbing pícaro does not last beyond the first pages of the novel; almost immediately he informs us that “Ya los puertos no me bastaban: me vino hambre de alta mar” (12) (By that time the ports no longer sufficed: I hungered for the open sea [9]). He makes the plan to embark as a grumete, caring only about setting sail for new worlds, the unknown, the Other: Entusiasmado por estas convicciones—que eran también consecuencia de la miseria— me puse en campaña para embarcarme como grumete, sin preocuparme demasiado por el destino exacto que elegiría: lo importante era alejarme del lugar en donde estaba, hacia un punto cualquiera, hecho de intensidad y delicia, del horizonte circular. (12) (These beliefs—they were also, of course, a consequence of my poverty—fired me with enthusiasm and I set about finding a place as a cabin boy. Where the ship was going was of little importance, what mattered was to get far away from the place I was in, to go towards another point on the curved horizon, some place of fierce delights.) (10)

He elects as his destination the newly discovered Indies: En estos tiempos, como desde hacía unos veinte años se había descubierto que se podía llegar a ellas por el poniente, la moda eran las Indias; de allá volvían los barcos cargados de especias o maltrechos y andrajosos, después de haber derivado por mares desconocidos. (12) (Twenty years or so earlier it had been discovered that the Indies could be reached by sailing west and so they had become the fashionable destination. Ships returned from there loaded down with spices, bruised and battered, after drifting over unknown seas.) (10)

As the above demonstrates, for this future cabin boy, the desire for the unknown is greater than the fear of the potential dangers offered by the sea. Along with the unknown as an abstract concept, the desire to become acquainted with other peoples and things attracts the narrator: En boca de los marinos todo se mezclaba; los chinos, los indios, un nuevo mundo, las piedras preciosas, las especias, el oro, la codicia y la fábula. Se hablaba de ciudades pavimentadas de oro, del paraíso sobre la tierra, de monstruos marinos que surgían súbitos del agua y que los marineros confundían con islas, hasta tal punto que desembarcaban sobre su lomo. (12) (When the sailors talked they mixed everything up: the Chinese, the Indians, the New World, precious stones, spices, gold, greed and myth. They spoke of cities paved with gold, of paradise on earth, of sea monsters that rose suddenly out of the water; sailors, mistaking these monsters’ backs for islands, would land on them.) (10)

What all these things have in common for the European youth is that they are different, Other.

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His youthful enthusiasm, combined with his colonial desire for the unknown, leads the narrator to believe he is invulnerable in the face of this precarious projected voyage: Yo escuchaba esos rumores con asombro y palpitaciones; creyéndome, como todas las criaturas, destinado a toda gloria y al abrigo de toda catástrofe, a cada nueva relación que escuchaba, ya fuese dichosa o terrorífica, mis ganas de embarcarme se hacían cada vez más grandes. (13) (Since I, like all children, believed that I was destined for glory and somehow immune from disaster, my desire to set sail grew stronger with each new tale I heard, whether wonderful or terrifying.) (10)

In contrast to the other novels discussed in the chapters that follow, which deal either with fictionalized versions of historical explorers and conquerors such as Cabeza de Vaca and Nuño de Guzmán, or with fictional characters who embark on historical expeditions such as those of Columbus or Hernán Cortés, in El entenado both the narrator and his captain remain nameless in order to heighten the fictionalized aspect of the narrative: “Por fin la ocasión se presentó: un capitán, piloto mayor del reino, organizaba una expedición a las Malucas, y conseguí que me conchabaran en ella” (13) (At last my chance came. A captain, one of the most experienced navigators in the kingdom, was organizing an expedition to the Molucca Islands and I managed to secure a place on it [10]).37 On the transatlantic journey, the pícaro’s experiences continue to underscore his marginality, as he soon finds out that the cabin boy’s duties include sexually servicing the sailors: En esa situación tan extraña le esperan, al grumete, adversidades suplementarias. La ausencia de mujeres hace resaltar, poco a poco, la ambigüedad de sus formas juveniles, producto de su virilidad incompleta. Eso en que los marinos, honestos padres de familia, piensan con repugnancia en los puertos, va pareciéndoles, durante la travesía, cada vez más natural. (15) (In this strange situation further vicissitudes await the cabin boy. The complete absence of women has the effect of emphasizing the ambivalence of his still adolescent features. As the voyage progresses, things which in port would seem repugnant to the sailors [decent family men every one of them] come to be seen as quite natural.) (13)

In the above, we see the ambivalence of a desire that under “normal” circumstances seems repugnant, but in the all-male environment of the ship is acceptable. In Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, B. R. Burg notes that shipboard sodomy was commonplace throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “Sexual encounters involving sailors are a part of maritime lore, and fo’c’s’le humor abounds with stories of below deck encounters in which salty bosuns initiate tender cabin boys into the

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arcana of the sea.” Although he attempts to make a case for the notion that males with homosexual preferences may have been attracted to the life of the sea, even Burg admits that some shipboard sodomy can be attributed to “situational homosexual behavior.” This concept of “situational homosexuality” can be traced to the latenineteenth-century sexologists who were the first to develop theories of same-sex desire. Indeed, the term heterosexual was not defined until after the term homosexual had been coined in the 1860s and popularized in the 1880s.38 As Michel Foucault was the first to observe, in the early modern age sodomy was considered a vice to which any man might succumb, while it was not until the late nineteenth century that the individual identity of homosexuality came to be defined. The late-nineteenth-century sexologists developed a series of classificatory schemata, inventing categories that were later taken up by Freud. Richard von KrafftEbing, for example, distinguishes between inborn, acquired, and situational homosexuality; he refers to this latter category as faute de mieux homosexuality, which, he says, due to the lack of preferable sexual options would appear in single-sex environments such as schools, prisons, and ships, but would not be sustained when the individual left that environment, provided that the individual was not born with or had not learned homosexual tendencies. In his book on Herman Melville, Robert K. Martin discusses the use of the sociological term homosocial to describe these same-sex environments: “Thus prisons may be said to be homosocial institutions, but prisoners remain heterosexual or homosexual, according to their principal sexual orientation, regardless of the sexual activity they may engage in while in a homosocial environment.”39 One of the most curious elements of the description of shipboard sodomy in El entenado is the ironic use of the language of courtly love: Es de hacer notar también que la delicadeza no era la cualidad principal de esos marinos. Más de una vez, su única declaración de amor consistía en ponerme un cuchillo en la garganta. . . . Dos o tres veces estuve a punto de quejarme al Capitán, pero las amenazas decididas de mis pretendientes me disuadieron. (15; emphasis mine) (It has to be said, too, that delicacy was not a strong point amongst the sailors. More often than not their idea of a declaration of love was a knife held to the throat. . . . More than once I was on the point of complaining to the captain but my suitors’ earnest threats dissuaded me.) (13; emphasis mine)

The option the young cabin boy chooses is to take advantage of the situation: Finalmente, opté por la anuencia y por la intriga, buscando la protección de los más fuertes y tratando de sacar partido de la situación. El trato con las mujeres del puerto me fue al fin y al cabo de utilidad. Con intuición de criatura me había dado cuenta, observándolas, que venderse no era para ellas otra cosa que un modo de sobrevivir, y que en su forma de actuar el honor era eclipsado por la estrategia. (15)

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(At last I opted for sly consent, seeking out the protection of the strongest amongst them to turn the situation to my advantage. My dealings with the women of the port proved in the end useful. By watching them I had realized with a child’s intuition that selling themselves was just a means of survival and that in their way of life honour came a poor second to strategy.) (13)

Since the late-nineteenth-century sexological writings of Krafft-Ebing, prostitution has been considered one of the cases where homosexual activity does not indicate a homosexual preference, as males who prostitute themselves due to necessity would not necessarily choose same-sex relations under other circumstances. Havelock Ellis, a sexologist writing at the turn of the century and familiar with the early writings of Freud, finds that if we can say all humans are bisexual, the distinction between “true” versus “spurious” homosexuals is not very useful. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud maintains the distinction between different categories of individuals who engage in homosexual activity; although he is critical of these designations, he does continue to reserve a category for “contingent” homosexuality. Sociological research on Latin American sexual practices finds, consistent with the early sexologists, that males who prostitute themselves for reasons of pure necessity generally do not consider themselves homosexual.40 This would appear to be the case of the protagonist of El entenado, who at first accepts his role in sexual relations with no thought to his own desire: “Las cuestiones de gusto personal eran también superfluas. El vicio fundamental de los seres humanos es el de querer contra viento y marea seguir vivos” (15) (Questions of personal taste were also superfluous. The fundamental vice of all human beings is the desire to stay alive [13]). By labeling his presumably passive sodomy as a matter of survival and by bracketing off the question of personal taste, the narrator creates distance between himself and a homosexual identity. He is assumed to be the receptive, rather than insertive, partner, because in the hierarchical environment aboard a ship, older and stronger sailors would assert their dominance by penetrating cabin boys. As in ancient Greece and classical Rome, where this type of hierarchical sexuality predominated, the younger partner is the one who is penetrated, and he is expected to extract no pleasure from his sexual passivity.41 Although the anxiety of identification leads him to resist defining himself as a sodomite, the narrator ultimately admits his own desire to be penetrated: [P]asé, por lo tanto, de mano en mano y debo decir que, gracias a mi ambigüedad de imberbe, en ciertas ocasiones el comercio con esos marinos—que tenían algo de padre también, para el huérfano que yo era,—me deparó algún placer. (15–16) ([S]o I let myself be passed from hand to hand, and I must confess that now and then, in my role as beardless and still ambivalent adolescent, I derived some pleasure from my dealings with the sailors, who, to an orphan like myself, had something of the father about them.) (14)

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In classical cultures such as Greece and Rome where intermale sexual relations helped establish and maintain a patriarchal hierarchy, a male could not accept penetration without at least partially relinquishing the prerogatives of masculinity; although a youth’s seduction implied only a temporary submission, for an adult man to declare a preference for the receptive role was to metaphorically renounce the position of power granted him on the basis of his gender. Even a youth had to fear the label of effeminate should he admit that yielding gave him pleasure, because the object of the older man’s affection in this type of hierarchical relationship is expected to derive no sexual gratification from being penetrated. As Leo Bersani succinctly states, “To be penetrated is to abdicate power.”42 Thus, by admitting the pleasure he derives from being penetrated by the strong sailors, the narrator of El entenado approaches the alterity of labeling himself a sodomite, a significant “Other within” European society; yet, by insisting on his ambiguous quality as a “beardless adolescent,” he does not have to commit to this label, as his youth buys him the time to defer his commitment to a sexual identity. The desire to be the Other and the concomitant anxiety of identification, then, function in this case in terms of the cabin boy’s attraction and repulsion toward a selfdefinition as homosexual outsider. It is precisely this shipboard experience of marginality and simultaneous resistance to a self-identification as marginal that colors his later ambivalent experience of otherness: his encounter with the cannibalistic Amerindians among whom he lives for ten years. Loathing and Loving Cannibalism in El entenado As mentioned above, the experience that most transforms the narrator of El entenado is his lengthy cohabitation with an Amerindian culture. His adventures as an orphan and pícaro in a port city, and later as a sodomized cabin boy on the sea voyage, only partially prepare him for his prolonged encounter with the indigenous Other. Due to these experiences, the concept of cultural relativity is not altogether unfamiliar to him. The notion that other cultures and subcultures exist will serve him well during his stay among the Amerindians. An early indication of the narrator’s resistance to ethnocentrism can be found in a reference to the stars: “Yo le había oído decir a un oficial que cada una de ellas era un mundo habitado, como el nuestro; que la tierra era redonda y que flotaba también en el espacio, como una estrella” (17) (I had heard an officer say that each star was a world, inhabited like our own, and that our earth was round and floated in space just like a star [16]). Apart from making the narrator recognize the insignificance of humanity, this awareness of the concept of relativity also contributes to his ability to comprehend other human cultures. Upon disembarking on American soil, the Europeans in the novel have the impression that they are taking possession of an empty land. At first sight, they do not

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perceive any inhabitants: “Si esas eran las Indias, como se decía, ningún indio, aparentemente, las habitaba; nadie que supiese de sí, como nosotros” (22) (If these were the Indies as was claimed, there was no evidence of any Indian inhabitants, no self-aware beings like ourselves [20]). The captain brandishes his sword and claims the territory, but the narrator notes that the New World does not acknowledge this possession, as it records no sign of recognizing that it has been appropriated. Although the would-be colonizers consider themselves founders in a world they are discovering and populating with their presence, the narrator realizes when the crew returns to their vessel that there is no indication that they left any mark on the land. He recognizes that the self-importance they have conceded themselves as founders and discoverers of an empty land is just an illusion, and that the land existed before their arrival and would continue to exist after their departure, without a trace of the Europeans’ fleeting presence. The narrator’s sensation that they are not alone in this virgin land is confirmed when an arrow shoots through the jungle and mortally wounds the captain. When his captain and all of his shipmates are killed in this ambush, the narrator remains stranded in the New World in the midst of a tribe—whose name we will later learn is the Colastiné—that has an annual ritual of cannibalism but throughout the rest of the year lives an almost puritanical existence. During the anthropophagous orgy, all restraints on behavior are discarded; apart from this ritual, however, the Colastiné observe moderation in all aspects of their comportment. This has the effect of setting cannibalism apart as a ritual, much as Bakhtin describes carnival: as a temporary inversion of hierarchies. Recounting his story sixty years after this ambush, having long since returned to the Old World, the narrator is fulfilling his duty as an entenado.43 This word is the narrator’s translation of the indigenous term Def-ghi that the Amerindians apply to him and that has various meanings, among them a witness to retain the memory of the customs and rituals of the Colastiné and repeat their story so that their existence will not be forgotten. Although he will later learn to valorize their culture, the narrator’s first reaction is to distance himself from the Amerindians who have just killed all of his companions. He initially describes them as a “horde” of naked, dark-skinned men and their cries of Def-ghi as “sounds” rather than words. They are Others to him, and in stereotypical fashion, he describes the Amerindians as homogeneous: “[E]staban todos desnudos y se parecían entre sí” (29) ([T]hey were all naked and looked rather alike to me [28]). Although the narrator is calmed by the deferential treatment the Amerindians concede him, he nevertheless continues to refer to them as “savages” and to remark on their otherness, continually referring to the fact that they are naked and darkskinned.44 Their dark skin itself is a sign both of their difference and of their human sameness; his confessor years later sums up what the narrator himself had been unaware of at the time:

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest que yo había vivido durante diez años, sin darme cuenta, en la vecindad del paraíso, que en la carne de esos hombres había todavía vestigios del barro del primero, que esos hombres eran sin duda la descendencia putativa de Adán. (33) (that I had lived close to paradise for ten years and had never known it; that the flesh of these men still bore traces of the mud out of which the first man was formed; and that they were without a doubt the unacknowledged offspring of Adam.) (33)

This vacillation between identification with the Amerindians and the employment of Eurocentric rhetoric to refer to them is characteristic of the attraction-repulsion of colonial desire. The dynamic of colonial desire will become most apparent, however, when the narrator of El entenado witnesses the yearly orgy of cannibalism in which the entire community participates. The narrator soon becomes attached to the Colastiné, to the extent that after just one day in their presence, the memory of his shipboard companions begins to fade and his former life appears to him as merely a dream. When he first arrives in the village where he will spend ten years, an old woman points to him and mimes the act of eating, but after a tribesman designates the newly arrived outsider as Def-ghi, the old woman ceases her gestures and smiles in greeting. The reader can easily infer that through her gestures the woman has implied that the newcomer is going to be made into a meal, and that the response “Def-ghi” explains that he is meant for another role in the community. This is the novel’s first, albeit indirect, reference to cannibalism. Alone and afraid, separated from his culture and language, the fifteen-year-old cabin boy is reborn with the new identity of Def-ghi–entenado, which he has yet to understand. The exceptional hospitality of the Colastiné, however, makes him feel more at ease. When they approach him to converse, he compares it to the small talk in which he used to engage on deck with his shipmates; thus, in spite of the language difference, he sees the Amerindians in terms of similarity as much as difference. But the mark of their fundamental difference is soon exposed, when they begin to prepare grills on which to roast the flesh of his captain and shipmates. The narrator describes in a matter-of-fact tone the skill with which the tribesmen decapitate and gut the naked cadavers of his companions using bone knives, stopping their work only momentarily to greet him warmly. It is only when one of them makes a joke about the expression on the narrator’s face that he comes to a full realization of what is going on, and he responds by running away. When he returns, he is calmed by both the conviction that the same fate does not await him and the fact that the butchered flesh no longer resembles his shipmates. The next 20 or so pages of this 150-page novel are devoted to the description of this cannibal feast. Scholars identify various “motives” for cultures to participate in cannibalism. One motive that can appear in any given culture is famine: food shortages due to drought, war, and the like have led to the eating of human flesh in many different times and

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places. Disaster or accidents involving prolonged isolation for a group of people without any other food source can lead to rare, but highly publicized, cases of survival cannibalism, such as the 1847 stranding of Donner Pass survivors, the 1972 Andean plane crash of a group of Uruguayan soccer players, and any number of shipwrecks or ships afloat without provisions in which the dead or dying are eaten or lots are drawn to sacrifice one member.45 None of the above types constitutes willful cannibalism, as in these situations the consumption of human flesh is a last resort in a time of crisis. Of more interest here is voluntary cannibalism, which can be culturally sanctioned or not, and can correspond to a variety of motives. Culturally sanctioned cannibalism would usually be ritual cannibalism, which in different locales anthropologists (sometimes arbitrarily) attribute to dietetic, religious, magical, or pietistic reasons or to a simple preference for the taste of human flesh. The line between religion and magic in particular is a judgment call on the part of the anthropologists, who traditionally have dubbed native beliefs “superstition,” whereas similar beliefs in Europe are considered religion. Cannibalism can serve various purposes: to please the gods, to mete out justice, to seek revenge, or to prevent the dead from returning to seek revenge. There is also the filial piety of mortuary cannibalism, in which parents who die from natural causes are eaten, the intent being that they may rest in peace and that their positive qualities will be transmitted to the next generation. Isolated cases of voluntary cannibalism are also found as anomalies in cultures that do not sanction the practice, Jeffrey Dahmer being one of the most famous examples. Garry Hogg reserves as a separate category of ritual cannibalism what he attributes to “sheer lust for flesh,” what others call gustatory or gastronomical anthropophagy. A review of the anthropological literature reveals that this faute de mieux category seems to be reserved for cases about which scholars are at a loss for a better explanation due to inconclusive field research, in the sense that ritual practices once deemed gustatory are often recategorized as ethnographers learn more about them.46 The attribution of mere gastronomic significance to a cannibalistic practice underscores its difference from Western culture, whereas attempting to understand some underlying ritual meaning highlights similarity with Western societies, as they can find analogies in their own cultural and religious practices.47 Anthropologists such as Peggy Sanday generally agree that a single motivation fails to account for cannibalism, and rather a combination of different factors is generally present where anthropophagy is practiced. In his essay in The Anthropology of Cannibalism, Thomas Ernst critiques the common assumption that cannibalism must necessarily be the central and defining cultural characteristic of any culture that practices it to any extent. Laurence Goldman notes that due to the sensationalism attached to the practice, it is usually represented as “larger than life.”48 As a significant segment of Saer’s El entenado is devoted to the description of an orgiastic cannibalistic feast, the novel can be said to both problematize and fall prey to this kind of centralization and sensationalization of cannibalism.49

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Another distinction anthropologists make is between endophagy and exophagy, that is, the eating of individuals from one’s own tribe or from other tribes, respectively.50 The various categories of anthropophagy can be divided into endocannibalism and exocannibalism, as cultures that practice anthropophagy are not indiscriminate in this matter, and generally specify not only whom may be eaten, but also who may eat whom, as well as which parts of the body must or must not be eaten and how they must be cooked. We might even take this argument so far as to say that all cultures apparently do have cannibalism taboos, not in the sense that they all prohibit it absolutely, but in the sense that those who do have cannibalistic customs have strict rules regarding its practice.51 The reason is obviously self-preservation, as the inherent danger of cannibalism is that it would necessarily lead to the extinction of any group that practices it without restraint; thus, where anthropophagy is said to be customary, it never appears to be indiscriminate, but rather is always surrounded by rituals that limit and control its exercise.52 What I am calling “loving cannibalism” can refer either to the affection expressed through filial piety cannibalism or to the admiration that can inspire revenge cannibalism, since in both cases, the Other is incorporated into the self because of some kind of positive feeling toward that Other. Thus, loving cannibalism can be endophagous, as in parental mortuary cannibalism, or exophagous, in the sense that to eat an enemy warrior, while demonstrating hatred and a desire to dominate, is also a sign of admiration, implying a desire to absorb that warrior’s strength. Regarding endophagous “loving” cannibalism, Garry Hogg cites examples of anthropophagi who claim to eat the flesh of tribe members “out of affection,” “because we knew him and were fond of him,” or because “it was better to be inside a warm friend than buried in the cold earth.”53 The term loving cannibalism here refers to anthropophagy due to an entire spectrum of motives, from filial piety to killing and eating an admired enemy, from Jeffrey Dahmer–type confusion of love with murder to what Hogg calls pure and simple lust for human flesh. Of concern in relation to Juan José Saer’s El entenado is specifically the type of “loving cannibalism” that involves the eating of warriors from enemy tribes. The respect and admiration with which captive warriors are regarded can take the form of incorporating the victim into the community for a period of time—sometimes as a substitute for a slain member of the tribe—and then killing and consuming him. This was the practice of the Tupinamba of Brazil, documented in the mid-sixteenth century by German Hans Staden and Frenchman Jean de Léry and dramatized in Brazilian Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s 1971 film translated as How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman. Among the Tupinamba, prisoners of war would be honored guests, be given wives in the host tribe, and live among them for an indeterminate amount of time before being verbally and physically insulted, killed, and eaten. Thus, the eventual victim is both “insulted as a foe” and “cossetted as a foster child,” and there develops a necessarily ambivalent “sentimental kinship between captor and captive.”54

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In this type of ritual in which the victim is adopted into the tribe yet still remains the enemy, the line between exo- and endocannibalism is irremediably blurred. Although his personal destiny ultimately is not to be sacrificed, it is precisely this kind of role as adopted outsider that the narrator in Saer’s El entenado is placed when stranded as the only living European among a South American tribe. Anthropologists and missionaries who record their experiences occasionally perceive the cannibals in terms of cultural similarities with Europeans, thus seeing them as not entirely different.55 But in spite of perceived cultural similarities, the need to maintain one’s own cultural boundaries generally prevents complete identification with the anthropophagous Other.56 Love and hate are present in the attractionrepulsion felt by the Westerners toward cultures presumed to practice cannibalism, and also in ethnographers’ descriptions of how cannibals themselves perceive their activity; whether it is attributed as stemming from loyalty or enmity, anthropologists tend to ascribe to the anthropophagous act a certain ambivalence on the part of native participants.57 Eli Sagan’s psychoanalytical approach to the subject generalizes on the inherent ambivalence that cannibalism represents in all cultures, those who do not practice it as well as those who do. Anthropologist Fitz John Porter Poole says of cannibalism in general, “In different contexts it may be seen as an inhuman, ghoulish nightmare or as a sacred, moral duty. But always it is encompassed by the order of ritual and the tenor of ambivalence.”58 Whether or not anthropophagous cultures all necessarily regard the act with ambivalence, it is certainly a fact that the Western imagination regards cannibalism with the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of colonial desire. In El entenado, it is not clear what precisely are the motives for the cannibal orgy; whether religiosity or revenge is the dominating factor, it is clear that it does constitute some variant on loving cannibalism, which runs the gamut from killing an enemy to absorb his strength to sheer lust for flesh. It is equally clear that in Saer’s novel, the fictional natives demonstrate ambivalence toward their own devouring of human flesh. As described above, when the narrator first sees his shipmates’ corpses being dismembered, he runs away; when he returns, he is greeted by the same loving treatment as before: “Algunos se acercaban para tocarme con la suavidad acostumbrada, otros se paraban al verme llegar, y gesticulando con entusiasmo, proferían . . . el sempiterno Def-ghi, Def-ghi” (40) (Some approached and touched me with their usual gentleness, others stopped when they saw me coming and, gesturing enthusiastically, uttered . . . the eternal Def-ghi, Def-ghi [40]). The love they feel toward their chosen one is paralleled by their lust for the flesh of his companions, which is waiting to be cooked: Del caserío, a medida que la hoguera iba creciendo, llegaban rápidos, hombres, mujeres, niños, y se ponían a contemplar las llamas. Algunos miraban, con deleite evidente, la carne apilada. Jóvenes y viejos, hombres y mujeres, hasta las criaturas . . . partici-

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Their anticipation is not prolonged, as the flesh is soon placed on the grills. The entenado notices that whereas the trunks and legs have been cut up to facilitate cooking, the arms have been left whole. What he at first thought to be dirt from the bodies having been dragged about carelessly turns out to be carefully applied seasoning: the narrator is surprised to find this level of epicurean evolution and loving attention in what appears to be a primitive act. In his description of the roasting of the flesh, the narrator indirectly suggests a few possible motives for this culture’s cannibalism. First, from the context it is clear that it is culturally sanctioned. In addition, in the first sentence of the passage cited below, he refers to the ceremony with which the flesh is arranged on the grills, implying that it is ritual cannibalism. But the fact that it is ritual cannibalism in itself does not explain the motive, which is clearly not religious because the narrator later remarks that in ten years he never saw the Colastiné practice any form of worship. In the second sentence below, the narrator vaguely implies a “protein deficiency” argument when he says that it was as if the village depended on these spoils of war.59 Ultimately, the narrator gives us few clues for understanding the underlying motive for this cannibalism, as he most often attributes it simply to “desire”: La disposición de la carne en las parrillas, realizada con lentitud ceremoniosa, acrecentó la afluencia y el interés de los indios. Era como si la aldea entera dependiese de esos despojos sangrientos. Y la semisonrisa ausente de los que contemplaban, fascinados, el trabajo de los asadores, tenía la fijeza característica del deseo que debe, por razones externas, postergar su realización. (42; emphasis mine) (The placing of the meat on the grills, which was carried out with ceremonial slowness, attracted even larger numbers of Indians and fired their curiosity still more. It was as if the entire village hung upon those bloodied remains. And the dreamy half-smile on the faces of those who watched in fascination as the cooks worked had the fixity characteristic of any desire whose gratification, for reasons beyond its control, must be deferred.) (42; emphasis mine)

The cannibalism of El entenado, then, would seem to be an unspecified form of what we are calling “loving cannibalism.” The desire of loving cannibalism depends on an identification between eater and eaten. Before placing it on the grills, the cooks demonstrate their identification with

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the flesh to be cooked by testing the temperature of the fire with their own hands, thus recognizing the sameness of their human flesh and that of their victims. Like this description of the cooks, the description of the attitude of the onlookers reveals an identification with the victims and the fire that roasts them: “no ardían, esos indios, en presencia de la carne, de un fuego menos intenso que el de la pira que se elevaba junto a las parrillas” (42) (In the presence of the meat, those Indians burned no less fiercely than the pyre built beside the grills [42]). The onlookers burn like the fire, and are being cooked from within by the flame of desire: “[L]a muchedumbre a la que algo intenso y sin nombre consumía por dentro como el fuego a la leña” (43) ([T]he crowd consumed from within, just as surely as the flames consumed the wood [43]). The identification between devourer and devoured is, then, nearly complete. The desire for the meat becomes absolute and absorbing: a mother pushes away her own clamoring child without for one second diverting her fixed gaze from the grill; the villagers even abandon their customary deference toward the chosen outsider who narrates the scene. In this loving cannibalism, which is essentially a ritual of incorporation, desire for the Other merges with self-desire: the tribe members lovingly gaze upon the sizzling flesh “con esa concentración obstinada del deseo que . . . se vuelca sobre el objeto para abandonarse más fácilmente a la adoración de sí mismo” (43) (with the stubborn concentration that typifies desire, which . . . lavishes attention on the loved object simply so as to abandon itself more completely to selfworship [43]). Here, we see desire in its purest form, to the extent that the object of desire is less important than desire itself. The question inevitably arises as to whether the newcomer will partake in the feast.60 In the anthropological literature on cannibalism, whenever an outsider describes his presence at a cannibal feast, the principal fears that arise are whether he will himself be killed, cooked, and eaten, and, that fear allayed with the passage of time, whether he will be forced to participate in a ritual that is taboo in his culture.61 By this time in the narration, any fears the narrator of El entenado may have initially had regarding being eaten have dissipated; he is also not forced to eat the corpses of his former companions. However, he experiences a strange desire to taste the flesh, a desire that is partially mitigated by the fact that, as the cut flesh had earlier ceased to resemble the individuals from whence it originated, now the cooked meat has ceased to resemble anything remotely human: El origen humano de esa carne desaparecía, gradual, a medida que la cocción avanzaba. . . . [L]os pies y las manos, encogidos por la acción del fuego, apenas si tenían un parentesco remoto con las extremidades humanas. En las parrillas, para un observador imparcial, estaban asándose los restos carnosos de un animal desconocido. (45) (As the cooking proceeded, the human origins of the meat became less apparent. . . . [T]he feet and hands, shrunk by the flames, now bore little resemblance to human extremities. An impartial observer would simply have thought they were the remains of some unknown animal.) (45)

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He alternately attributes this desire to hunger for protein or to his longing, as an orphan and outsider, to belong to the group: [T]al vez a causa del olor agradable que subía de las parrillas o de mi hambre acumulada desde la víspera en que los indios no me habían dado más que alimento vegetal durante el viaje, o de esa fiesta que se aproximaba y de la que yo, el eterno 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. (45) ([F]or a few minutes I felt an overwhelming desire, to which I did not succumb, to know the taste of that unknown animal. Perhaps it was because of the pleasant smell, or because of my accumulated hunger from the night before when the Indians had given me nothing but a little fruit to eat during the journey, or because of those approaching festivities which I, the eternal outsider, did not want to be left out of.) (45)

In spite of the other possible explanations proffered in the above passage, unadulterated gustatory desire dominates, as the first reason he has listed is simply the appetizing aroma emanating from the flesh. This desire is stronger than any instinctive aversion to anthropophagy: [M]irando fijo, como ellos, la carne que se asaba, demoré unos minutos en darme cuenta de que por más que me empecinaba en tragar saliva, algo más fuerte que la repugnancia y el miedo se obstinaba, casi contra mi voluntad, a que ante el espectáculo que estaba contemplando . . . se me hiciera agua a la boca. (45–46) ([M]y gaze, like theirs, fixed on the roasting meat . . . it took me a few minutes to recognize that almost against my will, however hard I tried to swallow my saliva, something else, something stronger than repugnance or fear, persisted in making my mouth water.) (46)

The anxiety of identification confirms the entenado’s cultural distance from the cannibals as he wanders among those waiting to eat, maintaining his identity as observer and not participant. Although the narrator, who does not ultimately participate in the cannibalism, insists that his desire is stronger than his aversion, even the natives who partake in the feast experience ambivalence in relation to the consumption of human flesh. The loving gaze with which men, women, and children silently contemplate the roasting flesh is described in a series of similar expressions: “su mirada fija” (42) (their fixed gaze); “la misma expresión contenida y maravillada, un poco ausente” (44) (the same rather dreamy expression of contained wonderment [44]); “contemplaban, hechizados” (44) (seemingly bewitched people lost in contemplation [44]); “contemplando con su semisonrisa ausente la carne que iba dorándose” (gazing abstractedly, half smiling, at the meat turning golden-brown [44]); and “absortos estaban en su contemplación amorosa” (45) (rapt in their adoring contemplation [46]).62 Even after receiving his

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portion, the first diner continues to be bewitched: “el pedazo de carne . . . al que contemplaba, en hechizo amoroso” (47) (the piece of meat . . . He was staring at it in rapt concentration [47]). When they begin to devour their human repast, however, an ambivalent attitude toward the anthropophagous act emerges. Like the narrator’s identification with the cannibal Other, here the loving identification with the victim leads to anxiety, manifested as nervousness, guilt, fear, and repulsion. Immediately after the cooks announce that dinner is served, the onlookers become anxious and nervous, pushing one another and furiously scratching themselves until they bleed. Anxiety prevents the first man served from satisfying his desire, which he prolongs, initially by continuing to stare at the piece of flesh, and then by attacking it so voraciously as to spoil any potential enjoyment: [C]ada bocado, en lugar de apaciguarlo, parecía aumentar su apetito. . . . Se hubiese dicho que había en él como un exceso de apetito que no únicamente crecía a medida que iba comiendo, sino que además, por su misma abundancia, hecha de gestos incontrolables y repetidos, anulaba o empobrecía el placer que hubiese podido extraer de su presa. (47– 48) ([E]very bite taken, far from gratifying his appetite, seemed to increase it. . . . It was as if there were in him an excess of appetite which grew as he ate. Worse, the sheer strength of his appetite, expressed in his uncontrollable, repeated gestures, cancelled out or diminished any pleasure he might have gained from his prize.) (48)

Still present is the identification with the victim, to the extent that the man appears to be devouring his own flesh: “Parecía más él la víctima que su pedazo de carne” (48) (He seemed more of a victim than the piece of meat itself [48]). Because his identification is with a dead man, the ability to feel anxiety becomes the distinctive characteristic that separates him from his Other: “En él persistía una ansiedad que ya estaba ausente en su presa” (48) (There was a residual anxiety in him from which the meat was now free [48]). Anxiety leads to ambivalence toward anthropophagy, as the narrator notes in all the diners the same dissatisfaction as in the first man: “En todos esos indios podía verse el mismo frenesí por devorar que parecía impedirles el goce, como si la culpa, tomando la apariencia del deseo, hubiese sido en ellos contemporánea del pecado” (48) (Their very frenzy to devour the meat seemed to prevent any of the Indians from enjoying it, as if for them, guilt, disguised as desire, were the concomitant of sin [49]). A number of conflicting emotions surface: “A medida que comían, la jovialidad de la mañana iba dándole paso a un silencio pensativo, a la melancolía, a la hosquedad” (48) (As they ate, the gaiety of the morning began to give way to a thoughtful silence, to a morose melancholy [49]). Whereas previously they had their gaze fixed on the roasting flesh, now that they each have a piece, their desire becomes more disperse and they stare absently into space. The narrator attributes to them ambivalent sentiments: “como si el origen de esa carne . . . los sumiese en la vergüenza, en el resque-

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mor y en el miedo” (49) (Or perhaps the origin of the meat . . . aroused in them feelings of shame, resentment and fear [49]). Their ambivalence ultimately is described in terms of simultaneous attraction and repulsion toward the anthropophagous act: “En algunas caras se percibía la atracción y la repulsión, no repulsión por la carne propiamente dicha, sino más bien por el acto de comerla” (49) (Some faces showed both fascination and repugnance, repugnance not for the meat but rather for the act of eating it [49]). Yet, desire remains the dominant sensibility: “Pero no bien terminaban un pedazo, se ponían a chupar los huesos con deleite, y cuando ya no había más que sacarle, se iban a toda velocidad a buscar otra porción” (49) (However, no sooner had they finished one piece than they began sucking with relish on the bones and when there was no more meat to be had they would scuttle off in search of more [49 – 50]). But it is a desire fraught with ambivalence: “El gusto que sentían por la carne era evidente, pero el hecho de comerla parecía llenarlos de duda y confusión” (49) (They clearly enjoyed the meat, but the act of eating it seemed to fill them with doubt and confusion [50]). It is only during the drunken orgy that follows that they are able to forget their “ansiedad vergonzosa” (53) (shameful anxiety [53]). Colonial desire and the anxiety of identification are not limited to the colonizers’ ambivalent response to the colonized. Here it is important to remember that we are dealing with a text by an Argentine author writing from the perspective of a European cabin boy stranded in the midst of an anthropophagous tribe. Within this fiction, the entenado is supposed to have lived with the Colastiné for ten years, and presumably learned to read some of their emotions. Nevertheless, the idea that the narrator may be projecting his own ambivalence toward the practice of eating human flesh is certainly possible as well. Like the missionaries and early anthropologists, Saer’s narrator may be looking for ambivalence toward anthropophagy as a sign of similarity between Western and “primitive” cultures. The entenado maintains his distance from the cannibals by not partaking in the feast and remaining an observer, wandering among groups of eaters. His detachment is evident in his description of the first man to receive a piece of flesh: “Había algo cómico en la manera en que sostenía el pedazo de carne que sin duda debía estar quemándole las manos” (47) (There was something comical about the way he was holding the piece of meat, which must have been burning his fingers [47]). The narrator confirms his cultural difference both by abstaining and by describing the cannibals as animals: “[C]ada uno se iba por su lado con su pedazo de carne como las bestias que, apropiándose de una presa, se esconden para devorarla de miedo de ser despojadas por la manada” (49) (Each Indian scurried off alone with a piece of meat; they were just like beasts who, having seized their prey, go off on their own in order to eat in secret for fear that some other animal from the pack will snatch it from them [49]). An entirely different attitude dominates a subgroup of tribesmen who are tranquilly grilling some fish in another area; the entenado at first identifies with this sub-

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group that seems more similar to his own culture, but he later understands that they are the warriors who killed his companions and cut up their flesh for the feast and thus, like the cooks who roasted it, must abstain from the anthropophagy.63 This subgroup solicitously, even lovingly, offers fish to the Def-ghi, who has also not partaken of the feast. Their calm, austere demeanor contrasts sharply with the main group, whose loving cannibalism has turned to hatred: as two men argue violently, the rest look on with complete indifference. The Colastiné remain in a daze or trance during a siesta and the ensuing orgy. After a period of somnolence and lethargy, they begin to stir and are served an alcoholic beverage. The nakedness that had earlier seemed innocent to the narrator now appears to him to be paraded about in an overtly sensual fashion that he admits makes him uncomfortable. Lacking all restraint, the Colastiné go on to participate in all manner of sexual activity with members of the opposite sex, the same sex, and with themselves, penetrating every human orifice, with no regard even for the incest taboo.64 The participants in the orgy are in a dreamlike state, detached from all that goes on around them. As the orgy winds to an end, gender roles are inverted: men act like women, women like men. The participants all become ill: “Era como si el arco del deseo, después de lanzar sus flechas, hubiese reculado golpeándolos en plena cara y dejándolos aturdidos y dolientes” (64) (It was as if, having loosed its arrows, the bow of desire had recoiled in their bruised, stunned faces [66]). The anxiety of identification leads the narrator to attempt to establish his cultural distance from the anthropophagi; witnessing an orgy participant who is clearly in pain and is attempting to vomit, he says, “Traté de odiarlo, pero no lo conseguí” (62) (I tried to hate him but I could not [64]). Thus, the attraction-repulsion dynamic of colonial desire does not permit the narrator to either identify completely with the cannibals or completely reject identification with them as fellow humans. This orgy, it turns out, contrasts sharply with what the narrator later learns is the normal comportment of the tribe, in which restraint is the order of the day. Like Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, the orgy is only a temporary inversion of regular life. Because his first days with this tribe were spent in this orgy of cannibalism, drunkenness, and unbridled sexuality, the entenado is surprised to learn that moderation in all things characterizes the daily life of the Colastiné.65 Soon after the cannibal feast, the excesses of the previous days are erased from memory, and a newly rediscovered innocence prevails. The narrator admits that what at first impression appeared to him to be worse than ferocious animals are really the most chaste and sober beings with whom he has ever come into contact. Their prudence is hyperbolic in his eyes: “su higiene, manía” (their cleanliness a mania); “[e]sa urbanidad exagerada” ([t]his exaggerated urbanity); “Eran de un pudor sorprendente” (They were extraordinarily modest); and “[E]l cuidado por la limpieza era excesivo, casi irritante” (all 67) (All of them were excessively, almost irritatingly careful about cleanliness [all 69]). Although they are naked, they never relieve themselves in public, they bury their excrement, they bathe several times a day, and, in contrast to the days of orgy, they never demonstrate any

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overt sexuality in their public nakedness. The sexes have little contact with one another, adults never touch one another, and they are laconic in their communication. They are solicitous, easily offended, hardworking, and austere, performing their duties without laughter or pleasure. The effect of this description of the stoicism of their daily lives makes the Amerindians appear in some sense more civilized than Europeans. This cultural similarity would seem to be a point of contact between the two cultures, yet the narrator repeatedly insists that their abstinence is excessive: Sin darse cuenta, exageraban el pudor, horrorizados sin duda alguna, y confusamente, como los animales, de presentir aquello de que eran capaces. En los meses del año en los que la penuria los obligaba a enfrentar lo exterior, el olvido era total y se volvían austeros y fraternales, menos tal vez a causa de sentimientos nobles que por presentir que, para sus fiestas carnales, la robustez y la integridad de la tribu eran necesarias. (83; emphasis mine) (Their exaggerated prudishness doubtless came from an unconscious, confused animal fear of one day glimpsing the horrors they might be capable of. During the months when hardship forced them to confront the outside world they forgot everything and reverted to their old austere, fraternal selves, motivated less perhaps by any noble thoughts than by an unacknowledged realization that the strength and unity of the tribe were vital to the celebration of their carnal rites.) (86 – 87; emphasis mine)

In the above, the narrator not only attributes their ostensible austerity and civility to actual barbarity and bestiality, but also claims that the Colastiné are unaware of this connection. Here the very sign of their cultural similarity is also the sign of their ultimate difference. The Ambivalent Position of the Witness of Cannibalism After nearly a year has passed in this fashion and the narrator has experienced a harsh New World winter, the Colastiné begin to become short-tempered and agitated, and at one point the entenado notices an old woman contemplating a skull with ardor and fascination. The warriors begin to prepare for battle, and the community takes out mementos of the European and Amerindian victims from the feasts of previous years—helmets, coins, necklaces, stones, bones, and skulls—fighting among themselves for the privilege of briefly handling them: Todo el mundo quería echarles una mirada, tocarlas, manosearlas. En menos de un año, habían adquirido el aire sobado y definitivo de las reliquias. Por el privilegio de su contacto fugaz, más de una vez hubo disputas, e incluso sangre. (76) (Everyone wanted to look at them, to touch and handle them. In less than a year they had acquired the shabby, definitive look of relics. For the privilege of a brief contact with them fights would break out and blood was spilled.) (79)

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The Colastiné are attracted to these sacred objects, which nevertheless cause anxiety: “Nadie, sin embargo, las guardaba mucho tiempo entre sus manos, como si además de la atracción desmesurada que ejercían, esos objetos sudaran también veneno” (76) (Yet no one held the objects in their hands for long. As well as the immense attraction those objects held for the Indians, it seemed as if they also exuded some deadly poison [79]).66 The level of agitation and excitement is high as the warriors depart in search of victims for the next anthropophagous feast, and during their absence the tribespeople become impatient. When the warriors return, even the outsider who narrates the story experiences a certain anticipation, in the sense that the imminent feast is something familiar to him after the tedium of winter: “Lo que avecinaba tenía para mí un gusto conocido” (77) (There was a familiar flavour about what was coming [81]). His identification with the native ritual he has experienced once before is such that the narrator half expects to see himself in the approaching canoes; instead, he sees a young man from a neighboring tribe, the new Def-ghi, alive alongside several cadavers. This arrival and the prospect of the impending feast again cause a gamut of reactions among the Colastiné. The anticipation of this new feast is characterized by “la acumulación del deseo” (79) (the burgeoning desire [82]); as the meat is cooking, they are again “absortos en la contemplación de las parrillas o perdidos en sus sueños carnales” (80) (absorbed in their contemplation of the meat or lost in carnal dreams [83]); and the realization of the ritual is described in terms of “el placer contradictorio del banquete” (79) (the contradictory pleasures of the feast [82–83]). As in the previous year, this cannibal orgy appears to the narrator as a manifestation of anxious and ambivalent desire. The presence of the new Def-ghi causes restlessness among the villagers: the narrator observes “la ansiedad que su presencia parecía infundirles, llenos de incertidumbre y confusión” (79) (the anxiety, uncertainty and confusion that his presence seemed to arouse in them [82]). The anxiety of identification is especially apparent in the performance that constitutes the interaction between the Colastiné and their new Def-ghi, in which the villagers playfully attempt to provoke the newcomer, who remains stoic rather than reacting to their taunts.67 The narrator now understands that this is the behavior that had been expected of him a year earlier, the purpose of the performance apparently being that the villagers should make the maximum fuss over the Def-ghi while he should take minimal notice of their efforts, thus confirming his privileged status among them. The narrator refers to him as a prisoner and then immediately negates his own use of the term by explaining that it is inaccurate. Although the true purpose of the Def-ghi is not explained until much later in the text, this scene points to the fact that it is a privileged position in this culture, and has a great deal to do with rituals of identification between self and Other. The encounter between the two surviving Def-ghi is one in which anxiety over the preservation of ego boundaries is manifest. The narrator at first expects that his re-

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lationship with the newcomer will be one of identification, as both share the same role in the community, albeit one that the Amerindian understands better than the European. As noted above, the narrator identifies with the ritual he had witnessed a year earlier to the extent that when the new Def-ghi first arrives, he rather expects to see himself in the approaching canoes but sees instead another like himself, a survivor about his same age. Because of the similarity of the newcomer’s position to his own one year earlier, the narrator describes him as being “Como mi propia sombra” (79) (Like my shadow [83]). But the narrator’s expectations that identification will prevail between the two are foiled, as the newcomer, being more of a cultural insider than the narrator, is the one who establishes the parameters of their relationship: Cuando lo vi llegar, sobreviviente, en situación idéntica a la mía, pensé que el horizonte desconocido me mandaba un aliado, pero un vistazo rápido le había bastado para reconocerme en medio de la tribu y desde ese momento había sido para mí pura evasiva y hostilidad. (80) (When I saw him arrive, another survivor in exactly the same situation as myself, I thought the far horizon had at last sent me an ally, but, from the moment he spotted me amongst the tribe, he was never less than evasive or hostile.) (84)

It is hatred, then, rather than love, that will characterize the relationship between these two would-be peers: “Era evidente que mi presencia, en cambio, lo fastidiaba. Las miradas desdeñosas que me lanzaba . . . se espesaban de odio. Más de una vez lo sorprendí observándome con disimulo, como quien estudia a un enemigo” (80) (What was clear, however, was that my presence irritated him. The contemptuous looks he gave me . . . were thick with hatred. I often caught him watching me furtively, like someone studying the enemy [84]). Through his enmity, the newcomer attempts to negate the narrator’s very existence: “Evitaba, en general, mi mirada, del mismo modo que mirarme directamente, ignorándome para establecer, en este mundo en el que yo parecía contrariarlo, por decisión mágica, mi inexistencia” (80) (He tended to avoid my gaze as if by not looking at me directly and ignoring me he could magically establish my non-existence in this world where my very presence seemed to thwart him [84]). Here, it is apparent that the newcomer defines his own identity through contrast and negation in relation to his Other, the previous year’s Def-ghi. The indigenous Def-ghi’s understanding of his proper role in the community is the primary element that distinguishes him from the narrator. Whereas a year earlier the narrator had reacted with fear and amazement to the clamoring attention paid him as the Def-ghi, the newcomer, being familiar with the local culture, responds to this treatment with a calculated indifference or with overt disdain. The newcomer’s knowledge separates him from the previous year’s Def-ghi: “Él sabía. Estaba al tanto, no únicamente de su propio papel . . . sino también del mío, dándome la impresión más bien desagradable de ser, al mismo tiempo, englobado y rechazado por él”

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(80) (He understood. He knew the score not only as regards his own role . . . but also as regards mine; I had the rather disagreeable sense of being both included and rejected by him [84]). Thus, this relationship between cultural insider and complete outsider is characterized by an ambivalence similar to that of the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of colonial desire. Here, the typical power relations of European colonizer and indigenous colonized are bracketed off, as both individuals in question are survivors of cannibal raids who find themselves in an ambivalent position as both prisoner and privileged among the Colastiné. Indeed, within this duo, the Amerindian has the advantage due to his superior knowledge of the local culture; thus, in this sense the colonizer-colonized roles are inverted. Over the weeks following the orgy, the villagers besiege the newcomer with petitions and offer him gifts that he accepts without scruples, while he gains even more control over them by appearing to ignore their entreaties: “[S]u actitud altanera y desdeñosa mostraba que este asedio no lo molestaba sino que le confería, por causas misteriosas, un poder desconocido” (80) (He showed by his haughty, disdainful manner that the siege did not bother him in the least; instead, for reasons I could not fathom, it conferred on him some unknown power [83 – 84]). The new Def-ghi ultimately escapes from the village, but not without first giving the narrator some indication of what his role entails; sixty years later as he writes his tale, the entenado admits that he is not entirely certain what was expected of him, even though the attempt to decipher this secret has been his singular lifelong preoccupation. Whatever the exact role of the Def-ghi, it is clear that it has much to do with the ambivalent relationship between self and Other among the indigenous tribes. The temporary incorporation of this outsider into the tribe, the deference with which he is treated, and the gifts with which he is regaled might lead one to believe that he is being prepared as next year’s victim, which would correspond with the Aztec practice of treating select victims as gods during a year before their sacrifice, or the Tupinamba practice of giving a future victim a wife and hut and treating him well for a time before slaying and eating him, as related by Hans Staden and Jean de Léry in the sixteenth century. But this is not the case in this fictional example, because in order to fulfill their destinies as entenados, or witnesses, the Def-ghi must survive and preserve the memory of the Colastiné. It appears that the villagers’ concerted efforts to attract the attention of the visitor are attempts to inscribe themselves in his memory so that he will retain part of them, as a parallel to the manner in which they in turn have ingested portions of his fellow warriors. For ten years, the narrator witnesses the same annual ritual in which enemies are devoured in a cannibalistic frenzy of which no mention is made and no trace of desire remains during the intervening months. After this decade-long cohabitation with the Colastiné, the narrator, who had been only fifteen when he arrived in their midst, becomes accustomed to the annual orgy, and identification with them seems to win out over rejection of their rite: “Yo crecí con ellos, y puedo decir que, con los años, al horror y a la repugnancia que me in-

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spiraron al principio los fue reemplazando la compasión” (83–84) (I grew up amongst them and my initial feelings of horror and repugnance were slowly replaced by compassion [88]). He still retains his identity as an outsider, however, by remaining apart from the anthropophagous aspect of their culture: Supieron, eso sí, dejarme al margen de sus fiestas desmedidas. Las últimas veces, para no verlos, me iba solo, durante tres o cuatro días, campo afuera, no por repugnancia sino más bien por pesadumbre, para no ver caer, en los mismos pantanos de años anteriores, a muchos que a menudo me habían mostrado consideración y bondad, despertando en mí algún afecto. (85) ([T]hey had the sense to leave me out of their gross festivities. On the last few occasions I avoided these by going off alone into the countryside for three or four days, not because I found the festivities so repugnant but because it grieved me to see people who had often shown me consideration and kindness and for whom I felt some affection falling into the same blackness.) (89)

Here the murky blackness he refers to is presumably not a moral judgment on their cannibalism as sinful, but a comment on how they lose themselves in the orgy as a result of which some end up permanently impaired. Like the relics of previous victims, the charred human flesh is a sacred object, the touch of which can harm them: “Bastaba verlos en posesión del objeto tan deseado para darse cuenta de que les quemaba las manos” (83) (You only had to see how the long-desired object burned their fingers even as they held it [87]). It is only after ten years of cohabitation—precisely when the narrator’s identification has begun to appear complete, to the extent that he feels as if he had never lived anywhere else and the tribesmen treat him not as a stranger but indifferently—that the Colastiné send him back to the outside world as they had with all the previous Def-ghi after much shorter periods of time. As his canoe draws away from the shore, the villagers make their final efforts to fix themselves in his memory, since, as he realizes only later, his true destiny as an entenado is to perpetuate the memory of the tribe.68 After drifting overnight, the entenado once again finds himself among strangers, this time Europeans, who awaken him with the declaration “Tiene barba” (90) (He’s got a beard [95]). When he sees their bearded faces, the narrator at first recognizes them as familiar, similar to ones he had seen in his youth in the ports of Spain. The dynamic of colonial desire asserts itself during this encounter as both the newly arrived Spaniards and the transculturated narrator vacillate between perceiving one another as self or as Other. Among the other bearded men, the narrator realizes he has lost his European language skills and at first is not able to speak to them or understand completely what they say. Having lived nearly half of his young life with the Colastiné, he attempts to address the bearded strangers using the native language or Spanish with Amerindi-

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an syntax, and hears their words as sounds much as he had understood the indigenous language when he first arrived in the village. When he manages to utter a few words in Spanish, his linguistic efforts, along with his physical appearance, confirm that he, like them, is a stranger in this land, the term extraño serving in this context as a means of identification between them. The Spaniards nevertheless react to the castaway with surprise, fear, and anxiety, because from their perspective, and given his linguistic efforts, he appears to be neither wholly European nor wholly Amerindian, but some kind of cultural hybrid. The laborious negotiations between them make the narrator aware that he has lost not only his mother tongue but his European manners as well. Because their Spanish now holds only a vague familiarity for him, they end up communicating with gestures. He answers their questions: there is a tribe of Indians nearby; they call themselves Colastiné;69 they have neither gold nor precious stones, but do have native weapons; and finally, “sí, sí comían carne humana” (92) (yes, they did eat human flesh [96–97]). The entenado recognizes in this exchange the desire of the Europeans to impress preconceived notions onto a world that is new to them, and to impose value judgments on the findings that serve only to reinforce these preexisting notions: Aunque, como lo supe más tarde, era la primera vez que pisaba esta tierra, [el oficial] consideraba cada una de mis respuestas rudimentarias como la confirmación de sus propias sospechas y pareceres, y tomaba cada una de las características de los indios, por inocente que fuese, como una afrenta personal. (92) (Although, as I found out later, this was the first time he [the officer] had set foot in that land, he found confirmation of his own suspicions and opinions in each of my rudimentary replies and took each of the Indians’ characteristics, however innocent, as a personal affront.) (97)

Not only does the Spanish officer impose a value judgment on this land that is unfamiliar to him, but he also interprets indigenous difference as an insult to his person, as if he expected that they should have anticipated his arrival and preemptively adjusted their society according to European norms; this officer is clearly lacking in the sense of cultural relativity that the young narrator had acquired through a lifetime of marginality among both Europeans and Amerindians. The narrator’s own difference immediately becomes an issue, as the captain regards him with suspicion, perceiving him as somehow “contaminated” through his contact with the native culture. The entenado, in turn, feels both attraction and repulsion toward the officer, whose physical prowess he describes in detail: Ese oficial era lo que en estas naciones se suele llamar una bellísima persona: tenía el pelo y la barba negros, lacios y bien recortados, un cuerpo atlético y proporcionado, la piel bronceada y saludable. (92)

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Latin American Novels of the Conquest (The officer was what in this part of the world people would call a handsome fellow: his hair and beard were black, the hair straight and the beard well-trimmed, he had an athletic and well-proportioned body and his skin looked tanned and healthy.) (97)

Apart from being physically attractive and elegantly attired, the captain has a good rapport with his men based on mutual respect and devotion: como si él fuese consciente de los privilegios que ese mando suponía y sintiese compasión y hasta cierto amor por sus hombres, pero apenas lo tuve enfrente sentí por él una especie de repulsión que en los días siguientes no hizo más que aumentar. (92; emphasis mine) (as if he were aware of the privileges command brought with it and felt compassion and even some kind of love for his men, though I, from the very first time I saw him, felt a kind of revulsion which only increased in the days that followed.) (97; emphasis mine)

The narrator suspects that the captain may have surmised the repulsion that he inspires, and he describes the captain’s mutually ambivalent feelings toward him in the following manner: “la curiosidad que despertaban mi aventura y mi persona venía mezclada de sospecha y de rechazo, como si mi contacto con esa zona salvaje me hubiese dado una enfermedad contagiosa” (93) (the curiosity I and my adventures aroused was mingled with feelings of suspicion and rejection. It was as if my contact with that savage world had infected me with some contagious disease [98]). Here, the anxiety regarding otherness is represented as fear of contamination. On board the Spanish ships, the narrator is the object of veiled glances and probing looks. Even the priest to whom he is entrusted regards him with misgiving: “[E]ra evidente que mi persona le inspiraba más miedo que compasión” (96) ([I]t was evident that I inspired in him more fear than compassion [101]). The crew’s mistrust of him even leads the narrator to doubt himself: Ese resquemor hacia mi persona fue, en los primeros tiempos, tan generalizado, que por momentos llegué a preguntarme si no había habido, en mi sobrevivencia y en mi larga estadía entre los indios, algún delito secreto del que cualquier hombre honrado debía sentirse culpable, o si los indios, sin que yo lo supiese, me habían hecho solidario de su esencia pastosa, y yo andaba paseándome entre los hombres como un signo viviente que era evidente para todos menos para mí. (96) (This deep-seated suspicion of me was at first so widespread that I even wondered at times if my very survival and long acquaintance with the Indians constituted some secret crime which any honourable man would have felt guilty about, or if the Indians, without my realizing, had made me so much a part of their rich essence that I bore some sign of this which was obvious to everyone except me.) (102)

Thus, the relationship between the narrator and the recently arrived Spaniards, like all of the relationships in El entenado—between Europeans and Amerindians, be-

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tween different Amerindian tribes, and between new and old Def-ghi—is an ambiguous one, characterized by both attraction and repulsion, by love and hatred toward the Other and even toward the self. The narrator leads an armed party to the location of the village where he had spent so many years, but they find it abandoned.70 A few days later, after the corpses of some of the soldiers along with those of many Amerindians are found floating in the river, the survivors head back to Spain. Like the historical sixteenth-century explorer Cabeza de Vaca when he returns to Spanish society after nearly ten years among the Amerindians of North America, the narrator of El entenado, also unaccustomed to the accoutrements of European civilization, has difficulty adjusting to wearing clothing: “La ropa me raspaba la piel, me hacía sentir extraño, lejos de mi cuerpo” (94) (I felt strange and alienated from my body in the scratchy clothes [99]).71 He ultimately relearns his forgotten mother tongue and readapts to Spanish culture with the help of a wise and kind priest, Father Quesada, with whom he spends seven years in a monastery. Father Quesada is the one individual who sees the narrator’s situation most clearly: on the one hand, being himself somewhat marginalized among the monks due to his strong personality, the priest can identify with the cultural outsider; on the other hand, he has enough critical distance from the narrator to read his soul: Supe, por la mirada rápida que me dirigió, que adivinaba mis penas, las justificaba y las compadecía. Y, sin embargo, esa mirada era sonriente, casi irónica, como si él hubiese visto más claramente que yo en mi propio misterio. (98–99) (I knew, from the one rapid glance he gave me, that he understood my troubles, found them justified and pitied them. And yet he was smiling, almost ironically, as if he had seen into my own mystery more clearly than I myself.) (104)

Perhaps due to his unique ability to peer directly into the narrator’s reality, Father Quesada is the only character, European or Amerindian, in the entire novel to merit a proper name. He is also the one who enables the narrator to write his story and thus realize his vocation as an entenado: “[C]omprendí que si el padre Quesada no me hubiese enseñado a leer y escribir, el único acto que podía justificar mi vida hubiese estado fuera de mi alcance” (99) (I understood that if Father Quesada had not taught me to read and write, the one act which might justify my life would have been beyond my reach [105]). It is not the writing of his own life that is the entenado’s contribution, but the transcribing of the story of the Colastiné. It is only after he leaves the monastery that the narrator will begin to fulfill his destiny as the Def-ghi, or witness. While living with the monks, he had discovered that there were other surviving crew members from his ship seventeen years earlier and that they had been touting their version of the story of the massacre, alongside other stories of captivity from returning adventurers, in which acts of cannibalism, such as

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an incidence of natives allegedly eating their prisoners raw, are highlighted. Father Quesada himself writes a treatise on his pupil’s adventures, titled Relación de abandonado (An account of the adventures of a child lost to the world), although the narrator admits that in his conversations with the priest he had left out many of his most essential impressions, thus editing his own story. Having left the monastery upon Father Quesada’s death, the entenado lives by his wits on the streets in picaresque fashion for a time until he joins a troupe of actors in a traveling theater. When the narrator later tells them his story, they persuade him to play himself in a comedy of his own composition representing his New World adventures. The narrator acknowledges that the indecorous aim of this enterprise is vulgar applause and filthy lucre, and in his writing of the play, he deliberately leaves out anything resembling what he perceives as the truth of his journey, taking the troupe leader’s advice to pander to the audience’s sensationalistic expectations: De mis versos, toda verdad estaba excluida y si, por descuido, alguna parcela se filtraba en ellos, el viejo, menos interesado por la exactitud de mi experiencia que por el gusto de su público, . . . me la hacía tachar. (108) (I simply left all truth out of the verses I wrote and if the odd scrap slipped through by mistake, the old man would make me cross it out, less concerned with the exact details of my experience than with his audience’s expectations.) (114)

The play becomes famous as the troupe performs in playhouses and palaces throughout Europe, eventually reducing the comedy to a pantomime for audiences from different countries.72 The narrator also concedes private interviews in which, having learned from experience, he again omits the essential truths and caters to the expectations of his listeners, who leave with their preconceived notions confirmed.73 The narrator at first attempts to persuade himself that perhaps there is some hidden kernel of essential truth in the tale the performers transmit to the audience, of which he himself is unaware, but eventually he becomes sickened by the fraud and ceases to perform, relinquishing his story and even his name to the troupe. Decades later, after having established a printing house and raised adopted children, the entenado meditates on the fate of the tribe among whom he had spent a good portion of his youth. Here again, as he reevaluates their rituals from a distance of many years, he reveals an ambivalent attitude toward the Amerindians. Regarding the yearly raids enacted to obtain victims for their cannibalistic feasts, he considers them more justifiable than European wars: “Y los indios eran más cazadores que guerreros porque a las expediciones las motivaba la necesidad y no el lujo sangriento que origina toda guerra” (115) (The Indians were more like hunters than warriors and their expeditions were motivated by necessity and not by the blood lust which lies at the root of all war [122]). Their hatred of war, however, is motivated by an aversion to any form of waste, confusion, or disorder and is characterized by a greater

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concern over their material losses and damages than over their human wounded and dead: “Daban la impresión desagradable de ser pacíficos únicamente por tacañería” (115) (They gave the disagreeable impression of being peace-loving purely out of small-mindedness [123]). Although at first he appears to assign to them more noble sentiments than those of Europeans, he ultimately reduces their pacific behavior to pettiness. He attributes even their ultimate deaths to their difference, speculating that, being so parsimonious, they had gone back to their village for their possessions and there lost their lives to the attacking Europeans. It is in these later meditations that the narrator begins to understand both the importance of the indigenous practice of cannibalism and his own role as the entenado, or witness, of the tribe’s existence. Speaking to returning sailors in the harbors in the hope of ascertaining details regarding the fate of the Colastiné, the narrator is unable to glean any information and thus presumes the tribe has been completely wiped out. During these conversations, he realizes that no one but he so much as distinguishes between the various indigenous tribes, as the European sailors ascribe to them all, rather, a cultural homogeneity as “Indians.” Only the entenado knows that difference is an important concept among the Amerindians, as each tribe is an autonomous unit with its own language, customs, and belief system, and each holds that only their existence is real. The Colastiné, for example, define themselves in contrast to what they perceive as the amorphous chimera that lies beyond their village, in which other tribes appear to exist but are only simulacra of the Colastiné, who consider only their own lives to be real. Among the Amerindians of that region, there are various elements that differentiate one tribe from another: these include whether they are nomadic or settled, whether they are naked or clothed, whether they are bellicose or pacific, and whether they eat human flesh or not. For the tribe in whose midst the narrator lived for many years, cannibalism is one of the distinguishing traits that makes them unique and that, in this sense, makes them real. The fact that they consider only themselves to be real compels them to live in a perpetual state of anxiety, because they believe that the existence of the entire universe depends upon them. Their cannibalism in particular is somehow implicated in this anxiety: “Me costó mucho darme cuenta de que si tantos cuidados los acosaban, era porque comían carne humana” (127) (It took me a long time to realize that the reason they were burdened with all these cares was that they ate human flesh [137]). The purpose of the Def-ghi, it turns out, is to serve as an external presence by means of which the tribe may confirm its own reality, as the Colastiné depend on external sources to validate their existence. For example, they believe that an external object may be present, but that they and the object mutually depend upon one another to confirm their tenuous existence, and at the same time the presence of the object makes them doubt their own reality, in a vicious circle that cannot be broken because of their inability to see themselves from an outside perspective. As the narrator views it, “Lo exterior era su principal problema. No lograban, como hubiesen queri-

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do, verse desde afuera” (120) (Their principal problem was the outer world. They could not, as they might have wished, see themselves from outside [128]). This can be interpreted as a reflection on the conquest of the Americas: Europe was searching for an external reality to validate its own, a people to play the role of savage Other in contrast to European civilization. Within the culture of the Colastiné, the Defghi is elected to play the role of confirming their reality by witnessing it from an outside perspective. Although the Def-ghi, like everything outside the Colastiné, lacks real existence according to their cosmology, the tribe nevertheless depends upon this being to validate its own reality. Like all the words in their language, Def-ghi is an equivocal term with various disparate meanings, all of which point in a similar direction: it is the name of a bird that repeats words taught to it; it can refer to people absent or asleep, people who are indiscreet, or visitors who outstay their welcome; it can designate a man who goes on ahead of a party and comes back to report on what he has seen or a spy who goes to the enemy and brings back news; it can signify an object that occupies the place of an absent person; it can mean something reflected in water; and it can refer to a person who mimics a character. All of these definitions have in common the notion of mirroring reality, which leads the narrator to realize the significance of his role: De mí esperaban que duplicara, como el agua, la imagen que daban de sí mismos, que repitiera sus gestos y palabras, que los representara en su ausencia. . . . [Q]uerían que de su pasaje por ese espejismo material quedase un testigo y un sobreviviente que fuese, ante el mundo, su narrador. (134) (They wanted me to reflect like water the image they gave of themselves, to repeat their gestures and words, to represent them in their absence. . . . [T]he Indians wanted there to be a witness to and a survivor of their passage through this material mirage; they wanted someone to tell their story to the world.) (144)

The role of the Def-ghi, then, is ultimately that of witness, messenger, and narrator. One of the most significant rituals he witnesses is the annual cannibal orgy, because, as mentioned above, the Colastiné themselves appear to erase this memory during the intervening months of the year, living in a state of constant denial of their own anthropophagy, save during the annual ritual. The narrator understands their implicit disavowal of their own cannibalism as a sign of guilt: Que comer carne humana no parecía ser tampoco una costumbre de la que se sintiesen muy orgullosos, lo prueba el hecho de que nunca hablaban y de que incluso parecían olvidarlo todo el año hasta que, más o menos para la misma época, volvían a empezar. (128) (However, eating human flesh was clearly not a custom to be proud of either, for they never spoke of it and even seemed to forget about it completely all year until, at more or less the same time, they would begin all over again.) (137)

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The narrator explains that their cannibalism is a force outside their control: “Lo hacían contra su voluntad, como si no les fuese posible abstenerse o como si ese apetito que regresaba fuese . . . el apetito de algo que, oscuro, los gobernaba” (128) (They did it against their will, as if it were impossible for them to abstain or as if the recurrent urge was . . . of that dark something that ruled them [137]). Because the novel offers no other source of information on the tribe apart from the narrator’s testimony, it is impossible to know whether the entenado is imposing his own European values in interpreting the Amerindians’ silence as a sign of guilt. Cannibalism is important to the Colastiné because it serves as one of the major signs of the difference between this tribe and others. For example, they regard with contempt the very tribes whom they incorporate by eating their flesh: “Para los miembros de otras tribus, ser comido por sus enemigos podía significar un honor excepcional, según me lo explicó un día, con desprecio indescriptible, uno de los indios” (127) (One day an Indian explained to me, with indescribable scorn, that the members of other tribes considered it a rare honour to be eaten by their enemies [137]). The basis of the Colastiné’s disdain for the other tribes, then, is that they seem to prefer being the victims of this “loving cannibalism”: according to this indigenous interlocutor, “les gustaba que se los comieran” (128) (they like to be eaten [137]). The tribe with whom the narrator lives appears to consider this a kind of perversion, again without avowing their own complicity in this act: Creí entender que el desprecio venía de lo inexplicable de esa inclinación, y que el indio la consideraba como un gusto equívoco, perverso; parecía un desprecio de orden moral, como si, en ese abandono que hacían del cuerpo a la voracidad de los otros . . . se manifestase una especie de voluptuosidad. (128) (He appeared to despise them because their attitude was so utterly inexplicable to him and he considered their predilection both mistaken and perverse. He seemed to see it as immoral, as if in abandoning their body to the appetite of others they were revealing a kind of voluptuousness.) (137)

Here the desire to be eaten is interpreted as a deviant sensual desire, akin to the narrator’s earlier ambivalent desire to be sodomized. Even more dangerously, this desire is perceived as losing oneself in the Other and in the process losing one’s sense of self in the gap between being and nothingness:74 Si el hecho de ser comido rebajaba, no era únicamente por esa voluptuosidad inconfesable que dejaba entrever. Era, también, o sobre todo, mejor, porque pasar a ser objeto de experiencia era arrumbarse por completo en lo exterior, igualarse, perdiendo realidad, con lo inerte y con lo indistinto, empastarse en el amasijo blando de las cosas aparentes. Era querer no ser de un modo desmedido. (128; emphasis mine) (Allowing oneself to be eaten was demeaning not only because of the shameful voluptuousness it revealed but also, indeed above all else, because becoming the object of an experience was to plunge oneself completely into the outer world, to lose one’s real-

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To be eaten is a fate worse than death, because it means a complete annihilation of the corporeal self and a return to the undifferentiation of the universe outside human consciousness.75 For the Colastiné, to serve as a victim of cannibalism is to relinquish one’s ego boundaries, much in the same way that, within ancient Greek and Roman societies, an adult male who preferred to be sexually penetrated relinquished masculine privilege. Here, the Colastiné are the active devourers of human flesh, whereas the community of their passive victims experiences a diminished social status in their eyes, parallel to that of putos and maricones in Latin American society.76 For the Colastiné, as the consumers of human flesh, cannibalism is fraught with anxiety, as they are caught in a unique existential double-bind, in that their sense of their own reality depends on external validation, in spite of the fact that they believe that everything outside themselves is mere illusion. Their extreme ambivalence regarding the devouring of human flesh is summarized thus: Si, cuando empezaban a masticar, el malestar crecía en ellos, era porque esa carne debía tener, aunque no pudiesen precisarlo, un gusto a sombra exhausta y a error repetido. Sabían, en el fondo, que como lo exterior era aparente, no masticaban nada, pero estaban obligados a repetir, una y otra vez, ese gesto vacío para seguir, a toda costa, gozando de esa existencia exclusiva y precaria que les permitía hacerse la ilusión de ser . . . los hombres verdaderos. (128 –29) (If a sense of ill ease grew in them as they chewed it was because that meat must have had for them the taste of stale shadow and oft-repeated errors. Since the external was pure appearance, they knew deep down that they were chewing on nothing. Yet they were obliged to repeat that empty gesture again and again in order to continue to enjoy at all costs that exclusive and precarious existence that allowed them the illusion of being . . . the only true men.) (138)

Their annual ritual of seeking out victims turns out to be the only way they know how to deal with this anxiety over their precarious grasp on reality: [E]ra porque para ellos no había otro modo de distinguirse del mundo y de volverse, ante sus propios ojos, un poco más nítidos, más enteros, y sentirse menos enredados en la improbabilidad chirle de las cosas. De esa carne que devoraban, de esos huesos que roían y que chupaban con obstinación penosa iban sacando, por un tiempo, hasta que se les gastara otra vez, su propio ser endeble y pasajero. (129) (They knew no other way of separating themselves from the world, no other way of becoming, in their own eyes, a little more defined, more whole, less enmeshed in the dull improbability of things. For a time, until once more it lost its power, they drew from the meat they devoured and the bones they chewed and sucked at with such terrible perseverance their own frail and transient sense of being.) (138)

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Thus, their sense of self depends on their literal incorporation of the Other, because only by assimilating the Other’s flesh through “loving cannibalism” do they affirm their own reality. The narrator explains that their exophagy was once endophagy, in a time before they began to seek validation of themselves through the incorporation of the outside world. Their current exocannibalism is a reaction to the primordial anxiety they feel due to their collective remembrance of this earlier time before they had distinguished themselves in contrast to nothingness: “Si actuaban de esa manera era porque habían experimentado, en algún momento, antes de sentirse distintos al mundo, el peso de la nada” (129) (They acted in this way because at some time, before they understood their individual identity in the world, they had experienced the reality of the void [138–39]). The narrator dates this experience back to an earlier time of endocannibalism: “Eso debió ocurrir antes de que empezaran a comer a los hombres no verdaderos, a los que venían de lo exterior. Antes, es decir en los años oscuros en que, mezclados a la viscosidad general, se comían entre ellos” (129) (That must have happened before they began eating the flesh of those who were not true men, those from outside. Before, in the dark years when they floundered with the others, they used to eat each other [139]). Their reality was confirmed only when they turned to exocannibalism: “[L]os indios empezaron a sentirse los hombres verdaderos cuando dejaron de comerse entre ellos. . . . No se comían, y se volvían hacia el exterior, formando una tribu que era el centro del mundo” (129) ([T]he Indians only began to feel they were true men when they stopped eating each other. . . . They turned towards the outside world and became the tribe that formed the centre of the world [139]).77 In spite of the fact that they consider themselves the center of the universe, the Colastiné nevertheless live in a state of perpetual anxiety, as their precarious existence depends on validation from an external realm that they believe has only an appearance of reality. Their fear of slipping back into a primal undifferentiation continually haunts them: Era como si el viejo peligro siguiese amenazándolos. Como si, por mucho terreno que hubiesen ganado sintiesen, a cada momento, que podían perderlo otra vez. Sabían que, de este mundo, ellos eran lo más verdadero, pero no estaban seguros de serlo lo bastante, de haber alcanzado un punto de realidad óptimo e indestructible, que ya no podía retroceder y más allá del cual ya no podía llegarse. (130) (It was as if the old danger was still there. Whatever ground they had gained could always be lost. They knew that they were the most substantial beings in this world but they could never be sure that they were real enough, never believe that they had reached an unassailable level of reality that would not crumble.) (139)

Their deepest fear is that their current sense of reality is not their real being, but rather that their true essence is this prior nothingness: “Pero, sobre todo, lo que venían trayendo del pasado, la sensación antigua de nada, confusa y rudimentaria,

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había quedado en ellos como su verdadera forma de ser” (130) (Above all, their old, confused, rudimentary sense of nothingness which they brought with them from the past became their way of being [139]). Freud’s theory of repetition is present in the narrator’s explanation: Si es verdad, como dicen algunos, que siempre queremos repetir nuestras experiencias primeras y que, de algún modo, siempre las repetimos, la ansiedad de los indios debía venirles de ese regusto arcaico que tenía, a pesar de haber cambiado de objeto, su deseo. (130) (If it is true, as some people say, that we always try to repeat our early experiences and in some way succeed in so doing, the anxiety the Indians felt must have had its origins deep in the past, in the bitter aftertaste their desire still left them with even though the object of that desire had changed.) (139)

Apart from an implicit allusion to Freud’s notion from Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the compulsion to repeat is a basic human tendency, here there are also Freudianinspired ideas regarding the transition from primordial polymorphous urges to the adult phase of sexuality, in which the desired object is different from the self. Here, Freud’s stages of sexual development find their parallel in the tribe’s passage from endophagy to exophagy. Saer’s narrator seems to imply that this transition is never quite complete, because desire for the Other is always played out with reference to the original drives directed toward the self, which are never erased in spite of appearing to have been transcended, since they remain embedded within the unconscious. In like terms, the tribe’s primordial endocannibalism remains the underlying point of reference for their current exocannibalism: No podían tener una certidumbre mayor de realidad porque en el fondo de sí mismos sabían que, fuesen cuales fuesen las cosas del mundo exterior que hubiesen elegido como objeto, por lejanos y vagos que pareciesen los hombres que devoraban, la única referencia que tenían para reconocer el gusto de esa carne extranjera era el recuerdo de la propia. Los indios sabían que la fuerza que los movía . . . a salir al horizonte borroso para buscar carne humana, no era el deseo de devorar lo inexistente sino, por ser el más antiguo, el más adentrado, el deseo de comerse a sí mismos. (130; emphasis mine) (They could not get any true grasp on reality because they knew deep in their hearts that, whatever object of desire they chose, however unreal and lacking in individuality the people they ate seemed to them, the only point of reference they had by which to recognize the taste of that alien flesh was the memory of their own. The Indians knew that . . . the force that drove them out towards the far horizon in search of human flesh was not the desire to devour the inexistent but the more ancient, more deep-rooted desire to eat one another [to eat themselves].)78 (139 – 40; emphasis mine)

On a subconscious level, they know that desire for the Other thinly veils a true desire for the self, yet they live in denial of this fact:

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[E]l objeto en apariencia más alejado de su deseo, es decir ellos mismos, era, y ellos lo sabían, sin representárselo con claridad sin duda, la verdadera causa de sus expediciones. (130) (The true aim of those acts was rather the pursuit of what was apparently the least likely and furthest removed object of their desire: themselves. Although doubtless they never clearly acknowledged this, they knew the real purpose behind their expeditions.) (140)

Thus, the route to self-consciousness is circular, going from self to Other only to come back to the self: “Daban, para reencontrar el sabor antiguo, un rodeo inmenso por lo exterior” (130) (In their quest for the taste they had once known, they took an immensely circuitous detour to the outside world [140]). This leads back to themselves as the cause of their own anxiety: “Ellos eran, de ese modo, la causa y el objeto de la ansiedad” (13) (They were thus the cause and the object of that anxiety [140]). Within this context, the role of the entenado is especially urgent. The narrator ultimately realizes that what he had considered a game that the Colastiné play in their efforts to attract the Def-ghi’s attention is really a desperate attempt to inscribe themselves in his memory in order to corroborate their existence. The arrogance of the indigenous Def-ghi is explained by his comprehension of the importance of his role, as the tribe’s very existence depends upon him carrying their message to the outside world. During the ten-year stay of the European entenado, they adopt exaggerated poses, not in the name of making a good impression, but in the effort to make the most intense, lasting impression so that their memory might be perpetuated and they might not fall back into the “amasijo anónimo de lo indistinto” (141) (the anonymous void [152]). In their desire to make a memorable impression on the entenado, some of the tribe members use images of cannibalism, as this is the mark of their ultimate distinction: Uno que, el primer día, para llamar mi atención, me había amenazado con comerme a mí también, y que para demostrármelo simulaba morderse su propio brazo, me lo recordaba, riéndose, cada vez que se topaba conmigo. “Def-ghi, def-ghi,” me decía siempre, . . . “yo soy el que, en broma, te decía que te iba a comer.” (140; emphasis in original) (On the very first day, one Indian, trying to attract my attention, made as if to eat me and pretended to chew on his own arm. Every time he saw me he would remind me of this and laugh. “Def-ghi, def-ghi,” he would say, . . . “I’m the one who made the joke about eating you.” ) (151; emphasis mine)

The Colastiné always ensure that a Def-ghi is present for their annual anthropophagous ritual, because it is through this incorporation of the Other that they consider themselves most real. Although throughout the year they live an austere life in an effort to impose order

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on the chaos of their existence, every year the Colastiné are pulled back into the ancient ritual that only temporarily sates their hunger to authenticate the self. After repressing this desire for eleven months, they give themselves over entirely to perilous otherness during the annual orgy. The anxiety of identification thus remains unresolved in El entenado, as the quest to confirm the reality of the self through the incorporation of the Other must be repeated continually and can never be fully satisfied. Ultimately, in El entenado, the incorporation of the Other through “loving cannibalism” does not solve the problem of the anxiety of identification, then, but merely perpetuates it from one generation to the next.79 In Saer’s novel, the anxiety of identification can be witnessed on many levels. First, there is the young orphan’s lack of conformity with his marginalized position within European society. Seeking to improve his condition, he embarks on a transatlantic journey, only to find that the sailors confirm their status by sexually penetrating their social inferior, the cabin boy. As the ostensible lone survivor of an Amerindian attack, the narrator finds himself again marginalized, this time as the only European in the midst of an indigenous tribe. His experiences as a social outsider in Europe and on the voyage grant him a perspective of greater cultural relativity than a successful conquistador might be expected to have, and as a result of his transculturation, he comes to understand at least some of the customs of the Colastiné, whose most distinctive mark is their annual anthropophagous ritual, which as Def-ghi he is expected to witness, preserving its memory for posterity. Within El entenado, the ambivalence of the self-Other negotiations is apparent in many instances, including in the pícaro-turned-playwright’s reluctance to continue bearing false witness to the tribe’s existence in the play he has written but later renounces. The relationships between the narrator and the Colastiné, between one indigenous tribe and another, between old Def-ghi and new, and between the narrator and the bearded Europeans he encounters after ten years are all fraught with the ambivalence of simultaneous attraction and repulsion. Here, the dynamic of colonial desire is evident not only in the interaction between Europeans and Amerindians but also among Europeans and among Amerindians. As in the case of the Colastiné, who engage in consumption of the Other due to a desire that is ultimately revealed to be a desire for the self, in like fashion, the Europeans represented in this and the other novels of this corpus seek out new lands and peoples due to an ostensible desire for the unknown that ultimately reveals less about other cultures and more about their own fears and anxieties regarding the “Other within” the self.

2 Violence and the Sacred Idolatry and Human Sacrifice in Homero Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo

emorias del Nuevo Mundo (1988) is the sequel to Mexican author Homero Aridjis’s 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla (1985).1 Juan Cabezón is the marginalized fictional character who leads the reader through both novels, the first of which follows him through various adventures on the Iberian Peninsula and the second of which takes him across the Atlantic with Columbus and through the conquest of Mexico with Cortés.2 In 1492, Aridjis’s fictional converso Juan Cabezón joins up with a motley crew of rogues who travel throughout Spain and plot to assassinate Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. Central to the narrative strand is Juan Cabezón’s love for the conversa Isabel de la Vega, a crypto-Jewish woman who searches for a life in exile after persecution by the Inquisition. The title character and narrator of the first novel loses track of his beloved who has gone into exile and does not reunite with her and their son, Juan, until near the end of the second novel. Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, narrated in the third person, maintains a focus on the conquest from the marginal perspective of converso Juan Cabezón, whose character is examined extensively in Chapter 5 of the present study. After briefly narrating his transatlantic crossing with Columbus, his escape from the Navidad massacre that presumably killed all those left behind on Columbus’s first voyage, and his participation in the conquest of Mexico under Cortés, the remainder of Memorias tells the story of the early colonial period in the viceroyalty of New Spain. It is this period of transition, in which the first wave of conquistadors is being replaced by a new generation of ecclesiastical and civil administrators, and in which the processes of mestizaje, religious syncretism, and transculturation are beginning to be established along with the colonial administration, that will be the focus of this chapter. Specifically, the emphasis will be on the transculturation of fictional conquistador Gonzalo Dávila, in whom the ambivalent dynamic of colonial desire is particularly evident

M

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in the form of an attraction and repulsion toward indigenous cultural and religious rituals. A minor player in the conquest compared to historical figures such as Hernán Cortés, the fictional Gonzalo Dávila is represented in Memorias del Nuevo Mundo as less of a marginalized character than Juan Cabezón. Whereas the title character of 1492 represents a marginal participant in the conquest who left Spain as a converso with no social standing, his companion Gonzalo Dávila is a conquistador who comes to the New World perhaps without money but certainly with the honor and status that accompany the comportment of an Old Christian conquistador. Little is known about any sixteenth-century historical figure named Gonzalo Dávila. Documents testify that one Gonzalo de Ávila came to Mexico not with Cortés’s expedition, as Aridjis’s Gonzalo Dávila does, but rather with Francisco de Garay’s 1523 expedition to settle Pánuco, along the Gulf of Mexico.3 In 1529, the historical Gonzalo de Ávila was thirty years old and had been in Pánuco for six years. Having arrived with Garay and remained as an encomendero in Pánuco, the historical Gonzalo de Ávila apparently was not present for Hernán Cortés’s 1519–1521 conquest of Tenochtitlan, nor did he reside in the colonial metropolis in subsequent years as does Aridjis’s Gonzalo Dávila. Thus, the Gonzalo Dávila of Memorias del Nuevo Mundo is most likely a completely fictional creation, since he seems to share little with the historical Gonzalo de Ávila apart from his name. As noted above, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo is a third-person narration focusing on the character of Juan Cabezón, who in the previous novel had narrated in the first person his adventures as a converso in preexpulsion Spain. Of the four hundred–page novel, approximately fifty pages are devoted to Christopher Columbus’s four voyages, the narration of which becomes progressively shorter, such that the narration of his final transatlantic voyage and death in Valladolid is reduced to a single sentence. There is an abrupt transition from one chapter that ends with Columbus’s return to Spain in chains from his third voyage, and the next beginning in medias res with Cortés’s journey toward Tenochtitlan, followed by a brief explanation of Juan Cabezón’s whereabouts in the interim, and of how he became linked to Cortés. Although the novel ostensibly focuses on the protagonist Juan Cabezón who near the end of Memorias is reunited with his wife and son, the figure of the conquistador Gonzalo Dávila gradually becomes a focal point in the novel after the narration shifts from Columbus’s voyages to Cortés’s conquest. In Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, Gonzalo Dávila is represented as a cruel and sadistic conquistador, merciless in his treatment of the Mexican natives, who nevertheless is enraptured by a powerful attraction toward Aztec religious rites, including what the conquistadors perceive as idolatry and sorcery. This conquistador’s interest in indigenous rituals ultimately leads him to become as heavily invested in the sacred as in the violent. As René Girard elaborates, violence and the sacred are inextricably

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bound up with one another, and are both related to issues of marginality and ambivalence. Aridjis’s novel culminates in a human sacrifice in which Gonzalo Dávila represents the incarnation of a god and is the intended sacrificial victim. The conquistador’s attraction-repulsion toward native rituals in Memorias del Nuevo Mundo is a strong example of colonial desire in the corpus of the new novel of the conquest, as the fictional character Gonzalo Dávila paradoxically is allured by indigenous religion and culture while being one of the cruelest and most violent of the conquistadors and early encomenderos.4 As in the other novels examined here, the anxiety of identification will serve as a defense mechanism to counterbalance the conquistador’s attraction to native cults. Violence and the Sacred in Conquistador Gonzalo Dávila Although the character Gonzalo Dávila does not appear in the first fifty pages of Memorias, his name actually appears on the epigraph page preceding the beginning of the narration; the centrality of his character in Memorias del Nuevo Mundo is indicated by the fact that the third of five epigraphs to the novel is a stanza from a poem attributed to him. Because the historical Gonzalo de Ávila appears to be a minor conquistador whose writings, if any, are not readily available, we must assume that Aridjis wrote these verses, which point to the question of violence in the fictional conquistador’s character: Una ira más grande que el pecho, más crispada que el puño, más crujiente que el diente, más aguda que el ojo, una ira que no cabe en el mundo. (7) (A wrath greater than the chest, more tense than the fist, more grinding than the tooth, sharper than the eye, a wrath that does not fit in the world.)

This poem, in the center of the epigraphs, is preceded by quotations from Columbus describing the newly discovered lands as an earthly paradise and from Francisco López de Gómara stating that the greatest thing after the creation of the world, apart from the incarnation and death of its creator, is the discovery of the New World, and it is followed by a citation from Manuel José Quintana claiming that the greed that accompanied the conquest was a crime of the times and not of Spain, and finally by

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four verses from a Sephardic ballad that refers to the Jewish sense of being strangers in a strange land. Sandwiched between these other quotations from hegemonic and nonhegemonic sources, the poem attributed to Gonzalo Dávila makes a curious contribution to the epigraphs. The first two epigraphs point to the discovery of the earthly paradise of the New World as a positive contribution to humanity, the fourth deflects the blame for the conquest away from the black legend of Spanish greed, and the fifth refers to a general sense of the Jews as strangers in a strange land, a theme that runs throughout Aridjis’s Juan Cabezón novels and other new novels of the conquest and that implicitly links the conquistadors with other exiles and outsiders within Western society. The position of the fictional conquistador’s poem in the middle of the epigraphs draws attention to a citation that is unique for several reasons: first, it is attributed to a character in the novel; second, it is presumably apocryphal, as there is no reason to believe that the historical Gonzalo de Ávila left any writings for posterity, much less lyric poetry; third, as we will find out later, Aridjis’s character is a conquistador who would seem to be lacking in the artistic sensibility to write verses; and finally, it refers to the theme of “a wrath that does not fit in the world,” which calls attention to the character of Gonzalo Dávila as an exceptionally violent conquistador. Although he does not appear until after the first fifty pages, Gonzalo Dávila’s centrality to the narration is emphasized in the fact that after his first mention, his name is repeatedly coupled with that of the ostensible protagonist. In Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, Juan Cabezón and Gonzalo Dávila accompany Cortés’s entourage to Mexico, not as principal conquistadors but rather as lackeys attending to the mounts of the principals. While Juan Cabezón struggles between being a conquistador and remaining a passive onlooker to the violence, Gonzalo Dávila becomes a major player in this fictional representation of the conquest. If Juan Cabezón is characterized as a conquistador who comes in peace, Gonzalo Dávila is characterized as being an exceedingly cruel and violent conquistador. The theme of the conquistador’s anger and violence, alluded to in the poem attributed to him in the epigraph, is highlighted in the novel’s narration of the conquest of Mexico and in its later focus on early colonial Mexico City. As the narration progresses, Gonzalo Dávila stands out because of his sadistic treatment of the indigenous Mexicans. The first mention of this character in the novel proper coincides with Cortés’s initial arrival on the Mexican mainland: the captain’s first command on terra firma is to order Gonzalo Dávila to place Moctezuma’s envoys in shackles. He and Juan Cabezón are later commanded to guard the chief of Cempoala. Although the reader might overlook this cruel conquistador at first, he becomes increasingly more important as the conquest of Mexico continues. In the battle against the Tlaxcalans, Gonzalo Dávila and his mare both fight vigorously:

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Gonzalo Dávila, en su yegua La Muerte, ofendía más que ninguno a aquellos que tenían la mala fortuna de salirle al paso. En medio de la batalla corría de un lado a otro con La Muerte, que pateaba a los indios, los mordía, les resollaba en la cara, mientras él los lanceaba en el rostro, en los ojos, en el pecho, en el abdomen. (64) (Gonzalo Dávila, on his mare Death, was on the offense more than anyone against those who had the bad fortune to get in his way. In the middle of the battle he ran from one side to another with Death, who kicked the Indians, bit them, whinnied in their faces, while he lanced them in the face, in the eyes, in the chest, in the abdomen.)

Thus, from the beginning, the character of Gonzalo Dávila is associated with extreme violence against the indigenous peoples of Mexico, in contrast to Juan Cabezón, who merely defends himself in the battle against the Tlaxcalans, and even does that poorly, relying on Gonzalo Dávila to save him from an attack by a Tlaxcalan dwarf. In contrast to Juan Cabezón, who is trying to free himself from the dwarf by kicking him, Gonzalo Dávila digs his spurs into the flanks of his mare, and lunges toward the dwarf, killing him “con gran calma” (65) (with great calm) and then continuing to fight in spite of the fact that his lance is broken. The emphasis on Gonzalo Dávila as cool and calm in the heat of combat underscores his role as a cruel and calculating conquistador. At the end of the battle against the Tlaxcalans, Hernán Cortés compares the two conquistadors, noting that although Juan Cabezón contributes to the conquest as an old man, long-suffering and a good horseman, Gonzalo Dávila is the best lance that has come over to the New World. In contrast to the active and aggressive Gonzalo Dávila, Juan Cabezón is something of a pacifist conquistador, and even a cowardly one at times. As the narrator Juan Cabezón had declared in the companion novel to Memorias, 1492, “No soy hombre de armas, soy hombre de razones” (198) (I am not a man of arms, I am a man of words [176]), claiming that it is because of his unwillingness to fight that he is still alive. As will be developed further in Chapter 5, these examples point to the converso protagonist’s tenuous identity as a conquistador, which highlights by contrast the violence and cruelty of Gonzalo Dávila. Although Juan Cabezón is the character who has experienced the marginality of being a converso in inquisitorial Spain and later vacillates in identifying himself as a conquistador, whereas his companion is a mainstream conqueror who has no scruples about killing the inhabitants of Mexico, it is paradoxically Gonzalo Dávila who in Memorias will be most attracted to the native culture, in particular to its religious aspects. Although Moctezuma has sent word to the Spaniards not to proceed in the direction of Tenochtitlan, offering a variety of excuses for why they should remain on the outskirts of the empire where he will send them tribute, the conquistadors nevertheless continue to advance toward the Aztec capital. Now accompanied by their allies the Cempoalans and Tlaxcalans, the Spaniards march on Cholula, where events un-

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fold that will ultimately serve as a turning point in the conquest of Mexico. In Aridjis’s version, the fictional characters Gonzalo Dávila and Juan Cabezón are instrumental in Cholula, because they are the ones who deliver to Cortés the priests who give them the first indication that the Cholulans, along with reinforcements sent by Moctezuma, are planning a surprise attack on the Spaniards. When this information is completed by details told to la Malinche by the wife of an old chief, Cortés and his men ambush the Cholulans with a preemptive strike. Although the focus in the Cholula massacre is on the ambiguous figure of Juan Cabezón, who cannot commit to an identity as a conquistador, it is Gonzalo Dávila who announces that the Spaniards have won the battle. In Tenochtitlan, Gonzalo Dávila’s role among the conquistadors becomes even more salient. One of the first actions he takes in the capital city is to place Moctezuma in shackles, at the command of Cortés, who then immediately orders Juan Cabezón to remove the chains. This is yet another example of how Juan Cabezón’s pacific nature serves as a contrast to Gonzalo Dávila’s cruelty toward the native people of Mexico. When Hernán Cortés returns to the Gulf Coast to ambush Pánfilo de Narváez who was sent to arrest him, he leaves Pedro de Alvarado in charge of the Spanish forces in Tenochtitlan.5 In his absence, violence erupts in the capital, leading to the massacre at the Templo Mayor. In this conflict, a gory picture is painted of Gonzalo Dávila: Junto a Cabezón vino Gonzalo Dávila, con sangre resbalándole por el codo hacia la mano. Ebrio de muerte, pisaba charcos rojos, mientras el líquido precioso le escurría de los dedos, le salpicaba el pecho y la cara, la barba y los cabellos negros. (98) (Alongside Cabezón came Gonzalo Dávila, with blood streaming from his elbow toward his hand. Drunken with death, he stepped in red puddles, while the precious liquid dripped down his fingers, splattering his chest and face, his black beard and hair.)

Covered with blood, Gonzalo Dávila emerges as the image of the conquistador, violent and cruel, again in contrast to Juan Cabezón, who attempts to remain on the sidelines of what he describes as a festival of death. The conquest of Tenochtitlan from its inception is perceived as a “loving conquest” comparable to the “loving cannibalism” examined in the previous chapter. When Cortés marches on the capital city, he gazes at it with “los ojos amorosos” (85) (loving eyes). During the temple massacre in Cortés’s absence, Gonzalo Dávila takes on this loving gaze in the middle of the bloodshed: “Gonzalo Dávila . . . pálido y tembloroso, como en un acto de amor, daba una estocada a un bisoño; el cual, igual que si buscara su propio sacrificio, le había descubierto el pecho” (97–98; emphasis mine) (Gonzalo Dávila . . . pale and trembling, as if in an act of love, gave a lance blow to an inexperienced warrior; who, as if he were looking for his own sacrifice, had opened up his chest to him). The conquistador appears to receive sadistic pleasure

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from penetrating the Amerindian Other with his lance, and from killing and maiming in general; for example, in this same battle when a vision of a man with his ear cut off begs him for water, Gonzalo Dávila responds by cutting off the man’s hand. Gonzalo Dávila, often alongside protagonist Juan Cabezón, is present at all of the key moments in the conquest of Mexico, becoming increasingly important as the narration proceeds. As mentioned above, on the first page of the portion of the novel dealing with Cortés, we see Gonzalo Dávila placing Moctezuma’s envoys in shackles. Along with protagonist Juan Cabezón, he later guards the chief of Cempoala, witnesses the surrender and baptism of the kings of Tlaxcala, and both deliver to Cortés the Cholulan priests who give the Spaniards information that ultimately leads to the Cholula massacre. Later in the novel, it is explained that Gonzalo Dávila had also forewarned Cortés that governor of Cuba Diego Velázquez was plotting against him. After he fights in every major battle of the conquest leading toward Tenochtitlan, it is this fictional conquistador who places Moctezuma himself in chains. In the following section of Memorias, which makes the transition from the conquest to the early colony, Gonzalo Dávila will become a main character in his own right, with autonomous scenes represented independently from the focus on Juan Cabezón. The theme of religious symbolism is highlighted in the section of the novel dealing with the conquest of Mexico from the initial arrival of Cortés on the Mexican coast. Before they have even glimpsed the Amerindians, the conquistadors imagine that they will be received as gods: —¡Llegaron los dioses!—rugió Juan Velázquez de León. —¡Arrodíllate, perro!—gritó Pedro de Alvarado a una figura imaginaria. —¡Todos a los pies de su dios!—exclamó Cristóbal de Olid a legiones invisibles de indios sometidos, el sol dorando su cara. —¡A sus pies, señor dios!—se inclinó por burla Francisco de Montejo. ¡Mátalos, mátalos!—profirió Gonzalo de Sandoval, espada en mano, cortando el aire tras dos pájaros marinos. . . . —Dejadlos en paz—intervino Juan Cabezón. (53) (“The gods have arrived,” roared Juan Velázquez de León. “Kneel, dog,” Pedro de Alvarado yelled to an imaginary figure. “Everyone at the feet of their god,” exclaimed Cristóbal de Olid to invisible legions of subdued Indians, the sun tanning his face. “At your feet, Lord God,” Francisco de Montejo bowed down in jest. “Kill them, kill them,” Gonzalo de Sandoval proffered, sword in hand, cutting the air behind two sea birds. . . . “Leave them alone,” Juan Cabezón intervened.)

In the above citation, several themes are introduced. First, the Spaniards, before even seeing the Mexican natives, imagine that they will consider the Europeans as gods. Second, the dialogue leads directly from the topic of religion to the theme of violence; it is also notable that immediately before this dialogue is Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s

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translation of the Latin quotation on Cortés’s flag that says, “We must follow the sign of the Holy Cross with true faith, since with it we will conquer.” As evangelization is a primary justification for the conquest, in both the flag’s slogan and the dialogue, the transition from the topic of conversion to that of conquest is seamless. This is apparent later in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, when the character Fray Bartolomé de Olmedo tells the Spaniards, “Hermanos, la batalla se acerca, confesad vuestros pecados. Yo os absuelvo. De penitencia os doy que matéis a todos” (109) (Brothers, the battle approaches, confess your sins. I absolve you. Your penance is to kill them all). Through juxtaposition, Aridjis makes an implicit connection between the conquest and human sacrifice, as both are forms of state-sponsored violence sanctioned by the sacred. Gonzalo Dávila, in contrast to the official rhetoric, sees the conquest on a human level, not a divine level. When several friars and conquistadors attest that they have seen Santiago, or Saint James, on a white horse and the “Conquistadora” Virgin Mary present in the battle against the Tlaxcalans, Aridjis’s character flatly denies having witnessed any such religious icons in what he sees as a purely human struggle: No los he visto, no he visto a nadie más que el peligro de morir. . . . En la batalla, como en el amor y la muerte, veo a los hombres más grandes o más pequeños de lo que son en realidad, pero no vi esas imágenes. (66) (I haven’t seen them, I haven’t seen anyone other than the danger of death. . . . In battle, as in love and death, I see men as bigger or smaller than they are in reality, but I did not see those images.)

In spite of the fact that he will later become intimately involved in native rituals, Gonzalo Dávila’s attraction to the sacred is not preceded by an interest in Christian mysticism. Rather than a fascination with the divine in general, what seems to attract the conquistador to native rituals is their otherness. The representation of the sacred is woven subtly into the narration of the section of Memorias recounting the conquest of Mexico, its pages peppered with references to native religion, priests, idolatry, human sacrifice, and ritual cannibalism. For example, on several occasions, Moctezuma sends sorcerers to bewitch the Spaniards and dissuade them from marching on Tenochtitlan. Various indigenous gods appear to the Spaniards, including Mictlantecuhtli, lord of the land of the dead, who will be of special importance in later scenes of Gonzalo Dávila’s dalliance with the sacred. When the Spanish troops are in Tenochtitlan under the command of Pedro de Alvarado, Gonzalo Dávila and Juan Cabezón are especially eager to attend a festival in honor of Huitzilopochtli, which is slated to culminate in the sacrifice of select individuals representing the gods but instead becomes the scene of the temple massacre. In general, Aridjis’s conquistadors interact with these gods, priests, and sorcerers as if they were merely human, while at the same time they manipulate to their strategic advantage the indigenous perception that the Spaniards are gods.

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It is after the battles in Tlaxcala and Cholula but before the conquest of Tenochtitlan that the sacred becomes specifically associated with the figure of conquistador Gonzalo Dávila, when he and Juan Cabezón are sent by Cortés to reconnoiter the imperial capital dressed as Mexicans and with their faces tinted. On this clandestine mission, the two enter temples and witness a human sacrifice, and it is clear that both have a passing comprehension of native religion and rituals, at any rate enough to understand what is going on around them. The converso conquistador is considerably more sensitive to the indigenous culture, whereas his cruel counterpart sees the idols in profane terms as mere gold. When Gonzalo Dávila reaches out to snatch an emerald necklace from around the neck of the idol of Tláloc, Juan Cabezón stays his hand, protesting that it would cost them their lives were a papa to discover their presence. Here, Juan Cabezón goes so far as to employ the indigenous terminology for a native priest, and Gonzalo Dávila is so insensitive as to attempt to steal a precious relic from a temple, underlining again the differences between their approaches to indigenous otherness. One of the apparitions whom the two undercover conquistadors encounter in the temple is a priestly vision whose mouth smells of blood and centuries of death. As did the other Spaniards when they met with real and fantastic Amerindians, the conquistador at first reacts with violence: “Yo soy uno que te va a arrancar el corazón con esta espada—exclamó Gonzalo Dávila, y le dio la estocada al aire” (82) (“I am one who will tear out your heart,” exclaimed Gonzalo Dávila, lunging his sword in the air). Significantly, something about the conquistador is capable of frightening this specter of death: “Tuvo espanto de ti—le dijo Juan Cabezón.—Tengo miedo esta noche, miedo de ellos y de mí—reveló él” (82) (“He was afraid of you,” said Juan Cabezón. “I am afraid of this night, afraid of them and of myself,” he revealed). It is in reference to this ghostly figure that Gonzalo Dávila admits that Mexico has gotten under his skin: “No sé qué me pasa pero este país me trastorna, se me mete dentro” (82) (I don’t know what is happening to me, but this country disturbs me, gets inside me). Here it is apparent both that Gonzalo Dávila has some kind of power relative to indigenous sacred images and that native rituals in turn are capable of affecting the seemingly impenetrable conquistador, in a clear example of the anxiety of identification. Both Spaniards are horrified by the uncanny sights that confront them in the temple, where Juan Cabezón has the eerie feeling that “Nos miran desde adentro de nosotros” (80) (They are looking at us from inside ourselves). Here the protagonist projects the anxiety of identification upon the Amerindians, whom he assumes to be penetrating the Spaniards with their gaze. Whereas Juan Cabezón, the converso whose adventures as an outsider in inquisitorial Spain were recounted in Aridjis’s previous novel, might be expected to experience some kind of transculturation in this new culturally heterogeneous context, in the section of Memorias del Nuevo Mundo dealing with the conquest of Mexico, Gonzalo Dávila appears to be a conquistador who would not be affected by native culture. In contrast to his companion, who understands the

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native languages and uses indigenous terms in his speech, Gonzalo Dávila appears to think only of annihilating the Amerindian Other. Remarks about the country getting under his skin, however, reveal rifts in the conquistador’s ostensibly impregnable facade, breaches that will become even more apparent in the portion of the novel treating the early colony. Colonial Desire for Native Sorcery in the Figure of Gonzalo Dávila The character of Gonzalo Dávila, although he insidiously works his way into the text of Memorias del Nuevo Mundo from the first, appearing subtly on the epigraph page before the novel has even begun and emerging insistently from the beginning of the description of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, is not “properly introduced” as a character until the conquistadors have become the early settlers of the capital of New Spain. It is only now that the narrator fully outlines his physical appearance, after having briefly introduced him in the first pages of the Cortés section of the novel, where he is described with the striking physique of a true conquistador: “La cara pálida de Gonzalo Dávila se perfiló, su barba y sus cabellos negros, sudorosos” (52) (Gonzalo Dávila’s pale face stood out, his black beard and hair, sweaty). The first characteristic that is mentioned in the later, more complete description is that Gonzalo Dávila has black eyes, “tan negros que parecía se le había metido en ellos mucha noche” (128) (so black that it seemed that they had taken in a lot of night). His face is described contradictorily as appearing youthful yet also old and withered, as if youth and age were warring inside him. He is tall and thin, with long hair and beard and a loud voice, although he is reserved and sparing in words. He is also described as discreet and remorseless: “[L]o que veían sus ojos no lo repetía su lengua, y de lo que sus manos hacían no guardaba memoria ni arrepentimiento” (128) ([W]hat his eyes saw his tongue did not repeat, and of what his hands did he retained no memory nor repentance). Along with this physical description is an explanation of Gonzalo Dávila’s family background. It is here that the reader discovers that this conquistador was born in 1492, the illegitimate offspring of Luz Pizarro, a woman of peasant stock and owner of an inn, and an “hidalgo pobre” (poor gentleman) who had passed through Trujillo, of whom nothing is known apart from his name, Pedro Dávila.6 When his mother died, the young Gonzalo sold her inn for a few coins, clothes, and a mule, and set off for the New World. He arrived in Hispaniola in 1510, and Cuba in 1513, from whence he joined Cortés’s expedition along with Juan Cabezón, in whose company he is constantly found through the narration of the conquest. In this next section of the novel, which narrates the early years of colonial Mexico City, the two conquistadors will part ways, Juan Cabezón to become an innkeeper and Gonzalo Dávila to become one of the cruelest of the encomenderos.

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It is also at this point in the text that Gonzalo Dávila’s fascination with indigenous sorcery and human sacrifice crystallizes, a fascination that initially is motivated by greed. Having been promised as a conquistador an encomienda as well as riches in gold and silver, and now, as a settler, wanting to increase his wealth beyond the encomienda he has received, he enlists the aid of an indigenous guide and interpreter named Francisco Huehuetl—a minister of the idols who we soon find out is a ghost, having been killed during the conquest of Tenochtitlan—to help him search for treasure in the form of idols: Por esos días de busca afanosa de tesoros, Gonzalo Dávila fue y vino por las calles de tierra y las acequias de Tenochtitlan arrasada . . . a hurgar entre las piedras de los edificios sagrados . . . todo en busca de tesoros que no hallaban. (128–29) (During these days of keen search for treasures, Gonzalo Dávila came and went along the dirt streets and canals of leveled Tenochtitlan . . . to poke around the stones of sacred edifices . . . all in pursuit of treasures they did not find.)

Within this scheme, Gonzalo Dávila’s interpretation of indigenous artifacts is at first oblivious to their original meaning and attendant only to what they can mean to him in economic terms as precious metals and stones. Earlier, during the conquest of Tenochtitlan, he had used what knowledge he did have of indigenous notions of the sacred to reduce the meaning of the idols to that of mere gold: “Éste es el templo mayor, el centro ceremonial de Tenochtitlan y del imperio azteca, estará lleno de oro” (95) (This is the Great Temple, the ceremonial center of Tenochtitlan and of the Aztec empire, it must be full of gold). To some extent, the conquistador does recognize and value the indigenous relics, even if only on an economic level. One evening, Gonzalo Dávila and minister of the idols Francisco Huehuetl are ransacking some grave sites when they enter a tomb of many rooms with altars and idols. There, the conquistador fills a sack with loot, including many golden ornaments plucked from skeletons: “A la luz del ocote examinó el pectoral de oro con representaciones de dioses y fechas que no pudo entender. Lo guardó debajo de sus ropas” (130) (By the light of the torch he examined the golden chest girdle with representations of gods and dates he couldn’t understand. He tucked it away under his clothes). His ignorance of the meaning of the artifacts he uncovers will not last long, as soon the conquistador will become irrevocably invested in the spiritual significance of the idols among which he saunters. In this cave, the sacred rituals of the Other will take on a more profound and ambiguous meaning for Gonzalo Dávila as the trajectory of the violent conquistador becomes inextricably linked to the sacred. During their grave-robbing expedition, as they stand in the cavernous tomb among numerous skeletons, Francisco Huehuetl tells Gonzalo Dávila of the golden mask of Mictlantecuhtli, the lord of the land of the

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dead, which he says will make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. He who has the courage to wear it, says the otherworldly guide, will have the magical power to locate treasure, will be able to walk through walls and be transported through telekinesis, will be able to attract all the women he lusts after, and will be resistant to disease and seven deaths. The conquistador is eager to find such a mask, which the minister of the idols promises will make him richer than Hernán Cortés. Here we see Gonzalo Dávila’s desire to be both conqueror and conquered, expanding his boundaries as he seeks out an object of sacred indigenous beliefs, trusting the veracity of his guide’s account that he can use it for his own enrichment. Attraction mixes with repulsion in the conquistador’s reaction, however, when the phantom guide asks him whether he will have the courage to put the mask on, as he knows that such a powerful icon will also be frightening. Gonzalo Dávila soon realizes that he is already in Mictlan, the land of the dead, when Francisco Huehuetl points out his own bones, revealing that the minister of the idols was decapitated by the Spaniards in the temple massacre. Horrified by the skeletons that line the walls, the conquistador nevertheless follows his spectral guide through a series of caverns, stopping periodically to fill his bag with spoils. His reaction to his surroundings is filled with terror, but in spite of his awe, he is not intimidated to the extent of ceasing his pillaging. His response to the sacred objects he uncovers is one that mixes reverence with utter lack of respect: “Aventó lejos de sí una cabeza. . . . Pisoteó un esqueleto. . . . Se sentó sobre un bulto de piedra, igual que si el difunto fuera una silla en el camino. Alzó un cráneo de cristal de roca y como a un dado lo arrojó a lo lejos” (133) (He cast away a head from himself. . . . He stepped on a skeleton. . . . He sat on a fossilized form, as if the deceased were a chair on the path. He raised a rock crystal skull and tossed it away as if it were dice). His reverence for the indigenous relics, however, is demonstrated by the fact that he believes in the power of the golden mask. The conquistador will soon have no choice but to unequivocally respect indigenous rituals, because he will form part of them, as his flirtation with the sacred becomes a permanent engagement. After following the ghostly minister of the idols through a myriad of tunnels where he witnesses yet more hideous sights, Gonzalo Dávila finally spies the promised mask. The conquistador’s reaction is a mixture of repulsion toward the images of death that surround him and attraction toward the gold that he idolizes: Junto a Gonzalo Dávila sonaron sus cascabeles las víboras, pulularon gusanos y alacranes en el cadáver de un hombre gigantesco tirado sobre el estiércol de los murciélagos. Igual que si se contemplara tumbado en ese cuerpo, retrocedió asustado, quiso irse de Mictlan y de su propia vida, escapar de su condición mortal. Pero desde arriba de un altar lo miró la máscara de oro de Mictlantecuhtli. (136; emphasis mine) (Next to Gonzalo Dávila snakes shook their rattles and worms and scorpions swarmed in the cadaver of a giant man slumped over the droppings of bats. As if he had found

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himself knocked inside this body, he lurched back in fear, he wanted to leave Mictlan and his own life, escape from his mortal condition. But from above an altar Mictlantecuhtli’s golden mask gazed at him.)

As the conquistador’s attraction increases, so does his repulsion. Of note in the above passage is Gonzalo Dávila’s anxiety of identification, because what he most fears are not the dead bodies per se, but the skeletons as spectral glimpses of his own death. To accede to his lust for gold and pursue the mask is to embrace his own death. In this labyrinthine tomb, they finally encounter the lord of Mictlan, who tells Gonzalo Dávila that he will never leave this place where past, present, and future commingle: “Saldrás de aquí, en cuerpo vivo, pero tu espíritu se quedó aquí” (137) (You will leave here, with your body alive, but your spirit remained here). Knowing that the only thing the conquistadors lust after is gold, Mictlantecuhtli attempts to seduce Gonzalo Dávila into death using his golden mask as bait. “Ven, acuéstate conmigo” (Come, lie down with me), he begs, and later adds, “Ven, abrázame, te daré todo el oro del mundo” (137) (Come, embrace me, I will give you all the gold in the world). Mictlantecuhtli offers to let the conquistador keep the mask if he will only put it on, while his female consort, the mistress of Mictlan, reminds him that he already agreed to wear the mask. When the conquistador resists, the lord of the dead tempts him with treasures greater than those of Cortés, Moctezuma, the pope, and the emperor. Simultaneously enticed by the gold and horrified by the death that surrounds him, Gonzalo Dávila hesitates. The seduction is consummated when the mask magically floats in the air and adheres to the conquistador’s face. As this happens, he feels his lips sealed but hears his own voice entreating that he be allowed to don the mask. He lurches backward, afraid that the mask will burn him, but he is unable to avoid it, as it becomes permanently melded to his flesh. From this moment on, both violence and the sacred will characterize the living death of Gonzalo Dávila, until the novel culminates in his sacrifice in the guise of the god Tezcatlipoca. Going Native in the New World: Gonzalo Dávila Living and Dying in Colonial Mexico The early colonial Mexico City in which conquistador-turned-settler Gonzalo Dávila dwells is one that is still being built on top of the leveled imperial capital of Tenochtitlan, where churches are erected over the ruins of Aztec temples, with the blood and sweat of indigenous toil. It is also still haunted by its original inhabitants who died during the battles of conquest, but still roam the city. In the emerging colonial administration, the cruelest of the conquistadors will become the cruelest of the encomenderos. In keeping with the character that he has established up until this point, we can be assured that Gonzalo Dávila will use the powers granted him by the golden mask of Mictlantecuhtli not for good, but for evil.

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Juan Cabezón, who received nothing when the spoils of war were distributed, has managed to establish an inn, while Gonzalo Dávila has a great house on the Calle de Tacuba.7 There he lives with many indigenous servants and concubines, including Juana Tomatlán, who claims to be Mexican although the conquistador brought her from the Caribbean islands, and their mestizo son, Gonzalito. In his fortresslike house with a coat of arms above the door, the encomendero locks himself up all day and comes out only at night. He permits Gonzalito to be raised in his house, but does not recognize him publicly. Like his father and namesake, Gonzalito is cruel and heartless with those he deems his racial and social inferiors. Branded as a slave by his father to ensure that he will never claim his legacy, as a child Gonzalito sleeps with the dogs and is himself animal-like, barely aware of his surroundings or able to communicate. When his mother takes him to Mictlan where men worship a bat, however, he becomes a large, imposing, yet morally weak youth. Verbally and physically abusive, the mestizo youth tortures animals and slave children and rapes a young girl. Here Gonzalito represents a monstrous hybrid of the sort examined by Robert Young in Colonial Desire, embodying the worst of the Spanish culture with which he largely identifies. When Gonzalo Dávila banishes him from his fortress, Gonzalito follows his father around on the street like a shadow. The conquistador admits him back into the household to prevent him from going around town dressed as a governor and claiming that Hernán Cortés has named him his successor. When Juan Cabezón seeks out his friend several months into the reconstruction of Mexico-Tenochtitlan to tell him the rumor that Cortés is dead, he finds Gonzalo Dávila at one of his many haciendas, dressed in gold and with a golden face.8 He is surrounded by sacrificial priests, and they are watching a Tlaxcalan and an Aztec fight to the death for their entertainment. At one point, the conquistador manages to remove the mask, but he recognizes, “Si la máscara se convierte en mi cara, tendré más de cien años y nadie se dará cuenta de ello. . . . Pero un día el círculo de la máscara se cerrará sobre mi cara y me asfixiará” (186) (If the mask turns into my face, I could be over a hundred years old and no one would know. . . . But one day the circle of the mask will close over my face and suffocate me). The encomendero’s reputation as a violent and powerful sorcerer soon grows in Mexico City: “En la ciudad, la gente murmuraba de Gonzalo Dávila, decían que no era más que un rufián convertido en hechicero, un conquistador enriquecido con la miseria de los indios que tenía encomendados” (189) (In the city, people murmured that Gonzalo Dávila was no more than a ruffian turned sorcerer, a conquistador enriched by the misery of the Indians who were commended to his keeping). His neighbors further say that he possesses a smoky obsidian mirror in which he can see hidden things and hear what is said of him. Here it is clear that the promises the minister of the idols made in Mictlan have come true. As one might have predicted, Gonzalo Dávila uses these magical powers to his personal advantage. The rumors go on, “Se

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contaba que permanecía horas enteras encerrado en una pieza oscura mirando dónde estaban enterrados los tesoros de los mexicanos y luego iba a sacarlos con dos papas sacrificadores que tenía a su servicio” (189) (They also said that he would stay for hours on end locked inside a dark room seeing where the treasures of the Mexicans were buried and then he would go to dig them up with two sacrificial priests whom he had in his service). So far, all that the lord of the land of the dead and his ministers had promised has proved true, as Gonzalo Dávila has used the sacred gifts to obtain wealth beyond his wildest imaginings. Rather than being a source of unadulterated gratification, however, the gifts derived from the indigenous belief system provide him with the mixed pleasure of colonial desire; as the people of Mexico City further rumor: [E]n ese espejo se veía en todas sus edades y estados, desde el instante de su nacimiento hasta el de su muerte; mas, desesperado por su propio destino, salía con mucha agitación de la habitación; para luego regresar a ella, fascinado por el terror que le causaba su fin. (189) ([I]n this mirror he could see himself in all his ages and states, from the instant of his birth to that of his death; but, desperate over his own destiny, he would come out of his room greatly agitated, only to later return to it, fascinated by the terror that his end caused in him.)

Rather than bringing him pure satisfaction, the magical powers he possesses are also a source of consternation for the conquistador, who becomes anxious when he sees himself in different stages in the mirror. As with other forms of colonial desire, here terror is mixed with fascination, even as he contemplates his own death. The third-person narrator continues to tell the tale of the conquistador’s magical powers through the voices of the residents of Mexico City, who claim that Gonzalo Dávila has himself become the god of the smoking mirror, Tezcatlipoca, who sees and hears all, and in whose temple was found the obsidian mirror.9 The conquistador also has a ceremonial vase dedicated to the cult of Tezcatlipoca; the vase is in the shape of a tiger, representing animal ferocity, to whose fury a victim would be sacrificed. Not all of what his ghostly guide to the underworld told him is true, however, since Gonzalo Dávila was promised that he would be resistant to disease, yet it turns out that he has contracted syphilis. Like the cannibalism examined in the previous chapter, and sodomy, which is the subject of the following chapter, syphilis is an emblem of alterity whose origin is always deemed by Westerners to be elsewhere.10 Whereas cannibalism has been the quintessential mark of otherness in the Western world from its earliest recorded histories, and sodomy was said in Spain to have been imported from France or Italy—while the English called it le vice, referring to the French as its originators, and the Italians il vizio inglese, referring to the English—likewise, syphilis was called the morbo

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gallicum, also implying a connection to France, and alternately said to have been imported from the New World to the Old or from Old to New. Francisco Guerra notes the connection between syphilis and sodomy perceived as diseases of the Other: .

This political connotation tainted sodomy and bestiality in the eyes of the Spaniards with an alien nature very similar to that already described by the medical historians in the case of syphilis; the Spaniards called it the French disease, the French the Neapolitan malady, the Germans the Spanish scabies and the rest bubas from the Indies and so every nation cursed its neighbour or enemy with the provenance of the venereal disease. Likewise the Spaniards refused to acknowledge among themselves the existence of sodomy and blamed the foreigners for its importation.11

In Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, David Cook cites a passage from a 1574 medical tract regarding what were believed to be the origins of syphilis: “So they called it the French sickness. The French thought that since it was in Naples and from those of that land they had caught it, they called it the Neapolitan illness. The Germans seeing that they were infected through intercourse with the Spanish, called it the Spanish sarna, and others called it measles from the Indies, and with much truth, for the illness came from there.”12 Its presumed sources perpetually deferred from one place to another, syphilis, like sodomy and cannibalism, is always believed to have originated elsewhere. While both church and state claimed that the conquest was God’s punishment for Amerindian sodomy, Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote in his Historia de las Indias that syphilis was divine punishment for the Europeans’ oppression of the native Americans. Modern scientists have been unable to pinpoint the precise origins of this venereal disease, whose appearance in Europe coincides almost exactly with the time of the discovery of America. This, combined with the fact that the Amerindians had greater resistance to the disease than Europeans, has led medical historians to believe that it was transmitted from the New World to the Old. As Sander Gilman observes in reference to syphilis, “Imported from the Americas, it was the Native Americans’ return gift for Columbus’s present of smallpox.” Gilman’s statement forms a mirror image of the words of Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara, who five centuries earlier had seen smallpox as the punishment meted upon the Amerindians for their transmission of syphilis: “It seems to me that is how they were repaid for the bubas which they gave our men.”13 In Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, Gonzalo Dávila consults a number of experts on the disease that came to constitute a veritable plague in Mexico City. According to the narrator, syphilis had become so commonplace in the colony that a man who did not bear inscribed upon his body the visible marks of having had the disease could not be considered truly masculine. Being a macho conquistador with many indigenous concubines, Gonzalo Dávila is afflicted with syphilitic boils in spite of the minister of the idols’ promise that the mask would make him resistant to disease. Arid-

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jis’s character reiterates the notion that the source of syphilis is always attributed to someplace else: “Los italianos lo llaman ‘mal francés,’ los franceses ‘mal de Nápoles,’ los portugueses ‘sarna de Castilla,’ y nosotros los que sufrimos de esta enfermedad, simplemente la llamamos ‘mal de amor’ ” (191) (The Italians call it the French disease, the French call it the Neapolitan disease, the Portuguese call it Spanish scabies, and those of us who suffer from this ill simply call it “love sickness”). Although he relies principally on European medical science to help him cure his bubas, Gonzalo Dávila’s interest in native culture includes their medical knowledge. When his niece becomes lovesick in the emotional sense, the conquistador initially calls a Spanish doctor, who fails to cure her, then, at the suggestion of his indigenous servant, he calls an Amerindian doctor who gives her native remedies. Although they also fail to cure her, the encomendero demonstrates his simultaneous respect and distrust for native culture, calling upon the curanderos, or native healers, for his niece but not for himself. Gonzalo Dávila’s engagement with both the violent and the sacred continues alongside his search for a cure for syphilis. The epitome of the cruel and insensitive encomendero, he rules his household with an iron hand. Although he disappears for days on end, the members of his staff remain on constant alert, because upon his return he must find everything in the same place or will punish those responsible for breaking the household rhythm. His mestizo son, Gonzalito, is equally violent and also becomes engaged with the sacred. Gonzalito’s mother, Juana Tomatlán, is the one who initiates him in native rites. She is said to dismember animals to cast spells in an effort to regain the attentions of the conquistador. Gonzalito, like his father, seeks the company of the papas to participate in their idolatrous rituals and is even rumored to eat human flesh. As the novel’s most salient example of mestizaje, Gonzalito represents the most violent possibilities of both Spanish and indigenous cultures: his father’s greed and cruelty and the native belief in human sacrifice. Covetous of his father’s gold, Gonzalito will ultimately betray Gonzalo Dávila and lead him to his doom. By 1559, Juan Cabezón has been reunited with his son, the friar Juan de Flandes, only to see him die just after the friar’s mother, the protagonist’s long-lost love, Isabel de la Vega, arrives in Mexico. At this point, Juan Cabezón must be more than ninety years old, and he and Gonzalo Dávila are two of the few surviving conquistadors. Not having seen his comrade-in-arms for some time, Juan Cabezón seeks him out at his house on the Calle de Tacuba. [L]o halló en un aposento penumbroso con la cabeza coronada de plumas, la barba y el pelo teñidos de tiza, una pierna pintada hasta la mitad de negro y con cascabeles y sonajas de obsidiana en los pies. Septuagenario y ungido, encarnaba al dios Tezcatlipoca en su condición erótica, antes del sacrificio ritual. (364) ([H]e found him in a dark room with his head crowned with feathers, his beard and hair tinted with chalk, one leg painted black to the knee and with obsidian bells and rattles

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In his godlike state, carnal pleasure is still available to the conquistador: “Compartían su intimidad cuatro doncellas indias que se turnaban una a otra en darle placeres para evitar que cayera en estados de melancolía, inconvenientes para el ánimo de un dios que va a morir” (364) (Four Indian maidens took turns giving him pleasure to avoid his falling into states of melancholy, inconvenient for the mood of a god who is going to die). Sitting motionlessly in the dark, as if in a trance, Gonzalo Dávila is at first insensible to the entrance of his friend. Juan Cabezón, in turn, is barely able to recognize Gonzalo Dávila gone native, who has incorporated the Other in the self to the extent that he no longer resembles the conquistador he once was. The conquistador’s very body has been transformed by his transcultural investment in the rituals of the Other: “La blancura de su piel se veía ahora alterada no sólo por la tiza sino por una suerte de putrefacción de la carne semejante a la de la muerte” (364) (The whiteness of his skin now looked altered not only by the chalk but by a kind of putrefaction of the flesh similar to that of death). His formerly bright eyes are dark and cast a shadow over the rest of his face. His body is adorned in indigenous fashion with stones inserted in his nose and lower lip, and rings on his fingers.14 In his hand, he holds the smoking mirror that has a hole in the middle for the god Tezcatlipoca to look out upon the world. Juan Cabezón soon realizes that the conquistador’s lips are sewn together and some sacrificial priests are speaking for him. From somewhere in the room, a voice explains how his existence was changed when he entered the land of the dead: “Un dios entró en mi cuerpo desde la noche que me puse la máscara de Mictlantecuhtli. . . . Poco a poco tomó mis facciones, ocupó mis pensamientos, dijo mis palabras, me sacó de mí mismo” (365) (A god entered my body since the night I put on the mask of Mictlantecuhtli. . . . Little by little it took over my features, occupied my thoughts, said my words, displaced me from myself). When Juan Cabezón asks who this god is, the voice responds, “El que es yo” (He who is I), to which Juan Cabezón adds, “Parecéis muerto en vida” (365) (You look like the living dead). The encomendero-turned-god remains somber in spite of the efforts of the four maidens to cheer him up. Unable to do anything for his friend and afraid of seeing the mask of death on his face, Juan Cabezón abandons Gonzalo Dávila to the destiny he has carved out for himself, “sabiendo que había dejado a su amigo abismado en una noche impenetrable, la de su propia alma” (366) (knowing he had left his friend plunged in an abyss of impenetrable night, that of his own soul). Although at first he craved for the purpose of greed the mask Mictlantecuhtli offered him, the anxiety of identification emerges when Gonzalo Dávila sees that his life is at stake. As he realizes by now, when humans impersonate gods in the Aztec ritual, it is because they are about to be sacrificed. Soon after Juan Cabezón aban-

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dons his friend in the house that has become a labyrinthine tomb, Gonzalo Dávila escapes with the intention of returning to Castile. Juan Cabezón realizes that the conquistador’s escape from his sepulchral home is also an effort to flee from himself: “[I]maginó a su amigo escapando de sus perseguidores, y de sí mismo” (367) ([H]e imagined his friend escaping from his persecutors, and from himself ). By this time, it is clear that Gonzalo Dávila has gone native to the extent that all anxiety surrounding otherness must be directed toward fear of the “Other within.” Gonzalo Dávila’s flight from his fate is not successful, however, as his horse breaks a leg and he attempts to complete his journey on foot through the same volcanoes where the conquistadors had passed forty years earlier in their march toward Tenochtitlan. In contrast to the ecstasy he had felt then, now the impersonator of Tezcatlipoca is out of his mind with fear, apprehensive that at any moment he will be hunted down. Although he had sought the wealth and power that his association with the indigenous sacred rituals had brought him, he now reflects, “Ser poderoso es un oficio desastrado en estas tierras y más entre estos malditos idólatras que no han perdido la costumbre de sacrificar” (368) (Being powerful is a dirty business in this land and even more among these accursed idolaters who haven’t given up the habit of sacrificing). The conquistador-turned-god passes through several stages of denial before accepting his fate. Talking to himself as he trudges through the mountains, he explains that he had denied his divine identity to the Aztec priests: “Ya les he dicho cientos de veces que no soy su dios, ni tampoco soy Hernán Cortés, que me dejen en paz” (368) (I have told them hundreds of times that I am not their god, nor am I Hernán Cortés, that they should leave me alone). But the sacrificial papas have not accepted his denial: “No entienden, ven en mí a alguien que no veo. Una fuerza maléfica los induce a que me miren como a otro y por eso me persiguen y me cazan” (368) (They don’t understand, they see in me someone I don’t see. A malevolent force induces them to look at me as if I were another and for this reason they pursue and hunt me). The anxiety caused by overidentification with the Other leads him to deny the situation altogether: Todo es un sueño que vivo, no es cierto que estoy aquí, que piso esta desolación. Despertaré y volveré a ser yo mismo; rechazaré la máscara de oro y jamás me pondré la cara del señor de los muertos. (368) (It is all a dream that I am living, it is not true that I am here, that I tread on this desolation. I will wake up and return to being myself; I will reject the golden mask, and I will never put on the face of the lord of the dead.)

But it is too late to reject Mictlantecuhtli’s gift, as he had earlier accepted the golden mask along with the explicit and implicit conditions that accompanied it. The conquistador’s only desire at this stage is to retrace his steps back to his point of origin: “Andaré día y noche, hasta llegar al mar. Desde Veracruz, reharé los pasos

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que me trajeron a México, volveré a Cuba y a la Española y a Trujillo” (368) (I will walk day and night until I reach the sea. From Veracruz, I will retrace the steps that brought me to Mexico, I will return to Cuba and to Hispaniola and from there to Trujillo). But it is impossible to undo what has been done: the conquest of Mexico has in fact been accomplished. The conquistador cannot recross these same mountains with the youthful enthusiasm of arriving in the New World full of dreams of wealth and glory, because he has already achieved these goals, and learned something of the culture of the previous inhabitants of this world at whose expense his earthly treasure was obtained. The conquistador cannot go back and reverse his actions. Earlier, during the conquest of Tenochtitlan, he had encountered a man who was in the same situation in which he now finds himself, the sacrificial victim dressed as Huitzilopochtli. Although Gonzalo Dávila–Tezcatlipoca would like to be left alone, he had no such consideration for the human incarnation of Huitzilopochtli, whom along with other Spaniards he butchered and ransacked. After the fictionalized Pedro de Alvarado attacks the already decapitated man, “Gonzalo Dávila lo asistía, arrancando al dios su collar de corazones y calaveras de oro, su báculo en forma de serpiente” (98) (Gonzalo Dávila assisted him, yanking from the god his necklace with golden hearts and skulls, his staff in the shape of a serpent). Even after the man is clearly dead, the two conquistadors continue to beat and stab him and wipe their swords on his clothing and adornments in a final sign of their utter lack of respect for the vanquished. Now that the conquistador himself is the intended sacrificial victim, he hopes in vain that his life will be spared. Like those he conquered, he is now an object of loving conquest, one to be strangely revered for his strength and mistrusted for his greed and cruelty. By the time he is a fugitive in the mountains, Gonzalo Dávila knows too much about the indigenous culture and belief system to suppose that he will survive, because as 1559 draws to a close and 1560 begins, the end of the Fifth Sun, one of the Aztec calendar’s fifty-two-year cycles, is also approaching. The conquistador has already been marked as a sacrificial victim, and thus he sees that the apocalypse is no longer a matter of concern only for the Other, but is within himself. The hour of his death has already been appointed: “La muerte me comerá, me devorará, como me he comido a mí mismo cada día. . . . [L]a tiniebla de afuera se ha metido dentro de mí” (368– 69) (Death will eat me, will devour me, as I have devoured myself every day. . . . [T]he darkness without is now within myself). He is now inseparable from the apocalyptic cycle of the Fifth Sun: Los tzitzimimes, monstruos del crepúsculo, bajarán del cielo, será la señal. El fin del Quinto Sol se aproxima y vendrán a hartarse de hombres. . . . Los tzitzimimes saldrán de mí mismo, nacerán de mis ojos y mi boca; devorarán hombres, me devorarán. (369) (The tzitzimimes, monsters of the dusk, will come down from the heavens, that will be the sign. The end of the Fifth Sun is approaching, and they will come to eat their fill of

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men. . . . The tzitzimimes will emanate from me myself, they will be born from my eyes and my mouth; they will devour men, they will devour me.)

Although he had tried to deny his situation, Gonzalo Dávila recognizes that his fate is inexorably bound to the life cycles of the Aztecs, and he is unable to escape the force of the sacred rituals he once embraced to his own advantage. Alone in the mountains, Gonzalo Dávila’s mind starts to play tricks on him. Hearing the sound of drums and conch shells, in an impotent gesture he draws his sword and wields it in the air against an invisible enemy, signaling the loss of his grasp on reality. Still believing he can elude his captors, when the priests overtake him in the mountains he threatens to kill them, in the name of eradicating idolatry in the land. Although throughout Memorias he has shown little interest in the Christian religion, he now prays to Christ not to let him die right away, because his soul has been blackened by contact with native rituals. Whereas he had once sought the company of the papas, who were constant guests in his house and hacienda for his entertainment and enrichment, the sacrificial priests are now a horrifying sight to him: “[L]o petrificó la visión de una cuadrilla de sacerdotes vestidos de negro, embijados de la cara, el pelo hirsuto hasta la cintura, las uñas largas, las orejas perforadas llenas de sangre” (370) ([H]e was petrified by the vision of a band of priests dressed in black, their faces painted, their shaggy hair down to their waists, their nails long, their pierced ears full of blood). In keeping with the dynamic of the anxiety of identification, what once had attracted Gonzalo Dávila now repulses him. When four priests come toward him with obsidian knives, he temporarily escapes into a cave where he finds other victims slated for sacrifice. It is ultimately his own son who betrays his whereabouts: Gonzalito lo descubrió. Semejante a un guerrero huaxteca, la cabeza cubierta con plumas amarillas de periquillo toz-nene, condujo a los papas adonde estaba escondido, con un grito de alegría que aterrorizó a Gonzalo Dávila. (371) (Gonzalito discovered him. Like a Huasteca warrior, his head covered with yellow feathers of a toz-nene parakeet, he led the papas to where he was hiding, with a shout of joy that terrorized Gonzalo Dávila.)

Covetous of his father’s treasure and equally imbricated in the native culture and religion, the mestizo son himself delivers the conquistador–god incarnate to the priests who intend to sacrifice him. Soon thereafter, Gonzalito is seen in a procession in full regalia and with no remorse: “[A]pareció Gonzalito con ropas de virrey y semblante de rico, muy satisfecho de sí, como si ya hubiese heredado la fortuna de su padre y éste ya fuese difunto” (385) (Gonzalito appeared dressed as a viceroy and looking like a wealthy man, very satisfied with himself, as if he had already inherited his fa-

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ther’s fortune and the latter were already dead). There is no doubt that Gonzalito’s denunciation is malicious, as he does not even wait for his father to be sacrificed before he begins to spend his inheritance. Here, the novel’s most prominent representation of mestizaje proves to be a monstrous replica of the Spanish father with whom he primarily identifies. The final section of the novel is narrated in the first-person voice of Juan Cabezón, who witnesses the immolation of his former comrade-in-arms in the name of ensuring the continuation of the Aztec life cycles. He understands the sacrifice to be necessary within Aztec cosmology, because the Fifth Sun will not rise and the monstrous tzitzimimes will devour everyone unless blood is ritually shed. The narrator seems to believe that the world may truly end should the Aztecs fail to renew their covenant with their gods, and he reflects that he might be wasting his final hours writing his memoirs. Wavering between the Judeo-Christian ethic and indigenous Mexican belief systems, or perhaps trying to hedge his bets, Juan Cabezón wonders whether he should commend his soul to God or to the lord of the dead. Although he now wishes he could reverse the process, Gonzalo Dávila’s transculturation is evident in the names the Aztecs give him: Cortés Molipili, Malinche Xiuhtenentl, Dávila Mopili, and Gonzalo Xiuhtenentl. As these names indicate, his identity has melded with that of Hernán Cortés, who had died years earlier, but whom the Aztecs sacrifice by proxy through Gonzalo Dávila. Throughout the scenes leading up to the blood sacrifice, the names of Hernán Cortés and Gonzalo Dávila will be conflated. In the procession toward his own sacrifice, the dynamic of colonial desire is apparent in the conquistador’s reaction to his inevitable fate: Borracho por el brebaje que le han dado, flota en el espacio vago de sí mismo, lucha desesperadamente por despertar; pero vencido por una euforia ante la que no puede rebelarse, se abandona enseguida a una alegría aterrorizada. (378) (Drunken with the brew they have given him, he floats in the vague space of himself, struggles desperately to wake up; but overwhelmed by a euphoria against which he cannot rebel, he abandons himself at once to a terrorized rapture.)

The self becomes Other as the conquistador marches toward his death, imagining himself outside his own body: “Y ríe, como si lo que le sucede le pasara a otro, le ocurriese en un sueño o fuese el recuerdo de algo vivido en otra existencia” (378) (And he laughs, as if what is happening to him were happening to another, as if it were happening in a dream or as if it were the memory of something lived in another existence). Up until the last moment, Gonzalo Dávila continues to grapple between the impulse to resist or embrace the native ritual. The world does not end that night, as a new life cycle is initiated with the blood sacrifice of Gonzalo Dávila. The final pages of the novel narrate his immolation at the hands of Aztec priests who form a generation of papas trained clandestinely, hidden

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from the surveillance of the Spanish clergy. Gonzalo Dávila–Tezcatlipoca’s limbs are held by four priests while another cuts out his heart with the ceremonial knife and offers it to Huitzilopochtli. The heart is still beating as the papa raises it up, [h]asta que el corazón, caliente y palpitante, deja de vaher y de moverse. Entonces, lo arroja al fuego, para atizarlo y alimentarlo, y rocía la sangre sobre él, para bendecirlo. Al lado, el cuerpo del muerto divino es consumido por las brasas. (388) ([u]ntil the heart, warm and throbbing, stops steaming and moving. Then, he hurls it on the fire, to stir it up and feed it, and sprinkles the blood over it, to bless it. Nearby, the body of the divine dead one is consumed by the embers.)

The novel ends as Gonzalo Dávila’s ashes are transported to a secret place, while Juan Cabezón reunites with his beloved Isabel de la Vega and the Aztec world prepares for another fifty-two-year covenant with the gods. Colonial desire for difference often takes the form of attraction to the elements of native cultures that are perceived by the colonizer as being most “Other,” that is, elements that strike a nerve as being markedly distinct from the colonizer’s religious, sexual, and cultural values. For this reason, cannibalism and human sacrifice are often emphasized in narratives about non-Western cultures. The case of the fictional Gonzalo Dávila’s interest in Amerindian idolatry and sorcery takes identification with the colonized to the extent of “going native.” As an example of the anxiety of identification, the conquistador’s attraction to indigenous cults is counterbalanced by extreme contempt and violence toward the native Other. There are significant literary precedents for the idea of “going native” and specifically for the use of native beliefs as a means of manipulating the colonized, the most celebrated of these being the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Although he is deeply involved in indigenous sacred rituals, Aridjis’s Gonzalo Dávila, like Conrad’s Kurtz, is clearly complicit with the colonial administration. In the case of Aridjis’s conquistador, the contempt and brutality toward the natives that accompany his use of their rituals can be seen as a defense mechanism against excessive identification with the Other. If interest in the supernatural expresses an attraction toward an exotic aspect of indigenous culture, the conquistador’s cruel treatment of the Amerindians can be seen as a psychological defense caused by fear of the “Other within.” The anxiety of identification is clearly present in the conquistador’s brutality toward the natives that serves here as a means of preserving his cultural identity in the face of desire for the Other, and desire to be the Other. In Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, as in the other novels examined here, the competing attraction and repulsion of colonial desire felt by the colonizer toward the colonized serve to deconstruct the rhetoric of a conquest that is theoretically based on the unqualified domination of the Other.

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Latin American authors’ need in the years surrounding 1992 to confront the Iberian side of their heritage is expressed in Aridjis’s Memorias in the figure of the conquistador who is both fascinated and terrified by indigenous sacred rites. The fear of the hybrid as monstrous, which Robert Young discusses in Colonial Desire, is embodied here in the form of the mestizo Gonzalito, who represents the most violent aspects of both Spanish and Amerindian cultures. In contrast to the texts examined by Young in which European authors write about hybridity in order to express their fears of miscegenation, in this case it is a Mexican author confronting the hybridity of his own culture, born not from a peaceful transculturation, but from the violent conflict of the conquest. With its representation of colonial desire and the anxiety of identification, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo deconstructs the rhetoric of conquest by examining this critical moment in Latin American history through the ambivalent lens of the conquistador gone native.

3 Eros and Colonization Homosocial Colonial Desire in Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán

exican novelist Herminio Martínez has written four works that fit into the corpus of recent Latin American historical novels that rewrite the chronicles of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. These are his Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán (1990), a narrative recounted from the ironic first-person perspective of the cruelest of the conquistadors of Mexico, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán; Las puertas del mundo (1992), a pseudoautobiography recounting the fantastic and monstrous discoveries of Christopher Columbus; Invasores del paraíso (1998), the story of conquistador Francisco de Montejo and his son and nephew of the same name; and El regreso (1999), narrated from the viewpoint of a fictional survivor of Magellan’s voyage circumnavigating the globe.1 Highlighted in the Diario maldito are the themes of the fictionalized Guzmán’s enslavement and branding of the native peoples; his obsession with gold and with the conquest of a new province; his enmity toward conquistador Hernán Cortés and inquisitor Juan de Zumárraga; his capture, torture, and execution of Calzoncin, Tarascan chief of Michoacán;2 and his paranoid persecution of sodomites. Of these abuses and intrigues, this latter is the least documented in reference to the historical Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, yet it is perhaps the most salient element of Martínez’s novel. It is my contention that the historical fiction Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán represents the conquistador ironically as a homophobic sadist who is subject to homoerotic desire in order to highlight the contradictions inherent in the gendered rhetoric of conquest. The concepts of colonial desire and the homosocial have been developed separately within current postcolonial theory and gender theory, respectively, and both point to contradictions within the Western notion of desire. Whereas Robert Young’s theory of colonial desire explores the inherent ambivalence of the colonial situation, focusing on the simultaneous attraction and repulsion felt by the colonizer toward the colonized, the concept of the homosocial, developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,

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points to another contradiction in Western culture, in that patriarchy encourages homoerotic desire through male bonding while simultaneously discouraging the expression of this desire in homosexual behavior. This chapter seeks to unite these two categories of paradoxical desire—colonial desire as simultaneous attraction and repulsion, and the homosocial as coexistent homoeroticism and homophobia—in a theory of homosocial colonial desire. In Martínez’s novel, the fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán who serves as narrator manifests both attraction and repulsion toward the Amerindian male, and combines this ambivalent homoerotic desire with homophobic persecution of “sodomites” in the New World. By calling attention to these contradictions within colonial discourse, the homosocial colonial desire of Martínez’s Diario maldito deconstructs the rhetoric of an empire that ostensibly seeks to suppress homoeroticism in both colonized and colonizer. Although it maintains a focus on a major historical figure, as do most new historical novels, Martínez’s Diario maldito uses an ironic first-person perspective to undermine the rhetoric of conquest by pointing to an ideological inconsistency within it: the fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán is represented as a conquistador explicitly obsessed with the persecution of sodomites but also tempted by homoerotic desire. In the Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán, historiographic metafiction is used to point to the gaps in the rhetoric of conquest, because Martínez’s portrayal of conquistador Nuño de Guzmán as a homophobic maniac who is nevertheless subject to homoerotic temptation problematizes the notion of a conquest that ostensibly seeks to impose compulsory heterosexuality but at the same time through its process of systematic domination genders the Amerindians female, then symbolically rapes them.3 Whereas the original documentation on the historical figure Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán represents him as covetous and sadistic, but not as especially obsessed with sodomy, it is not unreasonable for this fiction to assert the possibility of such an obsession, as the conquistadors in general were exceedingly preoccupied with the persecution of sodomites. Indeed, the Spanish chroniclers and historians from the beginning of the conquest were constantly remarking that the Amerindians from the islands and mainland were grandes sodomitas (great sodomites).4 So numerous are these references that scholar Francisco Guerra has been able to compile more than two hundred pages of citations from original sources referring to native sodomy; Guerra, whose explicit purpose in compiling these references is to condemn Amerindian homosexual practices, maintains that there are virtually no recorded cases of sodomy among the Spanish conquistadors. In early modern European discourse, the term sodomy was a catchall phrase for a variety of nonprocreative sexual behaviors, including both heterosexual and homosexual anal intercourse, and was also conflated with nonsexual crimes against church and state such as heresy, blasphemy, and sorcery.5 In the chronicles of conquest, the term sodomy does have these vague connotations, but at the same time does appear to refer specifically to samesex sexual acts.

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In Western European texts from the period of the conquest, sodomy is designated “the sin not to be named among Christians,” in Spanish most commonly referred to as el pecado nefando (the nefarious sin), el vicio abominable (the abominable vice), or pecado contra natura (sin against nature), and although it was ill-defined, it was considered an ecclesiastical and civil crime worthy of the death penalty.6 In the New World, accusations of widespread sodomy among the Amerindians conferred a “just title of conquest” according to Spanish legal norms, because, as discussed in Chapter 1, the Catholic monarchs did not wish to enslave their own subjects but did allow the conquistadors to subdue “rebels” who resisted their authority or Iberian cultural norms.7 Like cannibalism, sodomy was a quintessential emblem of otherness that enabled the Spaniards to enslave indigenous peoples merely on the basis of the insinuation that they engaged in an act that Europeans considered unnatural, whether or not there existed proof of such behavior among members of a particular native group.8 Thus, in Mexico, each time Hernán Cortés conquered or formed an alliance with an indigenous group, he declared that they must abandon the practice of sodomy without first verifying whether they practiced it. As Jonathan Goldberg observes, Cortés’s call to each community to give up the sin of sodomy forms part of a rhetorical convention that designates certain acts as most distinct from civilized European culture. Thus, the admonition to leave off “sodomy, idolatry, and cannibalism” became for Cortés a formulaic expression he would utter upon approaching each new community, as part of a ritual of performance of taking possession.9 In a July 8, 1530, letter to the crown, the historical Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán accuses the Mesoamericans of cannibalism, idolatry, human sacrifice, and other “abominable” sins; although he does not use the word sodomía, the use of the adjective abominable can be perceived as an indirect reference to sodomy.10 In that same 1530 letter, the historical Guzmán reports that in Cuitzeo, he burned what he considered to be a male prostitute dressed as a woman, a category anthropologists refer to as the berdache, a native American man who dresses and works as a woman, and generally takes the receptive role in intermale sexual relations.11 In reference to this berdache, the historical Guzmán records: [E]ntre esta gente que en esta isleta se defendió, peleó un hombre en ábito de muger, tan bien y tan animosamente, que fué el postrero que se tomó, de que todos estaban admirados ver tanto corazón y esfuerzo en una muger, porque se pensaba que así lo era por el ábito que traia, y despues de tomado, bióse ser hombre, y queriendo saber la cabsa por que traia ábito de muger, confesó que desde chequito lo havia acostumbrado y ganava su vida con los hombres al oficio, por donde mandé que fuese quemado, y así lo fué. ([A]mong these people that defended themselves on this islet, there fought a man dressed as a woman, so well and so spiritedly, that he was the last to be captured, of which all were amazed to see such heart and effort in a woman, since that was what we thought he was due to the clothing he wore, and after he was captured, he was seen to

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Although he does not refer to him as a sodomita, the expression “ganava su vida con los hombres al oficio” suggests that Guzmán considered the berdache a male prostitute.13 In spite of these two oblique references to what the Spaniards would have called sodomy, in the original documents overall, it is apparent that the historical Guzmán’s lust for gold and power, not his desire to persecute sodomites, was his driving force.14 Precisely because it is the thematic element of Martínez’s novel that is least grounded in historical documentation and thus the most elaborately fictionalized aspect, it is essential to examine what the conquistador’s fixation on the question of sodomy might mean in the context of a historical fiction that rewrites the conquest. At first glance, it appears that in Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán, male same-sex sexual behavior, when practiced by Europeans, is looked upon with more indulgence than when practiced by native Americans. In the novel’s only case of interracial sodomy, Guzmán protects the Spanish partner from punishment at the hands of the Inquisition, though he consistently punishes Amerindians accused of sodomy.15 Rather than a simple case of racial discrimination, however, this asymmetrical punishment responds to a complex social hierarchy that encompasses questions not only of race, but also of sexual orientation and gender identity. The following analysis of the fictionalized Guzmán’s decision to punish certain cases of sodomy and exonerate others will lead to an exploration of homosocial colonial desire as an ambiguous expression of the gendered hierarchy of conquest. In the Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán, the narrator’s attitude toward same-sex behavior appears to be informed by a hierarchical notion of intermale relations based on the patriarchal ideologies of certain ancient and modern cultures. Rather than the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual acts or identities, the classical Greek and Roman worlds distinguished between socially stratified insertive and receptive roles corresponding to masculine and feminine genders regardless of the biological sex of the partners; scholars assert that this gendered hierarchical model predominates in modern Latin American societies. Octavio Paz was one of the first thinkers to contend this when in 1950 he wrote that in order to preserve their closed bodies, Mexican males must avoid being penetrated, while the macho, or chingón, who penetrates another is socially acceptable: “It is likewise significant that masculine homosexuality is regarded with a certain indulgence insofar as the active agent is concerned. The passive agent is an abject, degraded being.”16 Later sociological studies have generally confirmed Paz’s assertion: for example, Roger Lancaster’s research on Nicaragua; Ian Lumsden’s book on Cuba; research by Joseph Carrier, by Matthew Gutmann, and by Guillermo Núñez Noriega on Mexico; Tomás Almaguer’s study of Chicano practices; Stephen Murray’s book on Latin American male homo-

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sexualities; and research by Richard Parker and by James Green on Brazilian sexual practices.17 According to the Greek and Roman model, the man who takes the insertive role confirms his social status above that of the man whom he penetrates, and an adult male cannot submit to being penetrated without forfeiting some degree of masculine privilege. In the ancient and modern cultures in which hierarchical male homosexuality is practiced, men who prefer the receptive role are socially stigmatized as effeminate, whereas the penetrator may be perceived as thoroughly masculine. Most scholars agree that in contemporary Latin America cultures, the receptive partner is considered effeminate and is socially stigmatized.18 It is even possible, in the context of a society in which hierarchical homosexuality is practiced, that the act of penetrating another male might be considered the quintessential confirmation of masculinity. In the world of ancient Greece, because the seduction of women and slaves was considered an easy conquest, the seduction of a young man was considered a greater challenge and thus a more highly valued social accomplishment.19 Scholars disagree as to whether this is the prevailing attitude in current Latin American sexual relations: based on his research in Nicaragua, Lancaster maintains that penetrating a male can increase machismo, and Gutmann claims that a phrase commonly heard among Mexico City male prostitutes is “‘You’re a puto if you don’t do it with a man.’ ” Ana Maria Alonso and Maria Teresa Koreck also assert that sexual relations with another man “may represent the ultimate validation of masculinity.” Stephen Murray contests Lancaster’s assertion, concluding rather that if his heterosexual reputation is well established, then the insertive partner neither gains nor loses masculine prestige, and even Lancaster acknowledges that participation in homosexual acts has the potential for stigmatizing the insertive partner by association with the receptive partner, especially if he relinquishes part of his masculine privilege by exposing his emotional vulnerability to another man.20 Recently, much critical attention has focused on the relationship between sexuality and conquest.21 In 1950, Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad drew an explicit comparison between conquest and the act of rape. More recently, Robert Young’s Colonial Desire, Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather, and Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire focus primarily on colonial heterosexual relations, which are historically significant because they produce miscegenated offspring. Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality is unique in that it treats both heterosexual and homosexual relations between colonizer and colonized, yet it downplays the coercion involved in these colonial sexual relations. Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries, Rudi Bleys’s Geography of Perversion, Richard Trexler’s Sex and Conquest, and José Piedra’s “Nationalizing Sissies” all focus specifically on the representation of intermale sexual relations in the conquest. Whereas Piedra’s article emphasizes the progressive notion that the colonized “sissies” can assert resistance through the seduction of the colonizing “bullies,” Goldberg, Bleys, and Trexler perceive colonial sexual relations in terms of a “genderization of conquest” in which the colonizer is mas-

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culinized and the colonized is feminized through the imposition of a coercive, penetrative domination. Homophobia and Homoeroticism toward Amerindians and Spaniards in Martínez’s Nuño de Guzmán When the Diario maldito begins, narrator Nuño de Guzmán is on a ship on his way to the Mexican Gulf Coast, where he will assume his post as governor of the Province of Pánuco, with the expectation of later being appointed president of the first Royal Audience of New Spain, the highest position of state authority in a territory that has not yet been assigned its first viceroy. While still on his transatlantic crossing, the narrator begins to articulate his monomaniacal and diabolical dream of branding thousands of slaves and founding a prodigious urban center to be named Guzmania.22 Even before the fictionalized Guzmán has set foot on American soil, he expresses his incipient fear that sodomites will interfere with his grand design: “A los maricones los he hecho vigilar para que no forniquen con los hombres cuya misión es la guerra” (18) (I arranged for the queers to be under surveillance so that they don’t fornicate with the men whose mission is war). This distinction between maricones and men maintains a hierarchy in which the receptive partner in an intermale homosexual act is perceived as feminized, representative of the socially devalued female role. Here, and throughout the novel, homophobia and misogyny go hand in hand in establishing the narrator’s conception of the conquest as a gendered enterprise that defines masculinity as the actual or metaphorical penetration of both women and homosexuals.23 Throughout the Diario maldito, the narrator mentions indigenous and Spanish women solely as degraded sexual partners, most being nameless prostitutes and concubines. The narrator’s representation of both women and homosexual males as inferior gendered beings can be linked directly to the conquistador’s perceived need to suppress all that is feminine in the soldiers in order to advance with a conquest that is defined in these gendered terms. Pervasive throughout the text is narrator Nuño de Guzmán’s paranoiac fear of a homosexual conspiracy against his grand design. While still on board the ship en route to the Americas, the future governor makes vigilant daily rounds: “Tralla en mano he hecho paseos por los puentes, para ver si sorprendo en pleno ligue nefando a alguno de los invertidos y echarlo al mar” (33) (Lash in hand, I stroll along the decks, to see if I can surprise one of those perverts in the nefarious act and toss him in the sea). Evident in the above passage is Guzmán’s sadistic desire to punish sodomites, but also his voyeuristic desire to catch them in the act. As later examples of sadism and voyeurism will continue to demonstrate, this paranoiac fear of homosexual conspiracy fits into the scheme of the homosocial as simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic. Here we see the anxiety of identification manifested as the conquistador’s longing to be incorporated into a subculture by which he is repulsed.

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When the ship finally anchors in the West Indies, the crew is met with hospitality by islanders of both sexes, who, according to narrator Nuño de Guzmán, enjoy the opportunity to show off their naked bodies in front of the Europeans. The first thing that draws the narrator’s attention in this new land is the male reproductive organ: “[A]lgunos varones tienen harto holgados los hocicos y bastante fieras sus partes, que mucha repugnancia provoca el vérselas tan pendientes y en desmedido tamaño” (34– 35) ([S]ome males have excessively large snouts and really ferocious private parts, such that seeing them hanging so and of such disproportionate size provokes much repugnance). Guzmán protests that the enlarged organs repulse him, yet his exaggerated interest in male anatomy is indicative of sublimated desire for the phallus; here the simultaneous attraction and repulsion toward the indigenous male clearly point to the paradoxical dynamic of colonial desire. Whereas the fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán sees the nakedness of the natives as an attempt on their part to seduce him—and he is drawn in, more by the male than female bodies—the Amerindians also use their naked bodies as a means of resistance. In one significant scene, hundreds of indigenous youths “moon” the conquistadors from the shore of an island:24 [V]imos cientos de muchachos, los cuales, en señal de protesta por nuestra visita, se bajaron los tapacojones y, sin un ahí te va o ahí te viene, nos mostraron el rubio trasero, como dicen que hacen, en las plazas de Londres, unos individuos llamados hooligans. Como regato de agua fría cayéndonos en el lomo, así nos sorprendieron por su color— bastante parecido al nuestro—y cínico descaro en agachar los fondillos hacia nosotros. (42) ([W]e saw hundreds of youths, who, as a sign of protesting our visit, lowered their loincloths and, without so much as a by your leave, showed us their pale behinds, like they say is done, in the squares of London, by some individuals called hooligans. Like a stream of cold water falling on our backs, we were surprised by their color—rather similar to our own—and cynical impudence in bending over and showing their bottoms in our faces.)25

Here, one of the novel’s most blatant anachronisms—the reference to London hooligans of later centuries—highlights the Amerindians’ autonomy and their ability to use their bodies in an act of defiance against the conquistadors along the lines that José Piedra emphasizes in “Nationalizing Sissies.” These acts of resistance, however, will be few and far between in Martínez’s Diario maldito, in which the bodies of the colonized are more often used for sexual torture and voyeuristic pleasure on the part of the conquistadors. Upon his arrival on the Mexican mainland after a stay in the West Indies, the narrator at first presumes that he has rid himself of the pernicious influence of sodomites, since he claims to have left “los religiosos, los maricones, las monjas y demás pasajeros” (56) (the monks, the queers, the nuns and other passengers) behind in Ve-

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racruz when he continues his overland journey to Pánuco. He is soon disappointed to find out, however, that sodomy is also a custom in the new land: “También se me ha informado que aquí es práctica común la sodomía” (57) (They have informed me that sodomy is common practice here). Instead of finding gold and pearls, all Guzmán finds are “putos y putas” (queers and whores) whom he feels he must punish: “[A]quellos otros, los maricas, fueron muertos, herrados o vendidos a la esclavitud de las islas por no verlos más aquí” (70) ([T]he former, the queers, were killed, branded or sold into slavery and sent to the islands so that we don’t have to see them around here anymore). What he has in store for the sodomites is the same as for all the native Americans, eighty branding irons, forged in Toledo, with a G for Guzmán.26 The fictionalized conquistador describes his branding of the indigenous peoples in terms of penetration: “[I]ndios y más indios . . . Multitudes que van quedando por doquier con la G de mi fierro muy enseñoreada en sus flancos” (201) (Indians and more Indians . . . Multitudes that are going around everywhere with the G from my branding iron taking possession of their flanks). The narrator describes his branding of the sodomites as follows: Escribo desde una villa . . . en la que los hombres—de entrepierna muy bien servida, a propósito—viven en tal amariconamiento, que por todas partes se les ve encaramándose el uno sobre el otro ¡zape!, como la fresca mañana ¡ox!, pero yo los voy herrando para que se les quite la sodomía. . . . La G de mi apellido ha de recordarles por siempre jamás ¡puf! que no deben de hacer más prácticas abominables, y se me van los pulsos de imaginarlos tendidos bajo cuatro hombres que los herran. (59; emphasis mine) (I am writing from a village . . . in which the men—well endowed between the legs, by the way—live in such queerness, that they go around jumping on each other all over the place, shoo!, like the fresh morning, ugh!, but I am branding them so they will get rid of this sodomy business. . . . The G of my surname will remind them forever and ever pff! that they shouldn’t go around committing abominable acts, and my heart stops when I imagine them stretched out under four men who brand them.)

Worth noting in this passage are the fictionalized conquistador’s obsession with sodomy and with well-endowed male anatomy, as well as his combination of sadism with voyeurism. There is no question that this branding is sadistic and homophobic, but his motivation appears to be voyeuristic and homoerotic as well, because he describes the branding in terms of four men on top of the sodomite in a position that suggests a homosexual act. The narrator’s incessant exclamations reinforce his emotional involvement both in the act of branding and in the sodomy itself, as does his comment that his heart stops when he imagines witnessing the act. His repetition of ejaculatory remarks—¡zape! ¡ox! ¡puf!—signals his voyeuristic enthusiasm and his identification with this imagined scenario. Referring back to the first days of his arrival, the narrator remembers with similar fascination “aquellos maricas que

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hallamos en Pánuco, sí, aquellos que vimos embudarse por las partes traseras, no una, sino varias ocasiones. Sí. Sí” (86) (those queers we found in Pánuco, yes, those we saw take it up the rear, not once, but several times. Yes. Yes). In these examples, the homoeroticism-homophobia of the homosocial is combined with the attraction-repulsion of colonial desire and the anxiety of identification. Homophobic sadism is combined with a homoerotic fascination with male anatomy in the fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán’s recurrent practice of genital mutilation upon both indigenous and European men in what Richard Trexler would term “sexual punishment.” Trexler considers sexual torture an important factor of the genderization of conquest, as it reaffirms the power of one group of men over another. While governor of Pánuco, and later on his military campaign in Michoacán, Martínez’s conquistador repeatedly castrates his enemies and on occasion has their testicles thrown to the dogs or wild animals. These fictional scenes of violence are reminiscent of Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s order that forty berdaches be thrown to the dogs, recorded in Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo (1516), later published as the Decades, which Trexler notes is the earliest historical record of Spanish punishment of what they considered native American sodomy. After killing six hundred men in a battle in Cuarecua, Balboa discovered the cacique’s brother dressed as a woman and had thrown to the dogs forty men presumed to be sodomites, after which the natives brought some more noblemen to be killed by the Spaniards, who assumed they were also sodomites. Goldberg notes that this historical episode reveals little about native American attitudes toward sexual practices, presumptions about which the Spaniards use as a dividing line to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Indians, defined in terms of those who punish sodomy and those who practice it, respectively. The historical Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán himself threw a man to the dogs in Cuitzeo, not for sodomy, but, according to the interpreter García del Pilar, for coming in peace and neglecting to bring a tribute of gold, silver, or Amerindian tamemes to carry burdens.27 As is the case here, the original documents regarding his conquest of Nueva Galicia generally point to the notion that the historical Guzmán was less obsessed with the persecution of sodomy than with the pursuit of gold. The fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán’s most sadistic sexual torture is that of the cacique of Michoacán, Calzoncin, whom he hopes to ransom for gold, and whom he continues to torture even after it becomes clear that no gold is forthcoming. The historical Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán did submit the Tarascan cacique, referred to in the trial documents as Caltzontzin or Caçonçi, baptized don Francisco, to torture by fire, and later sentenced him to burn at the stake. Guzmán asserts in a 1532 letter that he thought that his reasons for executing the chief were self-evident, for which reason he neglected to send the trial records to the crown. The trial records were presumed lost or nonexistent until discovered by France V. Scholes in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and published with Eleanor B. Adams in 1952. Although the trial

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documents do highlight the accusation of sodomy, Guzmán’s own summaries of the trial in his letters and memoirs focus on the accusation of treason. Sixteenth-century sources such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, Francisco López de Gómara, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and to a lesser extent Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo all record the belief proposed in Martínez’s novel: that the historical Guzmán’s lust for gold led him to torture the Tarascan chief and later execute him to prevent him from registering a complaint about this mistreatment.28 Before ultimately burning the chief, Martínez’s Guzmán tortures him in his private parts: “[N]o lo voy a enforcar, sino que va a recibir una porción de vara por los traseros y las verendas partes, a ver si así, ¡carajo!” (190) (I am not going to garrote him, but he is going to feel the rod up his backside and virile parts, and we’ll see how he likes that, damn it!). On the military campaign trail, Calzoncin is forced to keep marching in spite of anal and testicular bleeding that is the result of castration and torture by fire at the hands of Guzmán. The narrator later regards without pity the tears of his own Tarascan mistress, who is crying, either because she is pregnant or because of “las nobles nalgas de su Rey, que las vio pasadas de lado a lado con la verdasca ardiente, toda vez que lo capé y lo piqué en todo su cuerpo” (200) (the noble butt cheeks of her King, which she saw singed from side to side with a burning switch, while I castrated him and pricked him all over his body).29 As discussed above, Richard Trexler considers what he calls “sexual punishment” an important part of the genderization of conquest, because it reaffirms the power of one group of men over another; for Trexler, any kind of torture subjected on the private parts of the body can be considered sexual punishment, especially when it involves what he calls “penetrative penality.” Trexler further observes that sexual tortures that do not result in immediate death, such as castration, leave the victim to carry on his body the insult that genders him feminine. Here there is a clear intent on the part of the fictionalized Guzmán to prick and penetrate the Tarascan lord in what Trexler would deem the “penetrative penality” of “sexual punishment.” The historical Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán did submit the Tarascan cacique to torture by water and fire, and later sentenced him to burn at the stake. His execution was carried out when the Cazonci was first dragged by the tail of a horse, and then burned, either mercifully garroted, or burned alive, according to different versions.30 Curiously, the trial records mention a previous sodomy investigation against the cacique, with some Spaniards and Tarascans offering anecdotal or hearsay support for the accusation. In his opening statement, encomendero Francisco de Villegas claims that the Cazonci has bribed his way out of punishment in previous trials for “así de lo susodicho como de sodomías y muertes de españoles en cantidad” (all of the above as well as sodomies and deaths of Spaniards in large numbers). Rather than focusing on accusations of Amerindian sodomy as do the original chronicles of conquest, however, Martínez’s novel turns the tables by emphasizing the fictionalized conquistador’s sadistic obsession with sexual torture.31

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In the Diario maldito, homoerotic connotations of the narrator’s sadism are apparent in his description of the cacique’s genitals: [É]l tiene su miembro viril más largo y ancho que el de los españoles, pues su mucho uso y libertad así se lo ha aluengado por su bien y por su mal: por su bien, para satisfacer tantas mujeres; y por su mal, porque pienso en cómo se le escaldará a la hora de las llamas. (195 – 96) ([H]is virile member is longer and wider than that of the Spaniards, since its frequent use and freedom have lengthened it for his benefit and to his detriment: for his benefit, to satisfy so many women; and to his detriment, because I think about how it will scald at the hour of the flames.)

As Peter Mason notes, historical documents and chronicles of the conquest more often tended to represent the genitalia of Amerindian men as unusually small, a representation that supported the hierarchical genderization of conquest, because the “lack of a clearly marked masculinity invited the thrust of European penetration”;32 in this fictionalized version of the conquest, the representation of the colonized as possessing exceedingly large sexual organs confounds the gendered hierarchy of conquest, as it hints at the inversion of the roles of colonizer as penetrator, colonized as penetrated. Thus, homosocial colonial desire, which allows for homoerotic attraction alongside homophobic repulsion, in Martínez’s novel serves to undermine the hierarchy of a conquest that ostensibly genders the colonizer masculine and the colonized feminine. The act of sodomy is prominently featured in the fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán’s code of crimes, according to which punishment is to be meted out “al que pecare en el pecado nefando contra natura, que tanto vimos en Pánuco” (123) (to him who commits the nefarious sin against nature, that we so often saw in Pánuco). Within the gendered hierarchy of the Diario maldito, female sexuality is generally beneath the notice of this narrator, whose only allusion to lesbianism is in the context of this penal code: “que ninguna india no sea osada de echarse sobre hembra, cuyo naturalmente haría un varón, y si así lo hiciere le dén [sic] mil azotes, las [sic] trasquilen y le corten los pechos” (124) (that no Indian woman dare to lay on top of a female to do what naturally a man would do, and that if one were to do so, they shall give her a thousand lashes, shear their [sic] hair and cut off her breasts). Although the same sadism and homophobia are present here as in the descriptions of male homosexuals, the straightforward style and lack of exclamations indicate a lower degree of voyeuristic interest in the female anatomy as compared to the male. Although he is intractable in his efforts to eradicate the indigenous practice of the nefarious sin, the conquistador of the Diario maldito at first appears to show more lenience toward Spanish sodomy. He adamantly defends his distant relative Cristóbal de Basaldúa, who is accused of “hechicería y prácticas nefandas con indio mozo”

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(128) (sorcery and nefarious acts with an Indian youth). The conquistador uses forceful language to defend the accused: Mis intenciones son las de incorporarlo a la tropa. ¡Qué le hace que adore a satanás! Santanases como él hacen falta para mi empresa. ¡No morirá a manos de la Inquisición! Ya lo decidí. Ni modo. Voy a salvarlo al precio que sea. (128) (My intentions are to incorporate him into the troops. Who cares if he adores Satan! I need devils like him in my enterprise. He won’t die at the hands of the Inquisition! I have decided. Whatever. I’m going to save him whatever the price.)

Several elements in the above passage are worthy of comment. First, the exclamations indicate a strong attachment to this distant relative, whom he mentions only in the context of this accusation of sodomy. Second, the fictionalized Guzmán resolutely wants to incorporate this Spaniard into his military forces in spite of his homosexual tendencies.33 Third, his rules appear to be enforced unequally depending on the ethnicity of the person who commits the alleged crime, as demonstrated by the fact that he defends his relative but makes no reference to the fate of his indigenous partner. Clearly, the question is not simply the censure of sodomy as an illicit sexual practice, but rather the genderization of conquest, which asserts the roles of colonizer as penetrator and colonized as penetrated. Here we can only assume that the fictionalized Guzmán’s decision to defend his distant relative is informed by the assumption that Basaldúa takes the insertive role, while his Amerindian partner takes the receptive role. Although in theory the Spaniards sought to suppress all forms of sodomy, this fictional case study suggests that the conquistador’s masculine privilege is not questioned so long as he remains the penetrator of Amerindian partners. Although he overlooks the overt homosexual practices of his distant relative, the fictionalized conquistador later executes two Spaniards, a soldier and a novice clergyman, who commit an act of “amor prohibido” (forbidden love) during the campaign to conquer Michoacán. According to Guzmán, these two are drawn and quartered and fed to the wolves, “dada la nefandez del hecho” (196) (given the nefarious nature of the act). It is not simply due to the nature of the act, however, because, as the Basaldúa case demonstrates, sodomy does not consistently lead to punishment in the Diario maldito, pointing to a discrepancy between theory and practice. As social historians such as Foucault observe, in the early modern age there was a disparity between the theoretical severity of the death penalty for sodomy and the de facto tolerance of sodomy in practice. This type of contradiction is characteristic of exclusively male societies such as the military, in which “the rampant homophobia of military life accompanie[s] a paradoxical tolerance for blatant homosexual behaviour,” according to Lynne Segal.34 Barring pure and unadulterated nepotism, a discrepancy between theory and practice regarding sodomy may help to explain why Cristóbal de Basaldúa is exempt from punishment: certainly the fact that he is a Spaniard and

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Guzmán’s distant relative works to his advantage, but a further explanation might be that the conquistador defends him because he is associated with the active, masculine role as penetrator of Amerindian partners. Neither race traitor nor gender traitor, Basaldúa fits into the scheme of the conquest as a gendered and gendering enterprise in which, according to the scheme outlined by scholar José Piedra in his article “Nationalizing Sissies,” the colonizers are “bullies” and the colonized are “sissies.” The novel’s second case of punishment for intermale sexual behavior, that of the novice and the soldier, draws on more modern concepts of gender identity and sexual orientation, as the novice is drawn and quartered not exclusively because of the inherently offensive nature of the act, but also because he has a clearly established and presumably stable preference for homosexuality and his entire being is associated with the receptive sexual role and feminine gender identity: “[M]e dicen que era mozo de veinte o menos años de edad, de muy buen ver en porte y donaire, sólo que amujerado en ademanes y vocecilla, que no era sino estar oyendo y mirando una hermosa doncella” (196) ([T]hey tell me that he was a youth of twenty or fewer years, very well poised in his bearing and demeanor, but that he was effeminate in mannerisms and voice, so that it was just like hearing and seeing a beautiful maiden). The novice’s crime is not only the vice of sodomy, to which according to Foucault all men were considered potentially subject in the premodern mentality, but also his sexual role and gender identity.35 As Richard Trexler observes, in both Spanish and some indigenous Mexican cultures, effeminacy and receptivity were considered criminal: “And the sin that merited the stake was the passive demonstration of self as totally womanish and effeminate—a crime of representation more than a sexual crime. . . . Less sodomy per se than the assumption of the ‘female’ role . . . with all its submissive associations to force and conquest, was that which repelled natives and Spaniards.”36 As he is the one who initiates the encounter by soliciting sexual attentions from the soldier, the effeminate novice is presumably the receptive partner, because in the Latin American pattern of hierarchical male homosexuality, the receptive partner is generally the one who solicits sex and pays if any money is exchanged.37 Thus, the novice metaphorically abdicates the masculine privilege associated with the conquistadors, and his punishment points to the fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán’s desire to restore the gendered order of conquest. In this case, the soldier, who presumably took the insertive role with the novice, is also punished, so apparently the question of which partner took the receptive role is not Guzmán’s only criterion for determining whether he will punish a Spaniard who participates in a homosexual act. Another possible explanation for the fact that he punishes both Spanish partners is that this particular behavior follows the more modern pattern of mutual eroticism rather than the ancient hierarchical model, in which sexual pleasure is the exclusive estate of the insertive partner. David Bergman asserts that in contrast to the classical model, which maintains social hierarchies, the

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modern egalitarian model of reciprocal pleasure radically challenges patriarchy.38 The possibility of mutual pleasure is obliquely implied in this passage of the Diario maldito as the narrator says that when approached by the novice who spoke to him of forbidden love, the soldier returned his passion, the use of the verb corresponder suggesting a link with the reciprocal model rather than the hierarchical model of sexual relations. For Martínez’s Nuño de Guzmán, equality between lovers would be unthinkable, as he perceives all relationships in terms of expressions of hierarchical power. Here the anxiety of identification manifests itself as the fictionalized conquistador’s defense mechanism against his own potential foray into mutually pleasing homosexual contact. The principal reason that both novice and soldier must receive capital punishment is that their sexual behavior does not uphold the gendered hierarchy of conquest. Alan Bray observes that in Renaissance England, in which a hierarchical model of male homosexuality prevailed, public accusations of sodomy were levied only in the exceptional cases when same-sex behavior transgressed the social order, and ignored in the majority of cases when it upheld established hierarchies.39 Such a criterion seems to inform the fictionalized Nuño de Guzmán’s decision to punish the novice and the soldier but not his relative, because the Basaldúa case upholds the colonial system in which sexual acts establish and maintain hierarchical patriarchal relations. This explains why a potentially mutual expression of homoeroticism between two Spaniards of roughly equivalent social status such as the novice and the soldier must be punished in order to restore the gendered hierarchy of conquest, while Basaldúa’s penetration of an Amerindian goes unpunished because it can be interpreted as a confirmation of masculinity, patriarchy, and the goals of conquest. Homosocial Colonial Desire in the Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán In line with Sedgwick’s model of the homosocial society as paradoxically discouraging homosexual acts in theory while indulging homoeroticism in practice, the conquistador of the Diario maldito tolerates homoerotic horseplay when, on the campaign to conquer Michoacán, Guzmán and his men stop to bathe at some hot springs: [A]unque entre varones solamente estábamos, vi cómo a más de uno íbansele sus ojos por las partes pudendas de los demás, cual si buscaran pitanza para su pupila, y yo me hice el desentendido. . . . [A]l fin que cada quien es dueño de su gusto y de su honra. (173) ([A]lthough we were among only men, I saw how more than one of them was gazing upon the private parts of the others, as if they were looking for a daily ration for their eyes, and I pretended not to notice. . . . [I]n the end everyone is master of his own taste and his own honor.)

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In the above scene, many of the soldiers engage in homoerotic play, and the narratorconquistador includes himself in the first-person plural of this group: “Todos sentíamos correr por nuestras venas las tentaciones. . . . [R]etozamos a placer y nos dimos remoquetes. . . . ¡Cuánto jugueteamos allá . . . ” (174–75) (We all felt temptation run through our veins. . . . [W]e writhed with pleasure and fooled around. . . . How much we frolicked . . . ). Here Guzmán’s indulgent attitude toward this horseplay points to the contradictions within a homosocial order that tolerates homoeroticism in practice but not homosexuality in theory. Even when he explicitly claims to be wishing for female companionship at the hot springs, the narrator tends to linger on the description of the soldiers’ anatomy in this context, much as he did in earlier descriptions of Amerindian male genitalia. Guzmán muses that if female prostitutes were to visit the hot springs, they would notice only him, “sin reparar en más partes colgantes que las mías. Sin fijarse, vaya, en otras verijas . . . grandes, medianas y algunas menudas como para maldita la cosa” (174– 75) (without taking notice of any hanging parts other than my own. Without, that is, looking at anyone else’s loins . . . some large, some medium, and others so small that they might be good for nothing). Although he is presumably looking through the eyes of the absent prostitutes, this very potential to represent the feminine gaze indicates that the conquistador’s eyes lingered on the soldiers’ groins while they were bathing, enabling him to make these observations later in his meditations about the lack of female companionship. Here the anxiety of identification obliges the fictionalized conquistador to displace his own homoerotic desire, imagining that the gaze is not his own, but that of the feminine Other. Although he practices castration and other forms of genital mutilation on both indigenous and Spanish victims, narrator Nuño de Guzmán is ambivalent when, still on the campaign to conquer Michoacán, he describes a temple sacrifice in which the men practice genital self-mutilation, stringing their penises together.40 The conquistador reacts with a mixture of aversion and awe, remarking that Spaniards would not have the valor to attempt such an act. His admiration of the natives as perverse yet in a sense more masculine than the Spaniards gives way to the desire to penetrate and dominate. The conquistador and his men attack and kill all the men, women, and children, but only after their voyeuristic appetites are sated by witnessing the entire ceremony, in which the most handsome man is chosen as victim, is fellated by a priest whose hair is standing on end, and then has his heart cut out and eaten. The attention to every phallic detail, down to the priest’s hair and the penetration of the victim first by the stone blade and then by arrows, is further indication of the fictionalized conquistador’s homoerotic interest in the sexual anatomy of those he dominates. Whereas the women and children are hung on trees, the men who participated in this homoerotic sacrifice are impaled in what Trexler would denominate a “penetrative penality.”

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Soon thereafter, Guzmán and his men find themselves on the defensive end of an attack with phallic objects, when the natives of Michoacán storm them with stone hatchets and long sticks. The Spaniards respond by killing them all, raping the women and forcing the children and old people to run naked so they can stick them with their swords in the back and up the behind. In his explanation of sexual punishment, Trexler notes that “spearing corpses from behind has a symbolic relation to penetrating passives.”41 This violent episode is followed by a scene of homosocial male bonding between Guzmán and another man, Captain Andrade, whom he describes in terms that suggest a marked tenderness: “[É]l se rió con esa risa tan blanca y llena de dientes, arriscando la naricilla con el mohín que tanto le queda” (219) ([H]e laughed with that laughter so white and full of teeth, crinkling his nose in a pout that suits him so well). The chapter ends with the two conquistadors exchanging a meaningful gaze and then stepping together across a field littered with the corpses of the vanquished: “Yo lo miraba. Él iba con los ojos a esas partes. Yo lo acompañaba con los míos y mis pasos que tanto anduvieron allá, escalando escarpas y hollando cuerpos” (220) (I looked at him. He went with his eyes to those parts. I followed him with my eyes and my steps that walked so much over there, scaling slopes and trampling bodies). The campaign to conquer Michoacán is the beginning of the end for Nuño de Guzmán, as he is sent to prison to await trial for his mismanagement as governor of Pánuco and president of the first Royal Audience of Mexico. While imprisoned, the narrator meditates on the question of how he obtained these posts by procuring female partners for Emperor Carlos V and accompanying him on his sexual adventures. The fictionalized conquistador had originally introduced the topic of the sexual services he lent to the emperor in a digression addressed to his adversary Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, with whom he claims to have visited prostitutes when the two were schoolmates in Toledo. The narrator’s insistence that his New World assignments were a reward for his procurement efforts on behalf of the emperor, which he curiously describes using the verb lambisconear (to suck up), confirms Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of the homosocial, which builds on the theories of René Girard and Gayle Rubin to assert that men form strong homoerotic bonds when they exchange women.42 Although she does not explicitly discuss this theme, the idea of two men “going whoring” together fits squarely into Sedgwick’s concept of the homosocial, as it is a kind of male bonding that is genitally heterosexual, yet intensely colored by homoerotic desire. Fearing his incipient political impotence, the imprisoned conquistador recalls his prolific sexual prowess, which he proved alongside Captain Andrade in the brothels where “[b]ebimos y refocilamos las apetencias, casi uno al lado del otro, y no fue sino hasta la puerta de salida donde ya no lo vi más” (223) (we drank and reveled in desire, almost side by side, and I didn’t lose sight of him until we left). Although he

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never engages in explicit homosexual acts in the novel, the narrator’s heterosexual overcompensation, usually with prostitutes, does not ultimately represent interaction between himself and women, but rather can be considered a homosocial affirmation of his masculinity in the eyes of other males, because as Lancaster observes, in Latin American machismo the conquest of women is undertaken by men primarily for the purpose of impressing other men.43 Here with Andrade, as formerly with Emperor Carlos V and earlier with future inquisitor Juan de Zumárraga, the act of “going whoring” together serves to form male homosocial bonds. Now in prison, Guzmán reflects, “¡Qué de gratos recuerdos hasta acá me alcanzan! ¡Cuántos del capitán Andrade en Jalisco y en México, oyéndome hablar y yo mirándolo reír o correr a quebrantar virginidades . . . ! Hace un rato estuve nuevamente con él” (225) (What pleasant memories reach me even here! So many of Captain Andrade in Jalisco and Mexico, listening to me talk and me watching him laugh or run to deflower virgins . . . ! I was just recently with him again). As president of the Royal Audience, Guzmán supports the local whorehouses both with his business and with tax-exempt status. The brothels exist in order for men to confirm their heterosexuality not only through homosocial bonds, but also through their resistance to specific homosexual temptation, as one of the dangers of these locales is contact with “los amujerados esos que en un descuido del cliente pueden metérsele a los brazos y agasajarse en lo que no deben” (127) (those effeminate ushers who if the client is careless can fall into his arms and caress him where they shouldn’t). On the campaign to conquer Michoacán, he compares the episode with the novice and the soldier to his experiences in the Mexico City whorehouses: “Acá hemos venido a hacer lo que no hubo en México, cuando los mariquillas aquellos de la doña se nos acurrucaban muy movidos de manos y ojos, al vernos ya borrachos y fáciles de caer en sus trampas” (196) (Here we have come to do what we avoided in Mexico City, when those queers at the madam’s used to rub up against us with their restless hands and eyes, seeing that we were drunk and liable to fall into their trap). The fact that the narrator includes himself in this “we” whose flesh may be weak enough to fall into the temptation of engaging in same-sex acts again indicates suppressed homoerotic desire on the part of the homophobic conquistador, pointing to the conquest as a homosocial enterprise that simultaneously challenges and confirms the masculinity of powerful Spaniards such as Guzmán. Even his description of his rival for power, Hernán Cortés, is laced with homosocial and homoerotic tinges. While in prison in Mexico City pending the investigation of his abuse of authority, Guzmán’s greatest diversion is listening to his guard describe Cortés’s courtship of great ladies. Guzmán is capable of temporarily placing himself in the feminine position, both previously at the hot springs where he had represented the perspective of a prostitute surveying the soldiers’ sexual anatomy and here while in prison as he listens to the guard’s stories and imagines looking at

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Cortés through feminine eyes and swooning into his arms when Cortés returns the gaze: Lo veo todo muy cumplido y regocijado en pláticas e inventivas que nunca le faltaban y más entre mujeres, que con sólo acercárceles [sic] y verlas con aquellos sus ojos que ahora me imagino de mirar amoroso, caían azoradas y trémulas entre sus fuertes brazos de hombre. (230) (I see him very polite and merry, chatting with the wit that never fails him, especially with women, since he has only to approach them and glance at them with those eyes that I now imagine as being of a loving look, and they would fall flustered and trembling into his strong, manly arms.)

Although he insists on his masculine identity as a dominator and penetrator of subaltern races and genders, passages such as these demonstrate that this conquistador is capable of identifying with the receptive sexual role, at least with his arch rival, Hernán Cortés, whom he describes as “¡Bello, majo, mozo, ardiente! ¡Mmmm!” (228) (Gorgeous, sexy, young and ardent! Mmmm!). Fundamental to Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán is the representation of the conquest as a gendered, and gendering, enterprise. In this ironic firstperson narration, war and sexual conquests are both represented in terms of penetration, and often the two categories are confused. Early in the novel, the conquistador boasts of the conquests he will make “between the sheets” as much as on the battlefield. The homosocial bond of warring and whoring is especially clear when the conquistador asserts that “raros son los verdaderos amigos, y éstos se conocen no sólo en la cárcel y en la cama, sino más en la guerra” (154) (true friends are rare, and you know them not only in jail and in bed, but more in war). This corresponds to what José Piedra calls “the war and bed games of colonialism” in which the colonizers are bullies and the colonized are sissies.44 This model of hierarchical sexuality is upheld in the case of Guzmán’s distant relative Basaldúa, who is not punished for sodomy because he presumably took the penetrative role with his Amerindian partner. The hierarchical model is threatened when two Spaniards of equivalent social status engage in a reciprocal sexual relationship, but the order of conquest is restored when both receive capital punishment. The gendered scheme of conquest is truly confounded, however, when the fictionalized conquistador gazes at both Amerindian and Spanish male genitalia with voyeuristic homoerotic desire, metaphorically placing himself in the receptive sexual role. War and sadistic torture represent an effort on the part of the conquistador to reject the receptive role associated with the sodomite, and to reinforce the active, masculine role through the assertion of a penetrative domination. This order is undermined, however, through the novel’s pervasive homoeroticism, which points to ideological contradictions within a conquest characterized

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by paradoxes such as colonial desire, which combines attraction and repulsion, and the homosocial, which juxtaposes homoeroticism and homophobia, and speaks to the anxiety of identification in fictionalized conquistadors who find themselves surrounded by other men and longing for physical contact without the stigma of sodomy. Thus, rather than a conquest that unequivocally genders the colonizer masculine and the colonized feminine, the homosocial colonial desire of Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán presents a more complex and contradictory picture that deconstructs the gendered rhetoric of conquest.

4 Colonial Desire for the Amerindian and Converso Other in Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante

ne of the most astonishing things about the corpus of recent Latin American novels that rewrite the chronicles of conquest is the extent to which the themes of Judaism, conversos, crypto-Judaism, the Inquisition, and the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain are ever present in the narratives. Whereas this is especially true of the novels that deal with the figure of Christopher Columbus, these themes also permeate texts such as Argentine Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante (The long twilight of the wanderer, 1992), in which the fictionalized Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca demonstrates the anxiety of identification both toward the indigenous inhabitants of the New World and toward the Judaic inhabitants of the Old.1 In novels such as Posse’s El largo atardecer, as in Homero Aridjis’s 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, the topic of Judaism all but overwhelms the ostensible primary focus on rewriting the conquest and colonization of the Americas. These novels, specifically through the representation of the liminal figure of the converso, reflect the dilemma intrinsic to any endeavor to define Latin American identity as the product of a transculturation whose origins lie in the violence of the conquest. As discussed in the Introduction, the theme of Judaism is present in nearly all of the novels in the subcorpus of historical fictional biographies of Columbus. In them, Columbus is presumed to be of Jewish extraction, although in many cases he is himself unaware of this fact. In several novels, it is simply mentioned in passing that Columbus has Jewish blood in his background, and in some cases he himself is ignorant of this fact, or tries to hide it. In most of the novels, he is represented as a firstor second-generation converso, but rarely as an active practitioner of the Jewish faith; he is often portrayed as a friend and relative of flagrant crypto-Jews pursued by the Inquisition, and in the most extreme case as an explorer who (usually unwittingly) participates in the effort to find a haven from persecution, a new Jewish homeland.2 In this subcorpus of novels, apart from the focus on the figure of Christopher Colum-

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bus as a New Christian, the presence of other converso actors in this historical period is underscored.3 For example, great emphasis is placed on the fact that Columbus’s mistress, Beatriz de Aranha, was presumably a New Christian, and may have been related to Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, who is also ironically presumed to have Jewish ancestry. These novels also focus on the instrumentality of converso treasurer Luis de Santángel in the financing of Columbus’s first voyage, and the presence of converso interpreter Luis de Torres on that same voyage. In contrast to the fictional biographies of Columbus, in Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante, it is not suggested that the explorer Cabeza de Vaca was himself of New Christian origin, but rather that he is attracted to Judaic and Moorish as well as Amerindian ethnic and cultural difference. In Posse’s novel, the themes of transculturation, colonial desire, and the anxiety of identification are evident in reference to both the Amerindians in the New World and the conversos in the Old. In the heterogeneous world of the Americas, the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca, like his historical counterpart, fashions a new self between the competing impulses to identify with the Amerindians, with whom he shares many common human characteristics, and to distinguish himself from them, because they lack many elements of Spanish Catholic culture.4 In this context, transculturation is the result of a gradual negotiation of the vacillation between identification with the indigenous Other and a desire to maintain a European identity based on difference from that same Other. By focusing on conversos as the “Other within” the conquest, novels such as Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante become entangled in a complex web of colonial desire, because the converso as half-outsider suggests a more ambivalent ideological position than a simple binary model of colonizer-colonized would have. Among other things, the avoidance of this strict self-Other dichotomy allows novels such as Posse’s to investigate the idea that the conquistadors themselves were in many ways marginal members of Iberian society. As discussed in the Introduction to the present study, although some of the conquistadors were from Old Christian families of fine lineage, many were segundones, or second sons, who, unable to reach the highest echelons of society due to the system of primogeniture, had to choose between church and state as the only viable career options for those members of the landholding class who could not expect to inherit the paternal estate. In the new historical novel of the conquest, many characters representing conquistadors somehow feel themselves to be marginalized within Spanish culture; these are the conquistadors the reader assumes to be most open to transculturation. In the present analysis of the historical Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios and Posse’s historical fiction El largo atardecer del caminante, the concern is with the figure of Cabeza de Vaca as an explorer salient for his willingness to participate in the incipient process of transculturation between Old and New Worlds. Of Argentine novelist Abel Posse’s trilogy on the conquest, El largo atardecer del

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caminante is the most recent and consequently has received the least critical attention to date. Published in 1992, it represents the long-awaited third novel of Posse’s promised trilogy: the first of the three, Daimón, on renegade conquistador Lope de Aguirre, appeared in 1978; the second novel, Los perros del paraíso, on Christopher Columbus, was published in 1983. By the time the trilogy was completed in 1992, nearly a decade had passed since the publication of Los perros del paraíso, and the first two novels had already appeared in translation in English and other languages.5 Over the past several years, dozens of critical articles have appeared on Posse’s trilogy, principally on Los perros del paraíso and Daimón, whereas El largo atardecer del caminante has neither been translated nor been the object of extended scholarly research.6 Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante is a historical fiction recounted in the first person by a narrator who represents the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca writing his memoirs upon returning to Spain after failed expeditions to both North and South America.7 This fictionalized narrator, like the historical Cabeza de Vaca as he represents himself in his 1542 chronicle Naufragios, is, although in theory a conquistador, in practice a man who stands out as being more open to contact and exchange with other cultures than the rest of the conquistadors who left written records. Four hundred fifty years later, Posse’s historical fiction further highlights this aspect of Cabeza de Vaca’s uniqueness, and offers several explanations for his openness to cultural exchange. Some of them, such as his experiences wandering hungry and naked in the wilderness and his general maladaptation within the enterprise of the conquest, are suggested in the explorer’s account. Additional explanations, such as his rejection of the Spanish identity forced upon him by virtue of his noble birth, are literary elaborations. In the chronicle Naufragios and the historical fiction El largo atardecer del caminante, the figure of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca stands out as unique among the conquistadors for his willingness to participate in the process of transculturation between Old and New Worlds, which will ultimately result in the formation of distinct Spanish American identities. In El largo atardecer, the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca vacillates between desire for and rejection of converso presence in the Iberian Peninsula after the expulsion of the Jews and after his own experiences in the failed expeditions to the Americas. Recounting in flashbacks his decade of living among the North American natives and participating in a process of transculturation while still maintaining his Spanish identity, the focus of the novel is Cabeza de Vaca’s reintegration into Iberian culture after his return to the Old World. Among the themes of the novel, one that stands out is the explorer’s ambivalent attitude regarding Jewish influence in Spain. In this novel, whose ostensible theme is the conquest of the Americas, the figure of the converso all but overshadows the representation of native Americans. Rather than a competing theme, however, the representation of the converso stands alongside the representation of indigenous presence as an emblem of otherness with-

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in the European imagination during the period of the conquest. Thus, in Posse’s novel, Cabeza de Vaca’s desire for a North American indigenous woman, his fictional wife, Amaría, narrated in flashbacks from the first-person perspective of the explorer who has now returned to Spain, and his current ambivalent desire for the conversa Lucinda, both demonstrate the larger issue of Latin Americans’ representation of the conquest as a struggle between the European conquistadors’ desire for the exotic Other and the defense mechanism of the anxiety of identification that compels them to maintain their cultural boundaries. In Posse’s novel, colonial desire is represented in terms of the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca’s ambivalent attraction and repulsion toward both the Amerindian and the Iberian Other. The fictionalized conquistador’s ambivalent desire for his Amerindian wife, Amaría, and later for the crypto-Jewish Lucinda is paradigmatic of the larger issues of identity and marginality in the conquest, as Posse’s novel metaphorically represents this enterprise as a struggle between the European conquistador’s desire for the exotic Other and the competing impulse to debase and oppress this Other through the conquest. Here, as in the novels discussed in the other chapters of this study, the representation of colonial desire and the anxiety of identification serves as a means of exploring the origins of transculturation in the Americas. Upon their contact with the New World, the explorers and conquerors were obliged to invent original ways of confronting diversity; Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s struggle between attraction toward the Other and desire to dominate the Other is emblematic of the process of conquest that resulted in the transcultural identity of Latin America. Transculturation and Identity in the Historical Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios By far the most salient aspect of Cabeza de Vaca’s transcultural experience elaborated in Posse’s historical novel is the theme of the would-be conquistador as naked in the wilderness, a portrayal that has ample support within the historical Cabeza de Vaca’s own relación, or account, in which textual references to nakedness abound. There are two such references within his brief prologue, in which he describes himself as having “wandered lost and naked through many and very strange lands” and begs the emperor to accept his relación “as a mark of service, for it is the only thing that a man who left those lands naked could bring out with him.”8 The explorer describes several shipwrecks, during the course of which the group of surviving Spaniards increasingly becomes smaller; after the final shipwreck, the group is left naked, that is, with no material evidence of their status as conquerors. Those who did not drown in this final catastrophe “were naked as the day we were born and had lost all that we had with us, which though it was not worth much, was everything to us at that time.”9 The Amerindians who had brought them food the previous day initially do not recognize the Spaniards in this naked state: “[W]hen they

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saw us in such different circumstances as at first, and in such a strange condition, they were so frightened that they turned back.”10 After the final shipwreck, Cabeza de Vaca continues to underscore the theme of nakedness in the wilderness: “The time that I spent in this land was almost six years, alone among them and as naked as they”; “I had no other protection against the cold, being naked as the day I was born”; “I have already mentioned how we were naked everywhere in this country, and as we were not used to it, we shed our skin like snakes twice a year.”11 When the group of shipwreck survivors is reunited with Spanish society at the end of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, they are given clothing: “We reached Mexico City . . . where we were very well treated by the viceroy and by the Marqués del Valle and received with much pleasure, and they gave us clothing and offered us everything they had.”12 The wanderers accept the gifts, but clearly had become unaccustomed to the accoutrements of civilization: “[W]hen we reached Compostela the governor received us very well and gave us clothing from his own supplies, which I could not wear for many days, nor could we sleep except on the floor.”13 Cabeza de Vaca explains that when they first reencounter the Spaniards, the Amerindians who accompany them refuse to believe that he and his companions are like the other Christians, because “we cured the sick and they killed the healthy; . . . we had come naked and barefoot and they well dressed and on horses and with lances; . . . we did not covet anything, rather we returned everything that they gave us and were left with nothing, and the only aim of the others was to steal everything they found.”14 Here Cabeza de Vaca’s nakedness clearly sets him apart from the Spaniards, and distances him ideologically from the enterprise of the conquest, which is represented here as pure marauding. Perhaps the most exceptional aspect of Naufragios is what Beatriz Pastor identifies as the development of a critical consciousness that is capable of imagining the possibility of an encounter of cultures in the New World apart from the colonial pattern that was already being established. This ability to imagine new and different cultural relations will become part and parcel of the incipient process of transculturation in which Cabeza de Vaca participates. Thus, for Pastor, Naufragios exemplifies how, even before the conquest is fully under way, a Spanish American identity is beginning to emerge through early cultural exchange in the Americas, a theme that is developed in the text of Abel Posse’s historical fiction in the imagery of Cabeza de Vaca as naked in the wilderness.15 Although he sets out as a conquistador, the historical Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca narrates from a perspective of marginality in his 1542 relación that has come to be known by the title Naufragios (literally, shipwrecks); this apparent contradiction is part of the narrator’s concerted effort to portray himself as a victim and elicit the sympathy of his royal reader, while simultaneously claiming enough authority to convince Emperor Carlos V to entrust him with another official mission. Initially, Cabeza de Vaca paints himself as a marginal personage in conflict with the social hierarchy

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headed by Pánfilo de Narváez. His criticism of Narváez builds up gradually, while the narrator simultaneously constructs a positive image of himself. This culminates in the most disastrous shipwreck, when Narváez, who has the strongest men on his own ship, nevertheless responds to Cabeza de Vaca’s plea for help with an “every man for himself ” approach, thereby relinquishing his authority. Not surprisingly, this is the same point in the narration where Cabeza de Vaca becomes the undisputed center of attention. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, born in Jerez de la Frontera around 1490, was a member of the Spanish nobility who was appointed as tesorero y alguacil mayor (treasurer) of the Narváez expedition to Florida. Unlike most of the members of the journey, he had noble blood on both sides of his family.16 Nevertheless, he sees himself as marginal to the burgeoning enterprise of Spanish imperialism, and he identifies with the Amerindians after his prolonged cohabitation with them. In the heterogeneous New World, the explorer must construct a new self between the competing impulses to identify with the native Americans, and to distinguish himself from them in order to preserve his own cultural identity. The chronicler’s express intent, spelled out in the prologue to Naufragios, is to rectify the fact that, because the expedition failed, his deeds did not speak for themselves: “I truly felt that my deeds and services were as clear and manifest as those of my ancestors; and that I would have no need to speak in order to be counted among those who, with perfect faith and utmost diligence, administer and undertake Your Majesty’s appointments.”17 In order to legitimate his own discourse, Cabeza de Vaca uses a strategy that Beatriz Pastor terms el discurso del fracaso (the discourse of failure), a designation that is not as unfortunate as it might at first appear, as the failure of the mission becomes the point of departure for a consciousness-raising that ultimately leads to a questioning of the established order and an identification with the critical discourse of resistance.18 Through this discursive feat, Cabeza de Vaca is able to turn the material failure of the mission into a positive sign; precisely because of this failure, he relies on rhetoric to construct his own service to the king, as the adventure, being a failure, could not “speak for itself.” In a way, he is writing for his own survival, that is, in the absence of heroic deeds, the written word provides his only chance to remain in the service of the king. In contrast to the more typical conquistadors whose actions do speak for themselves, Cabeza de Vaca, at the end of a failed mission, endeavors to make the relación itself be considered his service and the criterion for his next imperial appointment.19 In order to approach the question of ideological ambiguity in Naufragios, we must examine Cabeza de Vaca’s problematic position within the imperial order, and within the indigenous societies he encounters. The following will demonstrate that although he begins as an outsider and a slave among the Amerindians, he also becomes partially transculturated, to the degree that when he rejoins Hispanic society at the end of the narrative, his cultural identification with the Spaniards is precarious.

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After the shipwreck of the Narváez expedition, Cabeza de Vaca comes into contact with the social hierarchies of different indigenous tribes, in relation to whom he is at first a servant of many masters, and only later a master of his own fate. Traveling among different tribes, he gradually ascends from the status of slave to that of merchant, and finally becomes a traveling healer who combines European Christian rites with indigenous customs to perform miraculous cures. As slave, and even later as shaman, Cabeza de Vaca is a half-outsider within these native societies. Sylvia Molloy notes that the Amerindians always recognize his difference by placing him in extreme positions, either in a state of submission or in a privileged space. Even when Cabeza de Vaca and his companions become traveling healers, the narrator insists that they were forced into this privileged position by Amerindians who said they would withhold their food unless they put themselves to use by performing cures. In order to ascend socially within the various indigenous tribes with whom he lives, Cabeza de Vaca needs to construct some externally visible authority. This is gained chiefly through his manipulation of discourse. Molloy observes that when Cabeza de Vaca becomes a curandero, he acquires an authority that helps him repossess his own identity but at the same time also distances him from the Amerindians and prepares him to be reintegrated into the Spanish community. When he comes back into contact with the Spaniards at the end of Naufragios, however, Cabeza de Vaca continues to marginalize himself through his identification with the Amerindians; as Pastor notes, his “return to civilization” becomes the mark of his awareness of his own marginality with respect to the goals of conquest and the imperial values that he now questions.20 After rejoining the Spaniards, any social rungs the explorer may have climbed within the indigenous societies are erased; his next task is to reenter the social hierarchy of the empire. He does this precisely through the writing of his relación, which serves as his hoja de servicios (record of service) because the only way that this “failed” conquistador can rise socially is to convince the king that he is a faithful servant who has suffered in the name of the crown, and offers this suffering as his service. Cabeza de Vaca’s use of language is especially indicative of the process of transculturation that has led him to question the ideology associated with his own cultural identity and begin the process of identification with the Other. In general, when one culture conquers another, the language of the colonizer is an important means of imposing the dominant culture; as Tzvetan Todorov comments: “[U]sually it is the conquered who learns the conqueror’s language. It is no accident that the first interpreters are Indians.” In Naufragios, we see a unique reversal of patterns of colonization, in that Cabeza de Vaca is eager to learn the indigenous languages and customs. Linguistic transculturation in Naufragios takes place on many levels, not least of which is the incorporation of native terminology from various parts of the Americas in this text from the first generation of the colonial period: surprisingly, Amerindi-

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an terms are presented in the text without explanation or glosses. This discursive transculturation comprehends not only indigenous languages, but also the would-be conquistador’s acquisition of other Amerindian semiotic practices, such as the laying on of hands to cure and the native North American system of exchange.21 One of the first things that strikes the contemporary reader of Naufragios, after having read other chronicles of the conquest, is Cabeza de Vaca’s attitude toward native languages and his willingness to learn them. His first comments concerning the initial contact with the American natives in Florida reveal a priori his attitude about the indigenous peoples and their means of communication, in a surprisingly nonethnocentric reversal of the more common disclaimer that newly arrived Spaniards are unable to communicate with the Amerindians because the latter lacked a lengua (interpreter). Here, instead of placing the burden of communication—that is, of learning Castilian or providing an interpreter—upon the Amerindians, Cabeza de Vaca emphasizes the Spaniards’ lack of a lengua (literally, a tongue), repeating that “we were powerless to speak without an interpreter.”22 After living among the natives of North America for ten years, and having learned, according to his own testimony, several native languages, Cabeza de Vaca realizes that it is the Spaniards who are the strangers in a new land, and that it is they who must adapt culturally and linguistically. The fact that the narrator and his companions learn native languages instead of expecting the Amerindians to learn Spanish is quite extraordinary in the context of the colonial chronicles and the rhetoric of conquest overall, and it serves as proof of Cabeza de Vaca’s willingness to participate in the process of transculturation. Aside from language per se, Cabeza de Vaca also learns indigenous gestures, most notably the rituals of prayer and healing. The Spanish shaman’s transculturation of these gestures by calling out to the Christian God while laying on hands as well as his attribution of the cures to divine sources clearly form part of his own selffashioning. As Posse’s fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca will do four and a half centuries later, he combines the indigenous soplos (blowing) with an Our Father in his own syncretic ritual. The explorer’s description of himself in religious terms—as praying, as hungry and naked in the desert, and as witness of a burning bush—has been seen by critics as proof of Cabeza de Vaca’s manipulation of his self-representation in order to appear messianic. Through the semiotic transculturation of Naufragios, Cabeza de Vaca contributes to an emerging sense of cultural relativity, in that he is able to transcend his Eurocentric background to the extent that he can view other cultures as different, without necessarily equating difference with inferiority. In terms of the mutual reactions of the Amerindians and Spaniards to one another, one of the most interesting images presented to the reader is that of the Christians as cannibals. Beatriz Pastor points out that for the conquistadors, the accusation of cannibalism called into question the very humanity of those reputed to have committed this offensive act.23 As observed

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in Chapter 1 of the present study, in terms of representation of the Other, as long as Western scholars have been describing alien cultures, the image of cannibalism has been used to differentiate between a civilized “we” and a barbarous “Other.” This makes it all the more surprising that Cabeza de Vaca, who did not personally witness the consumption of human flesh by Christians, should so unabashedly relate an account of Spanish anthropophagy to his royal reader. Even more ironic, in terms of representation of the self and the Other, is his description of the Amerindians’ reaction to this episode of cannibalism: “[F]ive Christians who were encamped on the beach came to such straits that they ate one another until only one was left, who survived because there was no one left to eat him. . . . The Indians were so indignant about this, and there was so much outrage among them, that undoubtedly if they had seen this when it began to happen they would have killed the men.”24 Because cannibalism is the quintessential myth of the Other, it is truly astonishing that a European explorer such as Cabeza de Vaca could admit that his own people should in a moment of weakness violate a deeply ingrained taboo against anthropophagy. Not only did the Amerindians’ reaction demonstrate that the native tribes whom the explorer encountered shared this taboo, but Cabeza de Vaca’s repeated descriptions of them as able to endure extreme hunger without resorting to cannibalism make them seem more noble than the Europeans in this context as well. The fact that Cabeza de Vaca relates the incident to his reader in this manner stands as proof of the author’s identification with the New World Other and his distancing from an Old World sense of self. Cabeza de Vaca avoids extremes in his descriptions of both Amerindians and Spaniards, by presenting both positive and negative characterizations of indigenous and Hispanic individuals and groups. He does not see all North American natives as a single, homogeneous group, but perceives different good and bad characteristics within the various tribes. Of some, he says that they love their children and treat them better than anyone else in the world; of others, he says that they do not love their children as much and that many among them are thieves, liars, drunkards, and sodomites.25 In contrast to other chroniclers, Cabeza de Vaca takes pains to represent the differences among various tribes, and to provide ethnographic information about their distinct languages and customs, in relatively non-Eurocentric terms. Cabeza de Vaca’s representation of Amerindian customs is so understated that it almost seems as if he were describing another European culture, one different from his own, but not drastically so. Like European nations, he seems to say, some of the indigenous tribes are more pacific, whereas others are more bellicose. When they do fight, the Amerindians are worthy adversaries; speaking of a particular tribe, Cabeza de Vaca says that they are such good warriors one would think they had been raised in Italy. The reference to Italy makes it clear that his cultural frame of reference is still continental, but at the same time the Amerindians are not radically different, inasmuch as they can be compared to Europeans.

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By the same token, because they are worthy adversaries, it is useful for the Spaniards to know something about the Amerindians. After describing the indigenous war techniques and various customs, Cabeza de Vaca explains his reasons for including this ethnographic information, which is so that the Europeans can learn more about the culture they wish to conquer. It is also proof that he believes that the European conquest of America is bound to continue, and that he is willing to participate in this enterprise, by giving useful information now, and, if he can convince the king of his worth, by actively participating later. In this way, Cabeza de Vaca sets a precedence for what twentieth-century scholars such as Edward Said will recognize as the use of ethnographic knowledge in order to dominate the Other. When Cabeza de Vaca rejoins Hispanic society at the end of his ten-year journey, it is clear that he has been transformed by his contact with the North American natives to the extent that his reassimilation into the Spanish community can no longer be taken for granted; he has become what Malloy calls an incongruent transcultural hybrid—neither fully Spanish nor Amerindian.26 When the Spaniards attempt to reintegrate him and take advantage of his experience in America, Cabeza de Vaca expresses a desire to shield the Amerindians from the Spanish invaders, begging them not to mistreat or enslave them.27 Throughout his wanderings, he has maintained his cultural difference from the native Americans, but at the same time he has also identified with them; now that he is in a position to resume the authority of a conquistador, he realizes that the Spaniards have become something of an Other to him. Cabeza de Vaca’s identification with the Amerindians is demonstrated on a linguistic level: when the narrator must distinguish between New World natives and Old World conquistadors, he often refers to the Amerindians in ethnically unmarked terms, in contrast to the ethnically marked Spaniards: “[A]t midday we encountered our messengers, who told us that they had found no one, for all the people were hidden in the woods, fleeing so that the Christians would not kill or make slaves of them.” As Sylvia Molloy observes, in this scene from near the end of Naufragios it is clear that Cabeza de Vaca considers the Amerindians “normal people” and the Spaniards the “different” element in the land.28 His contrasting of gente and personas with cristianos confirms his identification with the former. He also occasionally juxtaposes nosotros with references to the Spaniards who do not form part of this multiethnic we: “[S]ix hundred persons came and brought us all the maize they could lay their hands on . . . and they brought us everything else they owned; but we refused to take any of it except the food and gave all the rest to the Christians to divide among themselves.”29 Recent literary criticism has speculated a great deal about the role of self and Other in Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, and about the degree of his identification with the Amerindians. Beatriz Pastor takes this argument the furthest in that she perceives Cabeza de Vaca’s transculturation as a form of resistance to the developing patterns of colonization. She describes the discourse of Naufragios as displaying a critical consciousness that questions the dominant model of the conquest and subverts it by

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representing solidarity, communication, and understanding with the indigenous Other, thus pointing toward an incipient Spanish American identity emerging from within the rhetoric of conquest itself.30 Cabeza de Vaca participates in processes of transculturation, but he does not completely reject his Hispanic background. Although in general he writes about the inhabitants of North America without unfavorably comparing them to Europeans, there are times when his discourse echoes that of the other chroniclers of the conquest: for example, he speaks of a fertile ground that “seems to me that it would be a very fruitful land if it were cultivated and peopled by civilized folk”;31 by using this Eurocentric rhetoric, he robs the Amerindians of human qualities and metaphorically appropriates their land. Considering the recent expulsion of Moors and Jews, and the incipient conquest of the Americas, it is clear that early-sixteenth-century Spain was not receptive to the idea of transculturation. Against this background, Cabeza de Vaca seems extraordinarily open to other cultures. Jacques Lafaye considers him a living embodiment of cultural mestizaje. In contrast to other Spaniards who visited the New World and wrote about it, Cabeza de Vaca lived among the Amerindians, first as their slave, and only later on equal footing with them, trading between tribes. Robert E. Lewis compares him with the other chroniclers of the conquest and concludes that none of the other explorers and conquistadors who left written records had come to experience the indigenous perspective as profoundly as he.32 Because he is in unknown territory and among people of a culture new to him, Cabeza de Vaca has the space to create himself, and he does so through his adventures and later through his reconstruction of them in his relación. Against the background of Spain’s efforts to seal itself off from ethnic diversity through reconquest and expulsion, the historical Cabeza de Vaca appears unique in his openness to cultural exchange. David Bost notes that Naufragios was an anomaly in its time, because Cabeza de Vaca’s “extended, intimate experiences among various American tribes gave him profound insight into the devastating impact of the conquest on the New World.” Juan Bruce-Novoa goes so far as to claim that Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios could be counted as the first Chicano narrative, due to the extent of the explorer’s transculturation. Lucía Invernizzi Santa Cruz refers to Cabeza de Vaca as a new man, forged in the struggle against adversity and through his partial assimilation to the indigenous world.33 This new man, created through contact with a heterogeneous world, finds that America provides him with the opportunity for cultural experiences and self-fashioning that life in the peninsula had denied him. Cabeza de Vaca’s nakedness is literal, but it also acquires a symbolic dimension, according to José Rabasa, who notes elaborates in another article that the roles of conqueror and conquered are inverted when the Spaniards find themselves naked and obliged to adapt to the indigenous culture. Like Beatriz Pastor, Silvia Spitta observes that in Naufragios, the loss of clothing on the part of the Spanish castaways

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represents the loss of civilization, ultimately leading to transculturation and the questioning of imperial values. According to Cesare Acutis, along with his clothing, Cabeza de Vaca loses his social identity and enters into a new culture. For Acutis, Cabeza de Vaca, writing in Naufragios from the perspective of a man who has resumed clothing and been reintegrated into Spanish culture, attempts to hide the fact that in his earlier nakedness in the wilderness, he had denied the culture whose ultimate symbol is its clothing.34 Cabeza de Vaca’s nakedness, then, symbolizes his ability to re-create himself and be reborn; as Cesare Acutis notes, the Spanish castaways appear like newborns in their nakedness. For Margo Glantz, Cabeza de Vaca’s use of the expression “naked as the day we were born” suggests that the shipwrecked Spaniard is traveling toward his own infancy and toward a precivilized self. Beatriz Pastor has also noted that Cabeza de Vaca is like a newborn, as physical nakedness is the equivalent of cultural nakedness. As Glantz further observes, when they are shipwrecked Nature undresses the civilized Spaniards and turns them into precultural beings who are reborn to be acculturated again on American soil and on Amerindian terms.35 Sylvia Molloy and Beatriz Pastor each perceive Cabeza de Vaca’s self-proclaimed nakedness in the wilderness as both literally a lack of clothing and figuratively as the absence of cultural and ideological baggage.36 This absence is seen by Molloy as an opportunity for self-creation, because Cabeza de Vaca has left Spain behind along with his clothing, and his naked self thus becomes a dispossessed space that he can fill with the unknown—America—to achieve a new self, a new identity.37 Although he is an educated Spaniard and not a tabula rasa, Cabeza de Vaca is open to experience, and creates himself in the space of the unknown, drawing upon the concepts of identity and alterity.38 This is the essence of transculturation in Naufragios: still recognizable as a Spaniard, Cabeza de Vaca has been transformed by contact with the indigenous Other. This hybrid person, this “new man” created in the conflict of cultures in the newly discovered Americas, although still a Spaniard, has become someone different who can no longer adhere unquestioningly to the ideology of the conquest. His nakedness represents the shedding of his identity as a Spanish conquistador and metaphorically opens up a space for him to question the goals of the conquest, because this nakedness expresses his extreme dispossession in relation to the cultural and ideological enterprise of imperialism. For Pastor, the loss of material culture in the final shipwreck represents the culmination of Cabeza de Vaca’s process of negation of the Spanish model of conquest and ground zero for the development of his new critical consciousness.39 Even the Spaniards they encounter at the end of their adventures recognize that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions have become something new and that their Hispanic identity is no longer stable; clearly, they perceive this as threatening, because they find it necessary to separate the shipwrecked wanderers from the indigenous

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population.40 Although his cultural identity remains Spanish, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca can nevertheless be seen as an initiator of a modern way of defining the self within a more heterogeneous world, precisely because of the ambivalent identification with the indigenous Other that is integral to his self-expression in Naufragios. Although Cabeza de Vaca’s adventures take place during the initial period of encounter between the Spanish and indigenous cultures, his marginalized yo and subtle irony allow the narrator to question the still-developing project of the conquest. His cultural identity is Hispanic, but the gap between this self and the indigenous Other begins to close as the explorer becomes better acquainted with the cultures of the various tribes he visits. Thus, Naufragios exemplifies how, even before the conquest is fully under way, the empire has begun to “write back”; that is, among the conquistadors themselves were those who began the process of formulating ambiguous responses to the question of European cultural and political domination of the Americas. Cabeza de Vaca participates in this incipient contestatory process, ironically questioning the project of the conquest while remaining a conquistador himself, and seeking the favor of the crown in order to continue to engage in the colonial enterprise, “writing back” from the perspective of a Spaniard who has become partially transculturated through his encounter with the North American natives. Naked in the Wilderness: Transculturation and Colonial Desire in Posse’s Fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca In Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante, the fictionalized narrator representing Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca is a sexagenarian living in Seville after his adventures in the Americas, which concluded with a prolonged trial following his return in chains after serving briefly as governor of the Río de la Plata region.41 In Seville, the narrator frequents a library to look at maps; there he meets the conversa Lucía de Aranha, who provides him with the paper on which he writes the memoirs of his voyages to North and South Americas. In the novel, his New World adventures are recounted as flashbacks intermingled with his current experiences in Seville. In North America, the fictionalized explorer marries and has a family, in contrast to the real Cabeza de Vaca, who in Naufragios makes no reference to having engaged in sexual relations during nearly a decade living among the Amerindians. In order to reunite with the Spaniards, Posse’s Cabeza de Vaca leaves behind his indigenous wife, Amaría, who dies after the Hernando de Soto expedition conquers the territory where she lives; their daughter, Nube, becomes a guerrillera in the indigenous resistance against the conquest, and their son, Amadís, arrives in Seville with a group of Amerindians on display in cages, and dies soon thereafter in spite of Cabeza de Vaca’s efforts to secure his release and provide him with medical attention. This arrival of his mestizo son in Spain serves as a point of intersection between the narrator’s past and present, New and Old World, experiences.

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In a brief prologue preceding the first-person narration, Posse describes Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca as a wanderer who stood apart from the typical conquistador because of his nakedness in the wilderness. In the prologue, Posse offers as evidence of Cabeza de Vaca’s transculturation the fact that upon reuniting with the Spaniards after a decade of traversing North America, “se dio cuenta que ya tenía pie de indio: no le entraban las botas” (11) (he realized he had an Indian foot: boots no longer fit him). In Posse’s novel, as in the historical Cabeza de Vaca’s relación, the explorer’s nakedness in the wilderness is directly associated with his transculturation and his nonconformity with the goals of the conquest: “[S]e separó del tipo humano del ‘Conquistador.’ A pie, desnudo como un indio, desarmado y sin cruces ni evangelios (visibles), se lanzó a la caminata más descomunal de la historia” (11) ([H]e distinguished himself from the human type of the “Conquistador.” On foot, naked like an Indian, unarmed and without crosses or [visible] gospels, he launched upon the most colossal walking trip in history). Posse’s novel proper begins with a declaration of Cabeza de Vaca’s cultural identity, which suggests that he is a cristiano viejo (Old Christian) as opposed to a converso (convert from Judaism). Such a distinction would have been important to an early-sixteenth-century Spaniard, because documents testifying to limpieza de sangre (ethnic purity) were being requested of Spaniards in order to prove their fitness for various occupations such as holding public office and travel to the Americas. The narrator’s declaration of his cultural identity reads thus: “Soy español, soy andaluz, soy extremeño. En todo caso, hombre de la España profunda. De una casa con más linaje y orgullo que riquezas” (16) (I am a Spaniard, I am Andalusian, from Extremadura. In any case, a man from deep Spain. From a house with more lineage and pride than wealth). This mention of lineage would seem to imply an Old Christian bloodline. In the case of both the real Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his fictionalized counterpart, the reference to lineage alludes specifically to the honors granted to his forefathers for services to the crown. The explorer’s paternal grandfather, Pedro de Vera, was eminent for his role in the conquest of the Canary Islands, and a maternal ancestor was granted the name Cabeza de Vaca as an honor for services to the crown.42 It is notable that the historical Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca signed his chronicle with this maternal surname, which in the context of Posse’s novel is explained as being due to the mother’s high position in the balance of household power in the narrator’s boyhood home in Jerez. In El largo atardecer del caminante, flashbacks reveal that as a young boy, the future conquistador was pressured by his mother to identify with his grandfather who conquered the Canary Islands and to live up to his noble surnames, which his father had failed to do. The fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca resents the pressure of “[e]se apellido, que mi madre me hizo vivir desde la infancia como un destino heroico que debía ser cumplido. . . . (Nada más negativo para un hombre que tener que vivir empeñado en alcanzar un destino impuesto o imaginado por los otros)” (16) ([t]his

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surname, that my mother made me live since childhood as a heroic destiny that had to be fulfilled. . . . [Nothing is more negative for a man than having to live committed to achieving a destiny imposed or imagined by others]). Precisely because his mother forces him to identify with traditional Iberian values, the narrator of El largo atardecer feels his Spanish identity is a cumbersome burden, and experiences the desire to associate with other cultures, including the Jewish religion that is expressly forbidden to those who profess limpieza de sangre. The narrator says that the god of his mother’s house is not the New Testament Christ, but the Jehovah of the Old Testament, a statement that vaguely implies an affinity with Judaism. This affinity is further developed in the novel through the representation of Cabeza de Vaca’s ambiguous feelings regarding living near the Jewish quarter, and in his sexual desire for the conversa whom he calls Lucinda. The reader later discovers that Lucinda is in love with a Moorish man who forms part of an underground resistance movement that relocates moriscos and crypto-Jews to communities off the Iberian Peninsula.43 The fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca’s nakedness in the wilderness comes to symbolize the desire to abandon the burden of the conquistador and adopt a transcultural identity: Éramos como indios entre los indios; tal nuestra pobreza, nuestra falta de imperio y poder. Curioso destino: haber llegado con voluntad e investidura de conquistador y enseguida haber caído en una posición inferior y más penosa que la del último conquistado. (74) (We were as Indians among Indians; such was our poverty, our lack of imperiousness and power. Curious destiny: having arrived with the will and investiture of the conqueror and immediately having fallen to a position inferior and more arduous than that of the lowest of the vanquished.)

Like the historical Cabeza de Vaca, Posse’s fictionalized narrator is touched by the humanity of the Amerindians who rescue the castaways and weep heartily for their loss, demonstrating more Christianity than the European conquistadors would have done if the situation had been reversed. Here there is a nearly complete identification between self and Other, as the Spaniards are naked like the Amerindians while the Amerindians are more Christian than the Spaniards. Because they are naked, the shipwrecked Spaniards are the ones who must adapt to the native culture: “Nosotros, los dominadores del mundo desnudos y sin coraza ni espada, debíamos aprender de los salvajes a coger peces y raíces no venenosas” (75) (We, the lords of the world naked and without armor or sword, had to learn from the savages to gather fish and nonpoisonous roots). Nevertheless, due to the anxiety of identification, even after years of cohabitation and transculturation, the difference between European self and indigenous Other always remains manifested on some level. Living among the Amerindians, El largo atardecer’s narrator admits to having re-

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signed himself to his circumstances and to having experienced the desire to abandon his Spanish identity altogether: Cedía yo a esa oscura tentación que nunca confesé, que más bien oculté cuidadosamente: aceptar mi situación, despojarme de todo lo que podría sintetizar con la palabra España. Era la tentación como de huir de mí mismo. (83) (I yielded to that dark temptation that I never confessed, that rather I hid carefully: to accept my situation, stripping myself of everything that could be synthesized in the word Spain. It was the temptation as if to flee from myself.)

In this passage, the verb despojar (to strip) is especially suggestive of the idea that he is shedding his identity in order to transform himself into a transcultural being who recognizes that he is the stranger in this strange land: “No era un nuevo mundo. Era otro mundo” (83) (It wasn’t a new world. It was an other world). His situation is the opposite of that of the conquistador, “Mi vida al revés, siempre al revés: yo era Moctezuma, yo era el indio” (84) (My life backwards, always backwards: I was Moctezuma, I was the Indian). Here the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca’s transculturation has progressed to the stage of a complete identification with the Other. One of the ways in which this fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca rebels against his burdensome noble heritage and participates in the incipient process of transculturation is by taking an indigenous wife, Amaría, the niece of Dulján, the chief of the tribe with whom he spends six years.44 The attraction-repulsion of colonial desire are vividly apparent in the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca’s relationship with the fictional Amaría. Most notable in this context is the narrator’s vacillation regarding the legitimacy of this alliance. He accepts Dulján’s offer of his niece’s hand knowing that it means the loss of part of his Spanish identity: “Acepté aunque aquello significaba un verdadero matrimonio y la traición de mi fe” (95) (I accepted although I knew that it meant a true marriage and the betrayal of my faith). He later refers to this alliance alternately as “amancebamiento” (96) (concubinage) and “casamiento” (99) (marriage), indicating ambivalence about his relationship with a woman who is not “like his mother”: not Spanish, not Christian, not even “civilized.” This fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca recognizes his own hypocrisy in having silenced this part of his adventures when he wrote the official relación of his journey, and admits that he is not like the Spaniards who boast of their sexual conquests with vanquished races, but more like the hypocritical Northern European conquerors: Me dicen que los pérfidos britanos y los holandeses tienen como la peor vergüenza confesar amores con indias y otras nativas. Son piratas y asesinos, pero tienen la delicadeza de no reconocer hijos de otra raza. En este mal sentido he sido más británico que buen español, esto es, cristiano. (99) (They tell me that the perfidious Englishmen and Dutchmen hold it as the worst shame to confess love affairs with Indians and other native women. They are pirates and mur-

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derers, but they have the delicacy of not recognizing children of other races. In this bad sense I have been more British than good Spaniard, that is, Christian.)

When he leaves Amaría and their two children in order to continue his journey westward in search of Spanish colonies, the narrator reiterates this notion: Dejaba una familia en estado salvaje, una familia no cristiana. . . . Había estado años al lado de Amaría. Había engendrado en su vientre. Pero nunca la sentí esposa a nuestra manera. Fui tan despreciativo como un britano. (14) (I was leaving a family in a savage state, a non-Christian family. . . . I had spent years at Amaría’s side. I had sired children in her womb. But I never felt her to be my wife in our way. I was as scornful as an Englishman.)

When he bids farewell to the indigenous wife with whom he has lived for six years, the narrator is exhilarated at the prospect of heading out naked in the wilderness, without the ideological baggage of the conquistador, with only “[l]a voluntad de enfrentar solo y sin España ni Cristo ni nadie, los espacios abiertos de ese mundo nuevo y virgen” (140) (the will to confront alone and without Spain or Christ or anyone, the open spaces of this new and virgin world). He persuades his two Spanish companions, Dorantes and Castillo, to leave behind their knives, leather garments, scapulars, and Bible, as the chief, Dulján, advises them to “presentarnos a los sucesivos pueblos del rumbo del maíz, desnudos de todo, desarmados y sin la prepotencia de sentirse el brazo de Dios” (142) (present ourselves to the successive villages of the path of the corn, naked of everything, unarmed and without the authority of feeling we are the arm of God). He convinces his companions to forge forth as new men in a new land without the external trappings of the conquistadors, because to take them “[s]ería como entrar en América con toda España encima” (141) ([w]ould be like entering into America carrying all Spain in tow). Avoiding all reference to Castilian culture, which could be dangerous considering that they are advancing toward tribes who are aware of the violence of the Spanish conquest, the wanderers affirm, “Nuestra arma mayor . . . era nuestra desnudez” (144) (Our greatest weapon . . . was our nakedness). In flashbacks throughout the novel, the narrator reconstructs his adventures in the New World, emphasizing his nakedness in the wilderness as a lack of both the external trappings and the cultural baggage of the conquistador. For this fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca, clothing represents the false masks and posturing of “civilized” society: “Trajes: vestiduras/investiduras/imposturas . . . Sólo ocho años he pasado desnudo, sin ellos . . . [o]cho años como devuelto a mí mismo, fuera de los trajes” (24) (Clothing: vestments, investitures, impostures . . . . Only eight years have I spent naked, without them . . . [e]ight years as returned to myself, out of clothing). During his wanderings, he not only sheds his clothing, but sheds his skin as well; reminis-

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cent of the historical Cabeza de Vaca’s declaration that “we shed our skin like snakes twice a year,” Posse’s narrator refers to leaving behind discarded skins along the wayside as symbolic of shedding and abandoning a series of identities. So contradictory is the position of the wanderers that in order to reencounter Spanish culture, they must walk in the opposite direction of Spain: “No les propuse ir en dirección a Cuba y España sino hacia el Poniente, a contra-España, digamos” (128) (I did not propose to them to go in the direction of Cuba and Spain but rather toward the West, counter-Spainwise, as it were). Earlier, the narrator had referred to his temptation to walk westward rather than toward Spain: “Una secreta voz me tentaba para seguir andando detrás del sol, en dirección opuesta a la de mi mundo” (79) (A secret voice tempted me to keep walking behind the sun, in the direction opposite to that of my world). This notion of walking away from Spain can be seen as a metaphorical representation of Cabeza de Vaca’s desire to abandon his Spanish identity in favor of transculturation, yet, ironically, his westward journey leads him back to Spanish society. Posse’s Cabeza de Vaca underscores his status not only as naked but also as barefoot. Like his skin, which he sheds periodically, his feet become hardened and used to walking, pies salvajes (savage feet) that by the end of his adventures cannot conform to wearing boots. The narrator explicitly associates his barefoot state with his adaptation to the indigenous mode of life, resulting in a transcultural identity maladapted to the career of conquistador. When he is reunited with the Spaniards at the end of his journey, his unease when wearing boots is directly linked to his altered identity: “Yo ya había perdido la costumbre de ser soldado español (tal vez, incluso, de ser español) y me bamboleaba un poco como si entrase en zancos en el salón donde se me homenajeaba” (45) (I had lost the habit of being a Spanish soldier [perhaps even of being Spanish] and I wobbled a little as if I were entering on stilts into the room where they were honoring me). In addition to lacking boots and clothing, another essential part of the conquistador’s gear that Cabeza de Vaca lacks is a horse: “Fui el conquistador desnudo, el peatón” (63) (I was the naked conqueror, the pedestrian). When he narrates the scene of the final shipwreck, he registers the meaning of his nakedness as a loss of the external trappings of the conquistador, and also of his Spanish identity: “Había perdido vestiduras e investiduras. El mar se había tragado la espada y la cruz. . . . Ese fue el verdadero naufragio: desnudo y sin España” (65) (I had lost vestments and investiture. The sea had swallowed the sword and the cross. . . . This was the true shipwreck: naked and without Spain). The narrator conflates the act of writing with the act of wandering, and in one passage he refers to the process of writing his memoirs in terms of “Una exaltación como la de aquella mañana cuando decidimos dejar esta ‘civilización’ de aventureros y tiranos y nos lanzamos desnudos, hacia el desierto, hacia el espacio abierto” (38) ([a]n exaltation like that of the morning when we decided to leave this “civilization” of adventurers and tyrants and we set out naked, toward the desert, toward the open space).

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Significantly, in the above passage, the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca portrays himself and his companions more in terms of voluntary deserters to the imperial cause rather than shipwreck victims naked by necessity. Thus, more explicitly than in Cabeza de Vaca’s original chronicle, Posse’s fictionalized narrator defines himself as a dissenter within the ranks of the conquistadors. His nakedness, his status as the barefoot conquistador, symbolizes the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca’s lack of conformity within the enterprise of the conquest. When this fiction represents an encounter with Hernán Cortés back in Spain, the conqueror of Mexico is surprised to find Cabeza de Vaca “menos indio, menos desnudo” (152) (less Indian, less naked). The narrator describes himself as unique among the conquistadors for having “mezclado con indios, como un indio más” (153) (mingled with Indians, like one of them), a conquistador who tried to be different but failed. He even attempts to convince Cortés that the entire enterprise of the conquest was a failure, because it succeeded only in adding territories to a weak, decadent empire. It is during his conversation with Cortés that Cabeza de Vaca begins to become aware that his maladaptation to the goals of the conquest was a direct result of his desire to escape the cumbersome identity imposed by his noble Spanish lineage: Mientras Cortés hablaba, sentí que yo nunca había creído en ese futuro. Nací con el futuro puesto, dada mi estirpe. No hice otra cosa sino tratar de desembarazarme de él buscando más la aventura que la conquista y el poder. Fui un peatón, un caminante. . . . [E]n lo profundo de mí nunca había cumplido con los propósitos del Imperio. (152) (While Cortés spoke, I felt that I had never believed in that future. I was born wearing my future, given my lineage. I did nothing but try to unburden myself of it by searching more for adventure than conquest and power. I was a pedestrian, a wanderer. . . . [I]n my deepest self I had never fulfilled the goals of the Empire.)

Thus, Posse’s protagonists the pedestrian conquistador who is not in accord with the goals and means of the conquest. In El largo atardecer, Cabeza de Vaca’s dissidence within the enterprise of the conquest is represented by the slogan, “Sólo la fe cura, sólo la bondad conquista” (154) (Only faith cures, only goodness conquers).45 Ultimately, for Posse’s Cabeza de Vaca, the conquest resulted not in the discovery of another world, but rather in Spain’s self-discovery: “No hemos descubierto nada en las Indias. Lo que hemos descubierto es España. Esta España enferma . . . ” (163) (We have discovered nothing in the Indies. What we have discovered is Spain. A sick Spain . . . ). Here, as in the narratives discussed throughout the present study, the colonial gaze is turned back toward the European conquerors. During his wanderings in North America, Cabeza de Vaca glimpses the possibility of a new order based on individual worth rather than on what he refers to as the yoke of social standing. In this world, he becomes a new man by giving himself over to the process of transculturation through which he gives birth to a new self; after par-

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ticipating in a ritual involving a hallucinogen, the narrator exclaims, “Me parí desde mi propio cuerpo” (172) (I gave birth to myself from my own body). When he and his companions are reunited with the Christians at the end of their travels, the narrator underscores again that the Spaniards do not recognize him as one of their own, because of his nakedness: “Yo, desnudo, con un taparrabos” (175) (I, naked, with a loincloth); “no respetaban mi jerarquía por estar yo desnudo y asalvajado” (176) (they didn’t respect my rank because I was naked and gone savage). By this point in the narration, Cabeza de Vaca’s nakedness has clearly become established as an emblem of the desire to shed his burdensome identity as a Spanish conquistador of noble lineage in favor of a transcultural identity. Just as shedding his clothing represents shedding the ideology of the conquest, putting on clothing represents putting that ideology back on as well: “Volví a ser tratado como cómplice y protagonista de nuestra España: me dieron ropa” (176) (I went back to being treated as an accomplice and protagonist of our Spain: they gave me clothes). Like the historical Cabeza de Vaca, Posse’s narrator elaborates on his difficulty adjusting to Spanish clothing, boots, and even sleeping in a bed. Although he has readopted the external trappings of Spanish civilization, his inner self has been permanently altered through the process of transculturation: “Era otra vez don Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, el señor de Xerés. Pero era otro, por más que yo simulase. Era ya, para siempre, un otro” (177) (I was once again don Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, gentleman of Jerez. But I was Other, no matter how much I pretended. I was now, and forever, an Other). He describes himself as a failed conquistador who neither took possession of territories, renamed lands, nor reduced natives to service to the crown, a “conquistador conquistado” (177) (conquered conqueror). Now neither Spaniard nor Amerindian, Cabeza de Vaca is a transculturated entity, simply an Other: “Ni tan rebelde como para negar al dios de su infancia, ni tan sumiso como para esclavizar y matar en nombre de un Rey. Un excéntrico. Un otro” (177–78) (Neither rebellious enough to deny the god of his childhood, nor submissive enough to enslave and kill in the name of a King. An eccentric. An Other). In order to receive another commission, which in this fiction is represented in terms of his desire to continue to protect the Amerindians from the cruelty of the conquest, he must pretend to be a Spaniard, to go along with the project of imperialism, but he knows in his heart that he is just acting, because his preshipwreck Spanish identity no longer exists. In his South American commission, as in his North American expedition, Cabeza de Vaca’s transculturated identity continues to make it impossible for him to implement the ideology of conquest: “Yo no era un hombre fiel al Imperio. Yo era un ‘otro’” (216) (I was not a man faithful to the Empire. I was an “Other”). His first act as governor upon disembarking on South American soil is to order the Spaniards to strip and bathe. Having bathed, their bodies are “purificados, redimidos de una España, de una cultura, muy enfermas” (219) (purified, redeemed from a sick Spain, from a sick culture). Only now, having purified their naked bodies of the decadence of Spain,

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can the soldiers go forward on Cabeza de Vaca’s mission, which is not a conquest but an anticonquest. Because his mission does not fit in with the goals of the other conquistadors in South America, he is arrested and returned to the Iberian Peninsula in chains. After prolonged imprisonment, trial, and sentencing, Cabeza de Vaca is stripped of his titles, truly a “descubridor desnudo” (234) (naked discoverer). The “Other within” Spain: Colonial Desire toward the Converso in El largo atardecer del caminante In Seville, after his failure as governor of the Río de la Plata region, Posse’s fictionalized explorer continues to express a distinct sense of not fitting into Spanish society, a sense that he expresses through his identification with Jewish culture. The narrator of El largo atardecer del caminante is fascinated with the Jewish and Moorish quarters, the juderías and alcaicerías of Seville, where he now finds himself after his adventures. The aging explorer harbors an inexplicable fascination with the Jewish ghettos but also a strong repulsion toward the “upstart” class of conversos. He alternately describes the New Christians as “aprovechados conversos” (28) (opportunistic converts) and “buena gente estos judíos” (29) (good people these Jews). He feels a certain attraction toward the sordid sights, sounds, and smells of the ghetto, where he is content to spend hours walking, fascinated by the marketplace; nevertheless, there is an ironic tone in his description of the conversos who have gone to Flanders and Genoa and now return as wealthy “enthusiasts of Catholicism.” In particular, the narrator is vehemently critical of the conversos whom he perceives as social climbers representing the new bourgeois class. In spite of this, the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca continues to live near the judería, which he refers to as a “nuevo mundo” (28) (New World). This is clearly a case of colonial desire, an ambivalent attraction-repulsion toward the Judaic Other. When this fiction represents the historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo coming to visit Cabeza de Vaca in Seville, the narrator alternately claims to live near the Jewish quarter by choice or by necessity: “¿Sabe usted? Con los años me siento mejor cerca de los moros y de los judíos” (29) (You know? After all these years I feel better close to the Moors and the Jews). He says this in part to shock the historian’s sensibilities, and immediately goes on to say that he was able to purchase the house cheaply, with the little money left him after his lawsuits.46 When the fictionalized Oviedo prods Cabeza de Vaca to admit to having stumbled upon the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola in his North American wanderings, the narrator responds sarcastically, “Cree usted don Gonzalo que si yo hubiese podido saquear las Siete Ciudades de oro estaría viviendo en una casa comprada a los judíos expulsados?” (31) (Do you think, don Gonzalo, that if I had been able to sack the Seven Cities of gold I would be living in a house bought from the expelled Jews?). Thus, in a single conversation, Cabeza de Vaca reveals his simultaneous attraction and repulsion regarding living

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near the Jewish quarter, and his anxiety of identification toward the marginalized populations of Old Christian Spain. The attraction and repulsion of colonial desire are most clear, however, in the narrator’s relationship with the conversa whom he calls Lucinda, who introduces herself to Cabeza de Vaca in the following exchange: —¿Cómo te llamas?—Lucía de Aranha. Se escribe con una hache antes de la a. Hay una vibración de inquietud en su voz porque es un apellido judío. ¿Acaso no se llamaba Arana o Aranha la barragana cordobesa del genovés descubridor? (21) (“What is your name?” “Lucía de Aranha. It’s written with an h before the a.” There is a vibration of uneasiness in her voice because it is a Jewish surname. After all, wasn’t Arana or Aranha the last name of the Genovese discoverer’s Cordoban concubine?)

This last reference is to Columbus’s mistress, Beatriz Enríquez de Harana, who was purportedly of Jewish descent. The curious thing is that upon meeting this conversa, the narrator immediately proceeds to change her first name from Lucía to Lucinda, which he says suits her better and which perhaps has a more exotic sound than the more traditional “Lucía.” From later flashbacks, the reader learns that the narrator had also changed the name of his indigenous wife to Amaría, suggestive of the verb amar and of the name of the Virgin Mary.47 This idea that female identity is malleable, and that Cabeza de Vaca feels empowered to rename the women with whom he associates, indicates that he is not completely lacking in the colonizer’s sense of his own superiority, and that desire and domination are not completely separate for him. As had been evident in the narrator’s ambivalent relationship with his Amerindian wife, Amaría, colonial desire is clearly present in the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca’s feelings toward the conversa Lucinda. When the narrator discovers that Lucinda is in love with the morisco Omar Mohamed, who also has the Christian name Jesús, the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca responds with a violent rage of jealousy and assumes that Mohamed is a member of a band of ruffians. He curses the day he fell in love with a woman beneath his station due to her status as a conversa: “¡Que tú seas tan puta! ¡Tan miserable! ¡Atroz judezna!” (194) (That you could be such a whore! So wretched! Vile Jewess!). Thus, his desire for the conversa is juxtaposed with a rejection of that same Other, coupled with hatred toward himself for loving someone so beneath him. He reproaches himself for his jealousy: “¡Tener celos! ¡Estar enamorado indecorosamente de una judezna endiablada por un moro!” (196) ( Jealous! To be indecently in love with a Jewess bedeviled by a Moor!). As Cabeza de Vaca soon discovers, her lover, Jesús-Omar Mohamed, is a morisco who forms part of an underground resistance movement that frees slaves and relocates them to countries outside the Iberian Peninsula, rather than a street ruffian as he had at first assumed. No romance ever does develop between Cabeza de Vaca and Lucía, and at the end of the novel, Lucía-Lucinda and Omar-Jesús flee to a Sephardic colony in Asia Minor.

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The sexual interests of Posse’s Cabeza de Vaca are always couched in terms of otherness: “Yo que he entrado en tantas putas, judías, moras, barraganas e indias, me voy a morir sin haber conocido la carne de una mujer decente de mi jerarquía. Alguien como mi madre, digamos” (51) (I who have penetrated so many whores, Jewesses, Moorish women, concubines and Indian women, am going to die without having known the flesh of a decent woman of my rank. Someone like my mother, as it were). In these terms, desire for the exotic Other appears associated with the cultural necessity of exogamy in line with the incest taboo, in the face of his Oedipal desire for someone like his mother. Living in Seville, the narrator continually expresses his sense of not fitting into Spanish culture in terms of identification with those of Jewish descent. When he is obliged to attend an auto-da-fé, he is appalled by the brutality of the Inquisition, and rejects the worldview it represents: “No. Nada me une ya a mi pueblo ni a la ciudad de mi infancia (que es la misma, pero yo cambié)” (117) (No. Nothing ties me any longer to the city of my childhood [which is the same, but I changed]). The auto provokes an epiphany in which the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca becomes aware of the hypocrisy of the culture in which he lives: “[S]entí toda la ridiculez de nuestro mundo como en una súbita revelación” (116) (I felt how ridiculous our world was as if in a sudden revelation). He ends up walking away from the auto-da-fé, concluding, “No. Ya soy definitivamente otro. . . . Soy otro. Soy el que vio demasiado” (117–18) (No. I am definitively Other. . . . I am Other. I am the man who saw too much). Following his transcultural experiences in the New World that led him to identify with the indigenous Other and question the values of the conquest, here in the Iberian context, Cabeza de Vaca identifies with the Judaic Other and rejects the values of the Inquisition. The theme of nakedness as freedom from ideological baggage is reiterated here, when after abandoning the scene of the inquisitorial auto, Cabeza de Vaca goes home and changes his clothes: “[M]e despojé de mi traje de ceremonias y vestido como un pordiosero. . . . me lancé a la calle. . . . Mi indumentaria me transformaba en un viejo vagabundo sin pretensiones” (118) (I shed my ceremonial clothing and dressed as a beggar. . . . I rushed into the street. . . . My clothing transformed me into an unpretentious old vagabond). Here in Seville, as in the Americas, lack of clothing is associated with freedom from the oppressive constraints of Cabeza de Vaca’s Spanish heritage. In El largo atardecer del caminante, desire for the Other becomes desire to be the Other when the narrator begins to adopt some Judaic and indigenous practices. The question of religious syncretism present in Naufragios, when in his shaman role the historical Cabeza de Vaca combines indigenous and Christian rituals in his curing, appears also in Posse’s novel. In El largo atardecer, the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca baptizes his children, although he does so in secret: “Les mojé la crisma con agua fresca y les puse un poco de sal, bautizándolos en nombre de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo y la Santa Madre Iglesia” (98) (I wet their foreheads with fresh water and put

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a little salt on them, baptizing them in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Mother Church). Further, when the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca’s mestizo son, Amadís, arrives in Spain in chains, and soon thereafter becomes ill and dies, the narrator prays over him in a syncretic ritual combining American indigenous prayers and gestures with Christian ones, “Padre nuestros, Avemarías. Pero también menté a ese dios de los llanos que llaman Aguar” (258) (Our Fathers, Hail Maries. But I also invoked the god of the plains they call Aguar). Curiously, Cabeza de Vaca also incorporates Judaic customs in his syncretic funeral rite: “Lavé yo a Amadís, casi como suelen hacer los judíos” (257) (I washed my son’s corpse, almost as the Jews do). Within this word casi (almost) is inscribed the inherent ambivalence of colonial desire and the anxiety of identification, as desire for the Other is tempered by the desire to preserve the distinction of the self, to maintain one’s own ego boundaries. Here, as in the other chapters of this study, postcolonial Spanish American authors experience marginality in relation to the metropolis, because as products of a transculturation whose origins are found in the violence of the conquest, they alternately accept and reject aspects of their dual cultural heritage. The principal dynamic identified here is the vacillation of colonial desire between the poles of attraction and repulsion toward both the Amerindian Other and the “Other within” European society. The anxiety of identification manifests itself as the need for the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca to retain his cultural boundaries, defined in opposition to both Amerindian and Iberian Others. As seen above, the narrator’s self-description as marginalized due to his “nakedness in the wilderness” is suggested by the historical Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s own Naufragios. In Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante, as in the broader corpus of texts that rewrite the conquest, the focus on the European conqueror reveals the author’s own ambivalence about Latin American identity as one whose origins reach back to the conflictive and violent racial miscegenation and transculturation initiated by the conquest.

5 Ambivalence toward Converso Self and Conquered Other in Homero Aridjis’s 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo

I could relate to Columbus, stranger to stranger. There he was, no matter what version of his life you believe, pushing and pulling at the city limits of wherever he found himself. An Italian in Iberia. A Jew in Christendom. A Converso among the baptized-at-birth. A layman among Franciscans. He spoke all languages with a foreign accent, and his sight was always fixed away from the heartland. He didn’t completely fit in, anywhere, and that was his engine. He was propelled by alienation. —Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Crown of Columbus

n the previous chapter, we saw how Abel Posse’s fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca expresses his ambivalent feelings of colonial desire toward two Others: the converso in the Old World and the Amerindian in the New. Although he identifies with these Others to a certain extent, and although he experiences a process of transculturation, Posse’s explorer is nevertheless secure in the knowledge that he is an Old Christian. In the case of Homero Aridjis’s completely fictional Juan Cabezón, who in 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo accompanies Columbus on his first voyage and Cortés in his conquest of Tenochtitlan, it is even more clearly a question of anxiety regarding the “Other within,” as here ambivalence toward the conquered Other stems from ambivalence toward the converso self. As a descendant of converted Jews, Juan Cabezón’s identity is already divided between a Jewish past and a Christian present. Living in the tumultuous times of latefifteenth-century Spain on the verge of the expulsion of the Jews and during the years of the most virulent persecution of New Christians by the Inquisition, Aridjis’s protagonist alternately accepts and rejects an identification with his Jewish heritage.

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This ambivalent self-identification carries over into the New World from the novel 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla (1985) to its companion novel, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo (1988).1 In this sequel, Juan Cabezón, stranded after the rest of the party left behind on Columbus’s first voyage has been massacred, becomes a curandero (healer) among the Caribs, much as the historical Cabeza de Vaca had been among several North American tribes. His identification with the Amerindians lasts only as long as he is living in their midst, however, as he goes on to participate halfheartedly in the conquest of New Spain. Thus, Juan Cabezón’s lukewarm identification with his own converso roots in the Old World is transported to the New World where his tentative identification with the Amerindians conflicts with his reluctant but de facto identity as a conquistador. Even more starkly than in Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante, then, in Homero Aridjis’s two novels tracing the adventures of Juan Cabezón, the anxiety of identification is evident in the protagonist’s own ambivalent identity and colonial desire toward the Amerindian Other. Homero Aridjis’s first full-length novel, 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla (1985), begins in the fashion of a picaresque narrative.2 As in the prototypical picaresque novel, 1492 has an episodic structure marked by geographic movement, in that the protagonist wanders from town to town within Spain, avoiding the Inquisition and loitering with a coterie of marginal characters. The character of Juan Cabezón is the only narrative element that links the various episodes of the two novels, which take him from inquisitorial Spain to Columbus’s voyage to the Indies, through Cortés’s conquest of Tenochtitlan, and into early colonial Mexico City. In 1492, the protagonist’s adventures are related from a first-person perspective, whereas the sequel, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, is recounted in the third person, with the final chapter reverting to Juan Cabezón’s narrative voice.3 Like the prototypical pícaro, Aridjis’s protagonist is a half-outsider who is marginalized as an orphan and in this case also as a converso. There is an implicit connection between the status of the pícaro and the status of the converso, as both are semi-outsiders who live on the margins of mainstream society.4 Although he does not serve a series of masters, Juan Cabezón’s first encounter after being orphaned is with a blind man with whom he shares many adventures, a parallel with the first master of the protagonist in the first picaresque novel, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes. Like the typical picaresque narrator, Juan Cabezón experiences geographical and social displacement that permits him to have contact with a variety of characters from different spheres, and he uses irony to criticize the social hierarchy with which he is in perpetual conflict, in this case, namely, the Spanish Inquisition. And, most significantly for the present study, like the protagonist of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, Juan Cabezón can be called an antihero and unreliable narrator by virtue of his inability to commit to an identification with his own Judaic background.5

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In an article on a 1938 Mexican picaresque novel, Ulrich Wicks offers a definition of the genre that is also uniquely applicable to the historical context of Aridjis’s novels: “The essential picaresque fictional situation—the picaresque mode—is that of an unheroic protagonist caught up in a chaotic world in which he is on an eternal journey of encounters that allow him to be in alternation both victim of that world and its exploiter.”6 This definition seems tailor-made to fit Aridjis’s two Juan Cabezón narratives, in spite of the fact that Wicks’s article was written ten years before Aridjis’s novels were published: Juan Cabezón is an “unheroic protagonist” on an “eternal journey of encounters” in which he is alternately the victim and the exploiter. This aspect of Aridjis’s character will be of particular importance in the analysis of the converso cum conquistador’s ambivalent colonial desire. Claudio Guillén’s definition of the picaresque genre points to the ambivalence of the picaresque character, whom he describes as an orphan and a half-outsider: “He [the pícaro] can, in short, neither join nor actually reject his fellow men. He becomes what I would like to call a ‘half-outsider.’ Hence the ambivalence of the final narrative situation.” Because the pícaro lives on the margins of society, he has the unique perspective of the half-outsider, and because there is no single reliable voice represented in the text, the resulting ideological standpoint is necessarily ambiguous. Guillén also refers to the picaresque narrator’s “double perspective of selfconcealment and self-revelation.” As Victoria Campos notes, the narration of 1492 sometimes gets so invested in recounting historical events that the protagonist’s personal story is downplayed, to the extent that we know little about the narrator’s inner life.7 When we do get a glimpse of his thoughts, however, we see the extreme ambivalence he feels toward his own converso background and, later, toward the American natives. Whereas the first unnumbered chapter of 1492 relates the protagonist’s prehistory by narrating the birth and death of his Jewish and converso grandparents, the second begins like a picaresque novel: “Yo, Juan Cabezón, nací en Madrid . . . en la calle del Viento, un jueves cuando mi madre, preñada de ocho meses, camino del mercado, tropezó y dio a luz un varón” (27) (I, Juan Cabezón, was born in Madrid . . . on Calle del Viento one Thursday morning when my mother, who was eight months pregnant, tripped on her way to market and gave birth to a boy [27]). This kind of freak incident associated with the protagonist’s birth parallels the beginning of the first picaresque novel, the anonymous sixteenth-century Lazarillo de Tormes; whereas Lazarillo is literally born in the River Tormes, Juan Cabezón is literally born on the street, on Calle del Viento, whose name evokes the wind and wanderlust that will carry the protagonist away from his home at an early age. As in the prototypical picaresque novel, material reality, and in particular hunger, is a great concern for the protagonist of Aridjis’s novel. Immediately after narrating his birth, Juan Cabezón recounts the hunger of his early years:

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De aquella infancia sólo guardo el recuerdo de mis hambres; que el día de carne y el día de pescado para mí fueron día de aire y día de secado; que en mis noches, mi panza vacía pobló mis sueños de figuras endebles y personajes flacos devorando criaturas desabridas y animalias amargas. (27) (Of that infancy I retain memories only of my hunger; meat days and fish days were for me air days and arid days; by night, my empty belly peopled my dreams with feeble forms and spindly striplings who devoured insipid creatures and bitter beasties.) (27)

Juan Cabezón’s parents feed him only proverbs such as “Vaca y carnero, olla de caballero” (Beef and mutton, food for the glutton) and “A mucha hambre no hay pan malo” (27) (Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings [27]). Later in the novel, he laments in true picaresque fashion that “yo tengo que ir por el mundo hambriento y desdichado” (90) (I must make my way in the world hapless and hungry [84]). While Juan Cabezón is still a young lad, his father, a barber, is drawn and quartered for either accidentally or intentionally slitting the throat of a customer while shaving him.8 Although his mother pampers him with food after his father’s death, Juan Cabezón roams the streets in tattered clothes and is regarded as an orphan. A few months after his father’s execution, Juan Cabezón’s mother begins keeping company with a miller, and the young boy is sent to spend every night outdoors so as not to disturb their lovemaking. After the miller is killed by highway robbers, Juan Cabezón’s mother begins to live with a baker, who later stabs her to death for having an affair with a Flemish merchant whose son she has borne.9 Now truly an orphan, the young protagonist is left to shift for himself, and like the prototypical pícaro he takes to the street. On the road, he is befriended by a blind man, Pero Meñique, who takes the hapless lad under his wing, and teaches him to live by his wits in exchange for his services as a lazarillo, or guide, leading the blind man around Madrid. Unlike Lazarillo de Tormes’s first master, who starves and sabotages his young charge, Pero Meñique acts as Juan Cabezón’s protector; in return, unlike Lazarillo, who purposely leads his cruel blind master onto the worst roads, the narrator of 1492 tries to steer Pero Meñique away from stumbling blocks. Together with the blind man and alone, Juan Cabezón will travel the roads of Madrid and of greater Spain in the final decades of the fifteenth century in the type of geographical displacement experienced by the typical pícaro. Over the course of the novel, Pero Meñique, whom we later discover to be descended from conversos like the narrator, will introduce the protagonist to an assortment of other marginal types, several of whom will also have an ambivalent relationship with Judaism: the blind man himself goes from being an apologist for virulent anti-Semite friar Vicente Ferrer to the other extreme of plotting to assassinate the grand inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada; two other acquaintances will later become spies for the Inquisition, yet these same characters will aid the converso Juan Cabezón

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in his avoidance of the Holy Office on several occasions. Thus, the anxiety of identification with the Jewish population of Spain permeates not only the picaresque character of Juan Cabezón, but the band of rogues with whom he associates as well. In Juan Cabezón’s particular case, interest in his Judaic roots is provoked by desire for the beautiful crypto-Jewess Isabel de la Vega. As a pícaro and a converso, the narrator can identify to a certain extent with the oppressed minority of Spanish Jews and New Christians; however, because of the ambivalence of his own marginal status, as half-outsider he vacillates between identifying with the conversos and supporting the established order that persecutes them; later, this same dynamic of colonial desire will be repeated when Juan Cabezón serves first as a curandero and later as a conquistador in the Americas. 1492: Juan Cabezón’s Ambivalent Identification with his Converso Origins The novel 1492 begins with the coincidence of Juan Cabezón’s grandfather’s birth in Seville at the same moment that Archdeacon Ferrán Martínez is inciting a mob to burn and loot the Jewish quarter, the first in a chain of events that will affect Jewish presence in the Iberian Peninsula, leading from the 1391 pogroms through the earlyfifteenth-century anti-Semitic campaigns of Friar Vicente Ferrer, the establishment and implementation of the Spanish Inquisition in the second half of the century, and culminating in the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Juan Cabezón narrates: “Mientras mi bisabuela Sancha gritaba sobrecogida por las ansias del parto, Ferrán Martínez y sus seguidores degollaban mujeres y niños, reducían a escombros las sinagogas y dejaban yertos a cuatro mil inocentes” (11) (While my great-grandmother Sancha cried out in the throes of labor, Ferrán Martínez and his followers slit the throats of women and children, reduced the synagogues to rubble and left four thousand innocents lifeless [13]). Significantly, his great-grandmother’s house adjoins a Jewish house through whose walls the ravaging can be heard. While she is in labor, she identifies with the persecuted Jews on a corporeal level, “creyendo que la furia que deshacía la aljama se le había metido dentro” (11) (convinced that the fury raging in the aljama [Jewish quarter] had entered her own body [13]). She shrieks as if her belly has been pierced by the archdeacon’s sword, or as if one of his dead victims’ souls has entered the newborn’s body. This intense physical and emotional connection with the Jewish people is not shared by her great-grandson Juan Cabezón. Although by narrating these events he demonstrates his awareness of the historic plight of the Jewish people, Juan Cabezón’s own identification with his Hebraic heritage is at best tenuous throughout the novel. Early on, Juan Cabezón comes to identify with the Jewish population of Spain, responding to his own converso background and to a general sense of humanity. He realizes that the Jews are not that different from other Spaniards; regarding an old

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physician wearing a scarlet badge, he says: “Su tipo castellano era tan característico como el de otros moradores del reino de Castilla, y no se habría distinguido de aquéllos si no fuese por las señales” (91) (His Castilian aspect was as pronounced as that of the other inhabitants of the Kingdom of Castile, and he would not have been distinguishable from them had it not been for the signs [85]). Juan Cabezón identifies with the Jew to the extent that he imagines, “Al pasar cerca de mí, creí oír su voz en mi propio cuerpo decir con el timbre suave, arcaico del poeta de Tudela, ‘Todos mis huesos proclaman: Adonay. ¿Quién se iguala a Ti?’ ” (91) (When he passed near me I thought I heard his voice emerging from my own body to say, in the soft archaic timbre of the poet from Tudela, “All my bones cry out: Adonai. Who is like unto Thee?” [85]). This psychophysical connection with a Jewish stranger is reminiscent of Juan Cabezón’s great-grandmother’s sense that as she suffered the pangs of labor, she felt the torment of the pogrom victims in her own body. But in spite of his ancestral connection with the Jews, this picaresque antihero is unable to sustain a continuous identification with a people who are currently being persecuted by mainstream Christian Spanish society. In the case of Juan Cabezón, the Inquisition is a strong incentive to buckle under the pressure of the anxiety of identification. When Juan Cabezón meets the character Pero Meñique, one of the blind man’s first questions is “¿Cristiano, judío o converso?” (Christian, Jew or Converso?), to which the narrator responds, “Descendiente de judíos conversos” (49) (Descendant of converted Jews [46]). The blind man’s own background points to the picaresque: for example, he speaks of growing up in the streets and fending for himself from an early age. His religious antecedents are not entirely clear at the beginning, as he speaks of a Catholic fervor that led him to follow in the footsteps of the fanatic friar Vicente Ferrer. It is a faith that Pero Meñique abandons for love, however, as he woos a cleric’s concubine who wears the red badge of a Jewess.10 Love for the inquisitorial fugitive Isabel de la Vega will later lead Juan Cabezón also to alter his religious convictions, directing him toward his Judaic origins. Of the blind man’s family background, at this stage we will learn only that his mother died in a leper colony after years of devotion to Christian charity. Whether the religious fervor he and his mother demonstrate ultimately represents overcompensation for New Christian antecedents of their own is not clarified at this point in the narration. It is apparent, however, that Pero Meñique identifies with Spain’s pariahs, as he introduces Juan Cabezón to a diverse cast of marginal characters, including the ragged King Bamba; the Tuerto (One-Eye); the Moor; and two women, the gluttonous Babilonia and the prostitute Trotera. This band is soon joined by the hunchbacked dwarf Rodrigo Rodríguez, and later by Babilonia’s brother, the corpulent friar Agustín Delfín. These latter two, Rodrigo Rodríguez and Agustín Delfín, will later serve as volunteer spies for the Inquisition, but both will also end up helping their companion Juan Cabezón evade the inquisitorial gaze by not denouncing him when the opportunity

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presents itself. This aspect is reminiscent of the picaresque genre as well, because, as Claudio Guillén explains, the picaresque novel generally includes a “rogues’ gallery” that serves as a fertile ground for social satire and also reflects the marginal group’s tendency to stick together: “How could a rogue fail to show some understanding toward other rogues?” When the dwarf Rodrigo Rodríguez of Toledo is introduced to this merry band, his sympathies would appear to lie with the New Christians, as he boasts that his father fought alongside don Álvaro de Luna, who was executed for treason after having been accused of supporting and defending conversos in the 1449 Toledo Rebellion.11 Only later in the novel will Rodrigo Rodríguez become affiliated with the Holy Office, whereas Agustín Delfín, who is introduced soon hereafter, is immediately associated with the authority of the burgeoning Inquisition. As Juan Cabezón and Pero Meñique continue to perambulate around Madrid, they arrive in the town square just in time to hear a crier proclaim that henceforth all Jews must wear badges and that Jews and Moors will be confined to living in designated quarters of the city, those surrounding the synagogue and the mosque, respectively. It is the blind man Pero Meñique, rather than the professed converso Juan Cabezón, who interprets this as a foreboding sign for the future of the Jews. It is January 1481, and the narrator still has a decade of adventures in Spain ahead of him. It is at this point in the narration that Agustín Delfín is introduced to the novel’s gallery of rogues that assembles in the square. He is a gluttonous friar, the brother of Babilonia, who upon presenting him to her friends informs them that he has urgent business in Seville regarding the Inquisition that the church is establishing to combat Judaizing among the New Christians.12 The discussion that ensues upon the introduction of Babilonia’s brother into the band reveals how the marginals alternately reject and identify with the Jews. The conversation begins when Juan Cabezón remarks that the Sephardim have been in the Iberian Peninsula since biblical times, to which Agustín Delfín replies that the Jews have raped nuns, profaned the sacraments, performed witchcraft with the host, scourged images of Christ on the crucifix, and otherwise mocked the Holy Mother Church.13 The Tuerto, or one-eyed man, responds that Jews think themselves better than other people because of their long lineage, and Babilonia adds that individuals of Jewish descent have acquired high offices and have mixed with Old Christians such that they have been mistaken for good Christians. This latter remark demonstrates a fear of the “Other within,” the anxiety that the Other is not different enough to be distinguished from the self, in this case, from the Old Christian Castilians. As the conversation continues, Rodrigo Rodríguez complains that the Jews teach their children urban trades rather than agriculture. The voracious friar Agustín Delfín ironically accuses Jews of gluttony but also of having dietary habits that deviate from standard Spanish fare, as they will not touch blood or bacon, yet they eat meat on Christian days of fasting. The friar’s reference to their gluttony would espe-

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cially point to the anxiety of identification, as he projects his own distinctive vice upon the Other. Babilonia then repeats the common slander that Jews emit an offensive odor.14 Rodrigo Rodríguez adds that even the baptized converts remain Jews and retain their customs, after which Agustín Delfín reiterates his sister’s concern that New Christians have come to occupy high positions in church and state, and Rodrigo Rodríguez follows by recounting an apocryphal anecdote about some Jews who kill a whale thinking it is the Leviathan. Interspersed with long digressions on the history of the Jewish people in the Iberian Peninsula, the conversation of the band of rogues turns tide, as some members who had been silent now pipe up.15 It is one of the women, the prostitute Trotera, who begins this “rebuttal” by proclaiming, “Yo, como trotera, no puedo condenar a nadie en este mundo” (108) (As I am but a gadabout, I cannot condemn anyone in this world [100]), thus pointing to her own marginal status as a means of identifying with the Jews. She goes on to relate to her peers that when she was a child starving in the streets, an old Jewish man gave her bread to eat, “y no me fijé si su mano era hebrea o de cristiano viejo, que la bondad y la maldad no tienen linaje sino obras” (108) (and I took no notice if his hand was Hebrew or Old Christian, for goodness and evil have no lineage, they are only known by their fruits [100]). The rebuttal is continued by fellow rogue King Bamba, who begins by insulting the gluttonous friar and his squalid sister and asking them the pointed question, “¿[O]s sentís con más derecho a la vida que ellos por ser hebreos?” (108) ([D]o you feel more worthy of life than they who are Hebrews? [100]), to which the friar responds sanctimoniously that it is better for Judaizers to burn on earth than receive their eternal punishment in the fires of hell. Being themselves half-outsiders, the various members of Aridjis’s rogues’ gallery at times experience a sense of solidarity with the Jews and conversos and at other times identify with the Christian hierarchy that condemns crypto-Jews as heretics.16 This identification with the status quo conforms to what Elaine Marks, in Marrano as Metaphor, following Hannah Arendt, says of assimilation: it is impossible to assimilate to an anti-Semitic culture without absorbing to some degree that culture’s anti-Semitism. As Sander Gilman observes in Jewish Self-Hatred, the desire of a marginal group to belong to the dominant culture leads members of that group to believe in what he calls the “liberal fantasy” that anyone who obeys society’s rules is welcome to share in the power of the ruling class; this is a fallacy, however, because, as Gilman notes, the reference group defines itself in contrast to social outsiders. Marginal groups hear the message that if they abandon their difference, they can join the mainstream, but they soon discover that in the mainstream, their difference is seen as an essential characteristic that cannot be cast off at will. Gilman further notes that if the subaltern becomes identified with the hegemonic class, he experiences anxiety over the fear of losing the power he imagines he has achieved and that the Other presumably undermines, and thus he may learn to resent the very group from which

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he himself hails. Thus, New Christians, for example, find themselves in a double bind in that if they identify with the Jews, they are ostracized from the dominant culture, and if they identify with the established order, they are implicated in the dynamic of self-hatred. In fifteenth-century Spain, the presence of the Jews is a constant reminder to the conversos of their own past as persecuted outcasts and their ambiguous present as half-outsiders. The greatest example of a self-hating converso would be the grand inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada himself, who is reputed by Fernando del Pulgar, the official chronicler of Queen Isabel and a self-hating converso in his own right, to have Jewish blood coursing through his veins.17 Pero Meñique, who remains apart from the rogues’ debate until the end, also demonstrates ambivalence toward the conversos. When he first met Juan Cabezón, he had told him that he had been an ardent adherent of the fanatical friar Vicente Ferrer, whose inflammatory speeches incited anti-Semitic fervor among his followers. Later he cites Ramón Llull, the Catalonian theologian who two centuries earlier had been given royal permission to preach to the Jews to convert them. But it is also Pero Meñique who comments that the proclamation regarding the wearing of badges and dwelling exclusively in Jewish quarters bodes ill for the future of the Jews. In the rogues’ debate, after all the others have spoken, the blind man summarizes his own thoughts: Yo voy por las calles de este mundo ciego, y no quiero abrir los ojos para mirar los fuegos de la muerte, que se encenderán en muchos lugares de estos reinos para quemar gente inocente; al odio que se ve en todas partes, prefiero la ignorancia sosegada de mi noche. (108) (I wander the streets of this world blindly, and I have no wish to open my eyes to see the fires of death that will be kindled all over these realms to burn innocent people. I prefer the peaceable ignorance of my night to the hate visible everywhere.) (100)

Pero Meñique’s sentiments will become even clearer when his own converso roots are revealed and when he later masterminds a plot to assassinate Tomás de Torquemada. At this stage in the narration, it is not even clear to the reader whether the blind man’s own background includes Judaic roots, or if he is of pure Old Christian stock. Juan Cabezón sees a vision of a man reciting an account of the origins of humanity according to the Jewish tradition, as the company turns its conversation to more vulgar subjects and at length disbands. The following chapter begins with a long digression on the history of the Inquisition in the third person without so much as a pretense of a framing story linking it to the life of the novel’s protagonist; as 1492 continues, there will be many such historical treatises, such that Juan Cabezón’s firstperson narrative voice is all but lost in the shuffle. In this and other such digressions dispersed throughout the text, the emphasis is on the Catholic monarchs’ financial reasons for persecuting the Jews, and it is often repeated that one expected result of the Inquisition and expulsion was that the royal coffers of Fernando and Isabel would

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swell with confiscated property. This particular sidebar is interrupted as the novel’s story continues, with Pero Meñique asking Juan Cabezón to lodge a converso brother and sister, Isabel and Gonzalo de la Vega, who turn out to be fugitives from the Inquisition, escaped from Ciudad Real. This action would seem to confirm the blind man’s sympathies with the oppressed minority, although Juan Cabezón will continue to waffle in his commitment, in spite of his burgeoning love for the conversa Isabel de la Vega. As food, or lack thereof, earlier indicated Juan Cabezón’s status as a pícaro, here, certain kinds of food draw him back to his Judaic roots: Por la puerta cerrada de una casa oscura salió el olor de la carne guisada, de las cebollas y los ajos refritos, delatando al converso en la cocina. A mí, el olor me dio hambre y pena, porque abrió mi apetito y me hizo pensar en mi madre, convertida en ceniza. (119) (A smell of meat stewed in oil, of onions and fried garlic escaped beneath the closed door of a darkened house, betraying the Converso in the kitchen. The smell made me hungry and sad because it quickened my appetite and made me think of my mother, now turned to ashes.) (109)

His love for his now deceased mother and his new love for Isabel make him identify, at least temporarily, with his Judaic roots. The physical description of Isabel is brief, and merely states that she has long hair, very white skin, and almond-shaped eyes. Whereas the almond eyes signal her Semitic origins, her white skin would not make her stand out among Castilians, and the color and texture of her hair, which could potentially serve as ethnic markers, are unspecified. With her presence in his house, Juan Cabezón begins to identify ideologically with the plight of the Jewish people. In a conversation with Isabel, he notes, “Hasta el más imbécil, más ruin y asesino morador en estos reinos se cree con derecho a atacar, despreciar y matar a los judíos” (124) (Even the most imbecilic, vile and murderous inhabitant of these realms believes he is entitled to attack, despise and kill Jews [113]). Juan Cabezón states categorically his identification with the oppressed rather than the oppressor: “Más vale morir como criatura inocente que vivir como verdugo culpable” (124) (It is better to die an innocent victim than to live on as a guilty executioner [114]). Although the narrator’s resolve here appears unwavering, it will not prove so when tested, as it will be on many occasions throughout 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. Soon after Isabel de la Vega’s arrival in Madrid, Pero Meñique’s origins are confirmed when Juan Cabezón runs into the blind man’s friend Rodrigo Rodríguez, who does not appear to recognize him at first. The hunchbacked dwarf is clad as a Dominican friar; although it appears he is a familiar rather than a friar, he clearly dons this garb in order to demonstrate his informal affiliation with the Inquisition.18 He begins by warning Juan Cabezón that he must take care whom he addresses on the

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street. It is this character who tells the narrator that his friend Pero Meñique is descended from conversos and, moreover, is a crypto-Jew “que practica la pravedad mosaica” (127) (who practices the Mosaic depravity [116]). Juan Cabezón responds that according to his knowledge, the blind man’s mother was a pious woman. After the dwarf repeats Ramón Llull’s dictum that “[a]quel fuego es bueno que abrasa y quema los herejes” (127) ([t]hat fire is good which consumes and burns heretics [116]), Juan Cabezón observes that the theologian Ramón Llull himself was nearly burned as a heretic by the author of the Handbook for Inquisitors. When Juan Cabezón asks why he is dressed as a friar, Rodrigo Rodríguez answers: Un cristiano viejo como yo debe andar vestido de fraile para mostrar su limpieza de sangre, para que en las calles y las plazas no lo aceche la pravedad judaica; debe con toda la fuerza de su ánima echar fuera de sí a los conversos que ha conocido, hablado o convivido por debilidad de su fe; tiene que extirpar de su cuerpo al abuelo judío que dio vida a su padre, sacando gota a gota de su sangre, hasta que el reino de Castilla quede purificado de ellos. (128; emphasis mine) (An Old Christian like myself must go about garbed as a friar to demonstrate the purity of his blood, to keep Jewish depravity from tempting him in the streets and squares; with all the strength of his soul he must banish from his being every Converso he has ever known, spoken with or frequented in the weakness of his faith; he has to root out from his body the Jewish grandfather who engendered his father, draining him drop by drop from his own blood until the kingdom of Castile is cleansed of them.) (116–17; emphasis mine)

Here the dwarf describes his own background in ambiguous colors: although, on the one hand, he claims Old Christian lineage and purity of blood, on the other hand, he speaks of a Jewish grandfather whose blood he hopes to purge from his own body with the fire of the Inquisition. Although he can be speaking metaphorically of purging the Castilian body politic of tainted blood, he is also specifically speaking of his own body, thus implying that he not merely consorts with conversos but also is himself one. Here the “Other within” is described in corporeal terms as the converso friend or family member who must be forcibly excised from the castizo (pure-blooded) Spanish body. It must be recalled that when this character was first introduced, he observed that he was an hidalgo (nobleman) from Toledo, where his father had been associated with Álvaro de Luna, who was notorious for his affiliations with New Christians. The epitome of converso self-hatred, Rodrigo Rodríguez’s virulent anti-Semitism, which he had expressed earlier in the rogues’ debate on Jews, is now directed toward one whom he once called friend, as he asserts that he is disposed to burn Pero Meñique at the stake. He then excuses himself, explaining that he has urgent business with Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, leaving Juan Cabezón with the parting words: “Cualquier cosa, Juanito Cabezón, cualquier cosa traemos entre manos, que muy pronto te deslumbrará la mucha lumbre” (128) (We are brewing something, Juanito

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Cabezón, something that will dazzle you ere long with its flames [117]). This latter comment could be perceived as an assumption that Juan Cabezón will sympathize with his converso self-hatred and be impressed with the spectacle of an auto-da-fé, or as a none too subtle threat that fellow New Christian Juan Cabezón could himself burn in the inquisitorial flames should he be tempted to backslide into the practices of his ancestral religion. Foremost in Juan Cabezón’s mind at this stage is his love for Isabel de la Vega, with whom he unites in passion: “Nuestros cuerpos fueron así reconciliados, no por la Iglesia de los inquisidores, pero por el amor; si no en una sola carne, en un mismo deseo” (132) (And thus were our bodies reconciled, not in the church of the inquisitors but in love, if not in a single flesh, then in a shared desire [120]). As with his great-grandmother’s link with the persecuted Jews in the pogrom of 1391, and his own fleeting identification with an elderly physician on the street, here Juan Cabezón identifies with the conversos through a corporeal connection. His spiritual and sexual relationship with Isabel de la Vega leads him to assert: “Mientras los inquisidores quemaban a Isabel en estatua en Ciudad Real . . . en mi pasión no dudaba en acompañarla a la cárcel y a la hoguera, en la suprema alegría de morir con ella” (134) (While the inquisitors were burning Isabel in effigy in Ciudad Real . . . my passion left me no doubt about accompanying her to prison and to the stake, for the supreme bliss of dying at her side [121]). Juan Cabezón vows to defend the New Christians against the Inquisition, but his words are seldom supported by deeds. In a similar vein, Juan Cabezón continues: “[L]a llevaba al lecho para amarla, dispuesto a enfrentarme por ella con los inquisidores de Castilla y Aragón, Valencia y Cataluña” (143) (I carried her off to bed and love, ready for her sake to confront all the inquisitors of Castile and Aragón, Valencia and Catalonia [129]). Here the narrator conflates love and death, romanticizing the notions of inquisitorial imprisonment and autos-da-fé. His specific resolve to accompany Isabel to the stake is never tested, although at the end of the novel, after searching for her from town to town and finally finding her about to embark from Spain during the expulsion, he is not so much as willing to take risks to follow her into exile. Thus, in spite of his avowed love for Isabel, Juan Cabezón will continually waffle in his commitment to identify with the persecuted minority. After they have lived together for some time, Isabel announces that she is carrying Juan Cabezón’s child, and he again expresses his identification with her on a corporeal level: “El tiempo tuyo me será de gran preñez espiritual, estaré lleno de cuidados y de ansias hasta que llegue el parto” (146) (My spirit will also swell during your term, for I shall be filled with cares and worries until the birth [131]). Her announcement of this life-affirming event is juxtaposed with a lengthy description of an auto-da-fé. It is March 1485, and in response to this bittersweet news, the two perform their own makeshift marriage ceremony, reciting vows similar to those of a formal wedding and blending elements of Jewish and Christian rites.

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Soon, however, following many months in hiding with not so much as a glimpse of the street, Isabel begins to go stir-crazy, and she and Juan Cabezón unwisely venture out in broad daylight. There they spy his former friend Babilonia, whom they know to be in league with the inquisitors, so they duck around the corner. When they suddenly bolt away, they realize they have aroused the suspicions of a familiar of the Holy Office who is dressed like an executioner. In 1492, the familiars of the Inquisition serve as a panoptic web of thousands of eyes whose vigilance is felt throughout the social fabric of Spain.19 Because such seemingly innocuous activities as not eating pork or bathing and putting on clean clothes once a week can cause a neighbor or familiar to denounce them, the converso protagonists internalize this gaze and become so anxious that they second-guess their own every movement. Soon thereafter, they discover that some conversos in Toledo have attempted to assassinate inquisitors, and others in Saragossa have succeeded in murdering inquisitor Pedro de Arbués; having themselves attracted the attention of a familiar, and knowing that efforts to capture Judaizing fugitives will be stepped up in the wake of the Arbués assassination, Isabel is plagued with nightmares.20 In one dream, she identifies corporeally with the Jews: [S]entí que había tres mujeres en mi cuerpo que se desprendían de mí, quedándome sólo con una muy débil y pequeña, yo. Yo, que andaba por una calle estrecha y tortuosa con las ropas judías señaladas que llevaba mi abuela en Zaragoza. Y sin saber si era ella en mí o yo en ella. (151) (I became aware of three women inside my body who were breaking off from me, leaving me alone with one very weak and tiny woman, myself. I, walking down a narrow, twisting street, wearing the distinctive Jewish garments my grandmother had worn in Saragossa. And not knowing whether she was in me, or I in her.) (135)

Isabel’s identification with the Jews is absolute, as she is a conversa only in name, and in her heart remains devoted to the Hebrew faith; Juan Cabezón, however, who is a second-generation New Christian but not a crypto-Jew, has a much more tenuous relationship with Judaism. Although Juan Cabezón shields Isabel from the fact that the inquisitorial familiar whom they encountered on the street has come to the house and threatened him with the stake should he be harboring a fugitive, she becomes increasingly anxious, and one day, nearing childbirth, she vanishes without a trace. Her absence, like her presence, is experienced by Juan Cabezón corporeally, and is linked again with his ingenuous belief that he could endure an auto-da-fé: “Sentí . . . que mi cuerpo era parte de la ausencia general y no algo animado, a imagen y semejanza de Dios. ‘Si en este momento me quemaran, las llamas no me dolerían,’ me dije” (156) (My body had become part of the void and was no longer animate, fashioned in the image and likeness of God. “If they were to burn me right now, I would not feel the flames,” I

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thought [140]). As elsewhere, here it is clear that Juan Cabezón’s convictions are based on his love for Isabel more than on an identification with the Jews due to any other motivation. The remainder of the novel 1492 focuses on Juan Cabezón’s efforts to locate Isabel, as she wanders throughout Spain seeking refuge from the Inquisition, which, after having burned her in effigy, continues to pursue her in body. The band of rogues has already dispersed to different parts of Spain: two of them, the Moor and the Tuerto, to fight alongside the Moors against the Christians in the South where they will die, impaled for treason, and three others—the dwarf, Rodrigo Rodríguez; the friar, Agustín Delfín; and his sister, Babilonia—to aid the efforts of the Inquisition to burn Judaizers. The protagonist’s pilgrimage, in turn, takes him to Saragossa, Calatayud, Teruel, and Toledo, places where Isabel has gone to stay with relatives; each visit is a narrow miss, however, because when Juan Cabezón arrives, Isabel has always just left that spot to go on to another. Before he leaves Madrid, Juan Cabezón tells Pero Meñique that he would never inform on Isabel, Pero, or any of his converso friends, even if he were subjected to water torture, tied to the rack, and scalded with hot oil. The blind man’s face serves as a mirror for the narrator to recognize how hollow his own words are: “Pero Meñique alzó la cara, sorprendido por el coraje de mis palabras, igual que si estuviese hablando con ligereza de tormentos desconocidos para mí, que habían quebrado y trastornado a hombres más fieros que yo” (160) (Pero Meñique raised his face, surprised at the bravado of my words, aware that I had been speaking lightly of torments unknown to myself which had already broken and driven mad far fiercer men than I [144]). The falseness of this bravado becomes evident when the protagonist is faced with any real threat of punishment at the hands of the Inquisition. Having gone to Saragossa in search of Isabel, Juan Cabezón witnesses an auto-dafé. As in El largo atardecer del caminante, discussed in the previous chapter, in which Posse’s Cabeza de Vaca is inspired by an auto to question his Old Christian identity, the procession of penitents in Saragossa serves as an occasion for Juan Cabezón to identify with the Jews. The night before the auto-da-fé, he experiences insomnia: Yo no pude dormir, sentado en el lecho duro del mesón; con las candelas apagadas, esperé que el alcalde, dos horas antes del alba, metiera lumbre en cada celda de la Aljafería para que los condenados se levantaran y se vistieran para ser llevados a un patio secreto. (173; emphasis mine) (I slept poorly, and reclining on the hard bed of the inn with the candles snuffed, I waited for the jailer to bring light into every cell in the Aljafería two hours before dawn so that the condemned might arise and clothe themselves to be led to a secret courtyard.) (155; emphasis mine)

In the above, Juan Cabezón’s identification with the prisoners is such that by merit of juxtaposition and the repetition of the subject yo, it almost appears as if Juan

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Cabezón himself were in prison awaiting execution, although he is really in an inn, safe from the fires of the Inquisition. The next day, as he attends the procession of penitents, his identification is more clearly spelled out: Y como si yo mismo fuese un judío en la plaza de la Seo, por primera vez en mi vida vi los rostros hostiles vueltos hacia mí, fui consciente de mi cara, del peso de mi cuerpo, y, semejante a un animal acosado por carniceros y cazadores feroces, tuve miedo del hombre. (177; emphasis mine) (And as if I myself were a Jew standing in the cathedral square, for the first time in my life I saw the hostile faces turned towards me, I was aware of my own face, of the weight of my body, and like any animal pursued by butchers or relentless hunters, I felt fear of man.) (158; emphasis mine)

This identification causes Juan Cabezón intense anxiety. However, it is not the psychic anxiety caused by fear of losing one’s ego boundaries by overidentifying with the Other, but more concretely the fear that identification with the Jewish Other will cause him to be persecuted by the Inquisition. Thus, it is an anxiety of identification that is caused by more direct and external, rather than internalized, mechanisms of control. When straightforward questions are put to him regarding his religious identity, the narrator varies his response depending upon what his interlocutor represents. The first person to query “Christian, Jew or Converso?” is Pero Meñique. Although the blind man asks this question before he has revealed his own converso status, the young orphan answers candidly that he is descended from converted Jews. One of the next characters to inquire as to Juan Cabezón’s parentage is the familiar of the Inquisition who knocks on his door in the middle of the night to threaten him with the stake should he be sheltering a fugitive. To the inquiry about whether his parents were Christians, Juan Cabezón responds that they lived and died as good Christians, and raised him to be a good Christian as well. These answers are both factually correct, but being an individual of in-between status in a society sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, Juan Cabezón must put the proper spin on his answers, that is, he must judge his context and carefully select the information he wishes to divulge regarding his converso ancestry. The in-between status of the converso is what causes most anxiety: neither fish nor fowl, Jew nor Christian, he forms part of a hated minority. As a witness to the Saragossa auto-da-fé in 1492 remarks to fellow onlooker Juan Cabezón, “El odio que se les tenía a esos miserables cuando eran judíos ahora se les tiene cuando son cristianos” (174) (The hatred felt for those wretched creatures when they were Jews has redoubled now that they are Christians [156]).21 When Juan Cabezón arrives in Teruel after failing to find Isabel in Calatayud, he overhears a friar ask a ragged man whether he is a Jew or a New Christian, to which the man responds, “Ni lo uno ni lo otro, sino

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desgraciadamente sólo un hombre” (189) (Neither one nor the other, but unfortunately only a man [169]). Here the homeless man clearly critiques late-fifteenthcentury Spain’s division of humans into ethnic and religious groups, and he is accused of heresy as a result. While still in Teruel, Juan Cabezón puts forward his own definition of the liminal category of the New Christian: when asked whether he is a converso, he responds, “Soy un hombre perseguido [ . . . ] si eso os parece un converso” (197) (I am a hunted man . . . if that is what you mean by Converso [176]). In this instance, the narrator clearly identifies with the conversos as a persecuted minority. Juan Cabezón is not a man of strong convictions, retaining in regard to his converso heritage a lukewarm identification rooted mostly in his love for the beautiful cryptoJewess Isabel. A significant example of this occurs while he is searching for his wife and child at the house of the prophetic maid of Teruel, Brianda Ruiz, who tells Juan Cabezón that he should proceed to Toledo to ascertain Isabel’s whereabouts. After she recounts her vision of an ascent to heaven, Brianda’s house is stormed by representatives of the Inquisition coming to arrest the crypto-Jews gathered there to observe the fast of Yom Kippur. Everyone flees except Brianda Ruiz and Juan Cabezón, who hesitates only momentarily before abandoning the fearless fifteen-year-old prophetess to her doom. Explaining his reasons for leaving this new acquaintance in such a lurch, the narrator relates: Indeciso entre quedarme con ella o huir también, acabé por huir, convencido de que a mí no me amparaba ninguna divinidad ni me reconfortaría morir por una creencia que no tenía. Además, la necesidad de encontrar a Isabel y a mi hijo era más fuerte que cualquier tentación de sacrificio y que cualquier persona que se topase conmigo. (196; emphasis mine) (I wavered between remaining at her side or taking flight as well, and I finally fled, for I knew there was no divinity who was sheltering me, nor would it be a comfort to die for a belief I did not hold. Moreover, the need to find Isabel and my son was stronger than any temptation to sacrifice myself or than any person who might cross my path.) (175; emphasis mine)

In the above, it is evident that Juan Cabezón’s love for his wife and child is greater than his devotion to the Jewish faith, which ultimately he does not feel to be his own. Upon fleeing the scene of the raid, the narrator remarks that due to this lack of belief in the Jewish faith, he does not repent abandoning the prophetess: “Por eso, sin remordimiento alguno, escapé” (196) (That is why I felt no remorse whatsoever as I escaped [175]). Nevertheless, he also claims an identification with those crypto-Jews who are captured: “Su captura me sobresaltó, como si hubiese sido la mía y me hallase a merced del alguacil . . . para ser conducido a las cárceles del Santo Oficio” (197) (Their capture left me shaken, as if it had been my own and I was now at the mercy of the alguacil . . . about to be conveyed to the prisons of the Holy Office [176]). Although he constantly reiterates his identification with the victims of the Inquisi-

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tion, after his resolve is tested in the raid on Brianda’s house, this avowed identification rings hollow. Having narrowly escaped capture by the Holy Tribunal, Juan Cabezón seeks refuge in the house of another conversa, Clara Santángel, whose father was immolated by the Inquisition.22 It is in this context that Juan Cabezón defines a converso as one who is persecuted, and counts himself as one. He attempts to explain to Clara why he deserted Brianda and why he now refuses to make any effort to save her from the clutches of the Holy Tribunal that will most assuredly sentence her to the stake: —¿Nada? ¿No os enfrentaréis a ellos espada en mano para rescatarla? —No soy hombre de armas, soy hombre de razones—dije. —¿Con razones cubrís vuestra cobardía? —Con ellas protejo mi vida. —Es una lástima que seáis hombre de tan pobre condición—comentó. —Por serlo todavía estoy vivo—repliqué. (198; emphasis mine) (“Nothing? Won’t you stand up to them, sword in hand, to rescue her? “I am not a man of arms, I am a man of words,” I protested. “So you conceal your cowardice with words?” “I protect my life with them.” “What a pity you are a man of so little character,” she remarked. “It is by virtue of being so that I am still alive,” I replied.) (176; emphasis mine)

Juan Cabezón’s response pales in comparison to Clara’s own declaration that if she were a man, she would kill all the inquisitors and their adjuncts with a weapon or her bare hands. The contrast between Juan Cabezón’s lack of conviction and Clara Santángel’s valiant declaration—not to mention the palpable courage of Brianda Ruiz as she awaits certain death at the hands of the Inquisition—makes it clear that the reader is not supposed to identify with this waffling antihero. Juan Cabezón’s pacifism in the name of self-preservation will be further evidenced in his adventures in the New World as recounted in Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. In Toledo, Juan Cabezón stays at an inn where he is interrogated by a familiar of the Inquisition, who also questions another man, who turns out to be Christopher Columbus, about his origins. Both Aridjis’s fictional protagonist and his fictionalized Columbus deny being conversos, although rumors of Columbus’s Judaic origins will continue into the sequel, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. It is while he is in Toledo that Juan Cabezón witnesses another auto-da-fé, this time one in which his ragged friend from the rogue band, King Bamba, is in the procession as a penitent. Although he has not been sentenced to burn at the stake, King Bamba nevertheless attacks the guards, and is returned to prison after telling his story to Juan Cabezón. Back in Madrid without having located his beloved Isabel, the narrator reconnects with Pero Meñique, who reveals his plot to singlehandedly assassinate the grand inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada. Because he is blind, Pero relies on the aid of Juan

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Cabezón, who halfheartedly agrees to serve as lazarillo in this formidable endeavor, observing that it is all the more foolhardy considering that the grand inquisitor is constantly flanked by hundreds of armed bodyguards. Juan Cabezón protests to Pero that he prefers to die a natural death, rather than a violent one: “Quiero morir lleno de días, de arrugas y de hambres” (214) (I wish to die from an excess of days, wrinkles, and appetites [190]). Nevertheless, he agrees to accompany the blind man on his reckless mission, “aunque no salgamos vivos de la empresa” (214) (even if we do not come out of this business alive [191]). Juan Cabezón has his own reasons to want to kill Torquemada: “En la empresa me movía, sobre todo, salvar de sus manos a Isabel y a mi hijo; los que en mis pesadillas diurnas y nocturnas observaba ya prendidos y quemados en una plaza” (219) (What drove me above all was the desire to wrest from his clutches Isabel and my son, whom I already saw in my waking and sleeping nightmares in custody and burning in some square [195]). Here, again, the protagonist’s tenuous relationship with the religion of his Jewish ancestors and the plight of his converso contemporaries are linked to his love for Isabel. The two would-be assassins travel to Ávila, where they hope to find Torquemada, who has gone there to conduct personally the case of the alleged crucifixion of a Christian child in La Guardia.23 Almost immediately upon arriving in the walled city, they encounter Torquemada on the street, but Juan Cabezón fails to alert the blind man in time for him to take action. As anticipated, the grand inquisitor is surrounded by 250 armed guards. The narrator hesitates, “sin saber si lanzarme contra él y asestarle una puñalada o quedarme inmóvil, mientras pasaba a mi lado” (226) (wondering whether to dash at him and deal him a dagger blow, or stand still as he passed me by [202]). The antihero’s choice, naturally, is to stand idly by. When Pero Meñique realizes that he has unwittingly missed this opportunity—an opportunity that may not repeat itself during their stay in Ávila—he makes Juan Cabezón swear that he will apprise him the next time Torquemada crosses their path. Juan Cabezón agrees, and soon they are joined by a fellow converso, Martín Martínez, who also has an ardent desire to kill Torquemada, and who has provided Pero Meñique with privileged information about the trial being conducted in Ávila. The assassins remain in the town for a month, waiting for a glimpse of Torquemada, during which time Juan Cabezón becomes increasingly uneasy, losing sight of the purpose of their prolonged stay in a town in which he does not hope to find Isabel. Pero Meñique, for his part, is concerned that when the trial is over, Torquemada will leave Ávila, so he becomes anxious to assault the first person he should encounter on the street, “como si cualquiera fuese Torquemada” (243) (as if anyone could be Torquemada [216]). The story of this ill-fated plot ends tragically, soon after the November 1491 autoda-fé in which the Jews and conversos convicted of crucifying the mythical child of La Guardia are put to death in what the narrator refers to as a “human sacrifice.” A few weeks after the auto, Pero Meñique attacks a notary in the street, mistaking him

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for the grand inquisitor, and is at once subdued and slain by the familiars of the Holy Tribunal. Although Juan Cabezón had earlier proclaimed his willingness to die in this enterprise, whereas Martín Martínez had expressed his concern that they might fail to achieve their goal and lose their lives as well on account of the blind man’s rashness, it is Martín Martínez, rather than Juan Cabezón, who is killed while determining whether to escape or draw his sword to help their mutual friend in their common pursuit. The antihero’s only thought when he witnesses the fate of his two accomplices is to save himself; gazing at their corpses, he reflects: Muertos los dos, consideré toda asistencia y resistencia inútiles. . . . Además, para mi propia vergüenza y a mi pesar, al verlos exánimes en el polvo sentí la alegría inmensa de encontrarme vivo bajo la luz del sol. (250) (Once both of them were dead, I judged any assistance or resistance on my part to be pointless. . . . What is more, to my own shame and in spite of myself, as I looked at them lying lifeless in the dust I felt boundless joy at being alive beneath the light of day.) (223)

Thus again, in spite of the bravado of his claims that he would suffer fire and torture for Isabel, when Juan Cabezón is faced with real danger at the hands of the Inquisition, his determination dissolves, and self-preservation becomes his singular aim. Paradoxically, it is a familiar of the Holy Office, Pero Meñique’s former friend Rodrigo Rodríguez, who spares Juan Cabezón from certain death at the hands of the Inquisition. Although the dwarf, staring intently at Juan Cabezón as he stands by, presumably recognizes him and surmises his connection with the events that have just transpired, he nevertheless keeps silent as the protagonist escapes. As Claudio Guillén has observed in reference to the picaresque novel, a rogue cannot fail to understand another rogue. Although Rodrigo Rodríguez is an hidalgo by birth, he is also a half-outsider by virtue of being a dwarf, a hunchback, and, as discussed above, most likely a converso himself. Although he is ascending in the social and ecclesiastical hierarchy by acting as a familiar of the Inquisition, and although he is virulently antiSemitic in his words, in his silence here Rodrigo Rodríguez still appears to identify to some extent with the marginal characters with whom he had associated earlier. Agustín Delfín, in parallel terms, also inadvertently helps Juan Cabezón in spite of his inquisitorial duties. Like Rodrigo Rodríguez, Babilonia’s brother is a familiar of the Holy Office. He reencounters Juan Cabezón in Trujillo, where he is staying at the inn owned by Luz Pizarro, mother of his later friend and fellow conquistador Gonzalo Dávila. The familiar beneficently tells Juan Cabezón of Christopher Columbus’s plan to reach the Indies by sailing west, and tells him that if he mentions the name Agustín Delfín, Columbus will surely permit him to embark on the voyage. As in his earlier conversation with Rodrigo Rodríguez, here the conversation is peppered with insults and threats, including the same friendly advice to avoid consorting with

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heretics if he wants to elude the fires of the Holy Tribunal. It is significant that two familiars of the Inquisition help a friend who they know fraternizes with conversos, due presumably to their own ambivalent status as former rogues currently associated with the most powerful ecclesiastical organ of the Spanish realms. Although the anxiety of identification prevents them from being openly friendly with the converso half-outsiders, they nevertheless remain somewhat loyal to their former friends. The conversation ends with Agustín Delfín wishing Juan Cabezón a bad journey with Columbus, on the very voyage that he recommended to him, thus demonstrating the extreme ambivalence of his relationship to the conversos. When the Edicts of Expulsion are publicized in April 1492, mandating that all Jews must leave the realm before August that same year, Juan Cabezón declares his renewed identification with the Hebrew people in diaspora, “sintiéndome también expulsado . . . [por el] poder soberano que echaba a los judíos de España y de alguna manera me arrojaba a mí mismo, al expulsar a Isabel y a mi hijo” (260) (feeling as if I, too, had been banished . . . [by] the sovereign power that was casting the Jews out of Spain and somehow turning me adrift by expelling Isabel and my son [232]). As elsewhere in Aridjis’s novel, this identification is linked primarily to the narrator’s love for Isabel rather than to his devotion to his own ancestry, and, as elsewhere, his words are not necessarily upheld by his deeds. After he has commented to Luz Pizarro that it is financially unsound for the Catholic monarchs to cast out such a productive people, his landlady accuses him of defending the heretical depravity, to which he responds diplomatically that he does not defend the Jews but neither does he rejoice at their sufferings. Soon thereafter, Juan Cabezón meets Isabel’s brother, Gonzalo de la Vega, outside the walls of Trujillo and realizes that Gonzalo has chosen to pose as an unbaptized Jew in order to follow the others into exile, rather than keep up the clandestine double life of a crypto-Jewish converso. Upon reentering the walled city, Juan Cabezón is once again asked “Christian or Jew?” and as in similar situations, he responds according to what his interlocutor wants to hear; although he claims to identify with the expelled Jews, his publicly avowed identity remains Christian. Isabel de la Vega, like her brother, is posing as an unbaptized Jewess in order to seek exile in Flanders with her son. The narrator finally meets up with her near the end of the novel as he travels toward the port city of Palos in order to sail with Columbus on his first voyage. Juan Cabezón attempts to convince Isabel to remain with him, as she is a conversa and is thus not required to leave Spain. She is unwavering in her identification with her coreligionists: “La expulsión de los judíos es mi expulsión, su muerte es mi muerte” (296) (The expulsion of the Jews is mine as well, their death is my death [265]). Once again, this identification is expressed with corporeal metaphors: “Llevo en mi rostro el rostro de mis padres y en mi cuerpo su sombra, no puedo desprenderme de su carne y sus huesos, su destierro es el mío” (296) (My parents’ faces are written across my own, and my body casts their shadow. I cannot dissever

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myself from their flesh and blood; their exile is mine [265]). Isabel cannot reconcile herself to remaining in Spain with Juan Cabezón, as her convictions lead her into exile with the Jews; when Juan Cabezón insists, she states firmly: “Los inquisidores, a falta de mi cuerpo, han quemado mi imagen; he muerto en estos reinos” (296) (For want of my body, the inquisitors have burned my effigy; I no longer exist in these kingdoms [265]). Juan Cabezón also suggests that he might accompany Isabel and their son, also named Juan, into exile.24 Isabel protests, however, that because he is known as a Christian, it is prohibited even for him to be conversing with the Jews as they depart. Because his public identity is Christian, Juan Cabezón’s presence among the exiles might call attention to the fact that Isabel is not an unbaptized Jewess but a recanted conversa and a fugitive of the Inquisition who has been burned in effigy. She pleads with Juan Cabezón to cease talk of accompanying them, as this places her in danger; the two do not even discuss, however, the possibility that he might follow them separately and thus not endanger them. She informs him that her intended destination is Flanders. Although he promises his wife and son that he will search for them there, in neither of the novels does he make any attempt to travel to Flanders, and he is not reunited with young Juan or Isabel until they travel separately to Mexico near the end of the sequel, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. Thus, by the end of 1492, Juan Cabezón has proved to be an antihero whose ambivalent identification with his converso ancestry is matched only by his lukewarm loyalty to his friends and family, as he has abandoned his blind friend, Pero Meñique, in the hour of his death, and now watches his wife and child go into exile, without making any serious effort to follow them. The ambivalence of Juan Cabezón’s position as a converso becomes most poignant when he bids farewell to Isabel, and his attention is called to the religious differences that separate Spaniards: Un guarda me empujó, haciéndome consciente de que mis pies habían traspuesto la línea invisible que separaba los vivos de los muertos, los cristianos viejos de los conversos, los fieles católicos de los obstinados en la herética pravedad, los que se quedaban de los que se iban. Una línea banal para unos, fatal para otros, bien clara y demarcada por el fuego y la sangre. (290; emphasis mine) (One of the guards pushed me, reminding me that my feet had crossed the invisible line separating the living from the dead, the Old Christians from the Conversos, the Catholic faithful from the stubborn practitioners of the heretical depravity, those who remained from those who had to leave. An insignificant line for some, a fatal one for others, sharply drawn with fire and blood.) (260; emphasis mine)

In this scheme, the liminal converso who is neither Old Christian nor crypto-Jew does not fit into any category in Spanish society. There is no place in Spain for Juan Cabezón who, rather than stay and feign conformity, or declare himself definitively a practicing Jew and opt for exile, embarks instead in August 1492 as a mast man on

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Columbus’s Santa María. In the sequel, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, America will become defined as a space in which individuals such as Juan Cabezón, marginalized within European society, can form an identity by setting themselves apart from the indigenous Other. Juan Cabezón, from Converso to Curandero to Conquistador As seen above, due to the external pressure of the Inquisition, Juan Cabezón cannot fully embrace either a pure castizo Spanish identity, which implies purity of blood as well as Christian faith, or a Jewish identity, which is that of his ancestors but not his own. The theme of Judaism is extended into Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, in the form of insinuations that Christopher Columbus is a converso. After the first fraction of the novel dealing with Columbus, the 1492 expulsion continues to resurface in sporadic references throughout the remainder of Memorias, which recounts Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Tenochtitlan and the early years of the New Spanish colony. As a primary focus, however, the question of Jews and conversos is gradually replaced by an emphasis on the relationship between the conquistadors and the Amerindians. Juan Cabezón’s ambiguous status will follow him into Memorias as well: whereas in the Old World he was neither Jew nor Christian, in the New World he will be neither conquistador nor anticonquistador. The theme of Juan Cabezón’s identity is apparent from the first page of Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, as the third-person narrator who replaces the first-person perspective of the earlier novel states that the protagonist has set sail on the Santa María “en busca de fortuna y de sí mismo, y para huir de los inquisidores que por esos días quemaban herejes en los reinos de Castilla y Aragón” (11) (in search of fortune and of himself, and to flee from the inquisitors who in those days were burning heretics in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón). This suggests that the New World will serve as a theater where outcasts from the Old World may fashion a new identity for themselves, this time in reference to the existing inhabitants of the Americas. Columbus’s alleged converso status is hinted at repeatedly throughout the pages of the novel dealing with his first voyage. His men find everything about him suspicious: even the fact that he invokes the Trinity and the Holy Family in his utterances and letters serves only to confirm their suspicions, as it reeks to them of the overcompensation of the outsider. They constantly refer to his foreignness, mentioning his Genovese origins and suggesting that the Portuguese may have bribed him to fail in his mission to find a passage to the Indies in the name of the Spanish crown. As mentioned above, in the previous novel, 1492, Columbus had appeared only once, at an inn in Toledo where Juan Cabezón was staying, and where a familiar of the Inquisition pointedly asked the Genovese adventurer if he was a converso, which he denied. On the Santa María, the members of the crew, including the converso interpreter Luis de Torres, speculate that Columbus may be a descendant of one of the houses

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of Colón presumed to be Jewish in one of several parts of Spain.25 They further note that the voyage was financed with the assistance of converso treasurer Luis de Santángel. Some of the sailors egg on Luis de Torres, trying to get him to admit that Columbus is a converso, but when the interpreter describes himself as a New Christian, not an informer of the Inquisition, his crewmate says Torres is “otro judío más cristiano que yo” (26) (another Jew more Christian than I), alluding again to the need of conversos to overcompensate. Another crew member notes, “No hay nadie mejor que un converso para descubrir a otro converso” (26) (No one better than a converso to discover another converso). Luis de Torres protests he has no desire to discover the discoverer, adding: “Debe un hombre hurgar en el vientre de su madre para conocer su origen? ¿Debe preguntar a qué fe pertenece su natura, si es judía o devota cristiana?” (26) (Should a man delve into his mother’s womb to know his origin? Should he ask what faith his virile member belongs to, whether it is Jewish or devout Christian?), thus suggesting the absurdity of their inquiries into Columbus’s background. The specter of the persecution of the Jews follows the crew on their voyage and into the New World. After they have left port, from his post as mast man Juan Cabezón believes he can still see the ships of the expelled Jews. Although we might expect a member of an oppressed minority to identify with other marginalized groups, when they land on the islands, Juan Cabezón is the first to suggest to Columbus the idea of enslaving the Amerindians: “¿Queréis esclavizarlos presto?” (24) (Do you want to enslave them right away?), to which converso interpreter Luis de Torres responds sarcastically that along with a language and religion, the Spaniards would bring with them the Holy Inquisition. Thus, from the beginning of this sequel, it is clear that Juan Cabezón—orphan, pícaro, and converso—does not identify wholeheartedly with the Amerindians. Whereas the Europeans regard the Amerindians as an Other against which to define the self, the Amerindians return the gaze: for example, when Juan Cabezón is charged with the surveillance of a Taino chief, the narrator tells us: “A Juan Cabezón se le ordenó vigilar los movimientos de Guacanagarí; quien, a su vez, lo vigiló desde su hamaca” (31) (Juan Cabezón was ordered to keep an eye on Guacanagarí; who, in his turn, kept an eye on him from his hammock). In the New World, the panoptic gaze of the Inquisition is replaced by the conquistadors, but as in the Old World, there are breaches in the system of vigilance. Columbus’s first voyage soon ends, with Juan Cabezón being among those left behind to settle the islands, and the only survivor of the massacre of the Navidad colony.26 On his second voyage, Columbus finds that Juan Cabezón has been living during the intervening months with a Carib tribe among whom he served as shaman. His external appearance indicates a high degree of assimilation to the island culture: “[A]pareció en la nao capitana Juan Cabezón, desnudo, pintado de blanco y negro, los ojos tiznados y el cabello largo” (35) (Juan Cabezón appeared on the flagship, naked, painted white and black, his eyes blackened and hair long). The admiral at

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first does not recognize this former crew member gone native, who tells him the story of how the Spaniards were killed by the vassals of the Taino cacique, Caonabó, whose people they had wronged in their greed for women and gold. From the descriptions of the massacre, the narrative leads to the account of Juan Cabezón’s year living in the midst of an anthropophagous Carib tribe.27 Like the narrator of Saer’s El entenado, Juan Cabezón experiences simultaneous attraction and repulsion toward the cannibals, who in Memorias are described as castrating and drinking the blood of captured men; castrating, sodomizing, and later devouring the youths; and keeping the women as slaves, to eventually eat the children they engender with them.28 When he first finds himself among the Carib women, their men having gone off to war, Juan Cabezón’s mind is filled with preconceived notions imported from Europe: “Desde ese momento, aguardó con miedo y curiosidad el regreso de los caribes, criaturas más conocidas por fama que por vista, y que según había oído tenían un solo ojo sobre la frente y cara de perro” (36) (From that moment, he awaited with fear and curiosity the return of the Caribs, creatures known more by reputation than by sight, and who according to what he had heard had a single eye in their forehead and the faces of dogs). Although the Carib women have frightened him by telling him of their cannibalism and by showing him gnawed bones, skulls used for drinking water, and a human neck stewing in a pot, Juan Cabezón nevertheless anticipates the return of the warriors with the mixed emotion of fear and curiosity.29 When the warriors return, Juan Cabezón’s apprehension becomes more powerful than his fascination, because he dreads both the notion that he might be eaten and the idea that he might be forced to eat human flesh. Juan Cabezón shows some glass beads to the chief, but he is unsure how to interpret the look on the cacique’s face: [L]o miró castañeteando los dientes, sin saber si lo iba a acometer a mordidas o había comprendido que las bolas de cristal tenían virtudes secretas para curar enfermos y para hacerlo señor de las islas vecinas. (37) ([H]e looked at him clattering his teeth, without knowing whether he was going to attack him with bites or if he had understood that the glass balls had secret virtues to cure the sick and to make him lord of the neighboring islands.)

Juan Cabezón is unequivocally repulsed by the idea of eating human flesh, even though he tells the Carib leader that he is starving to death: “De manera que éste mandó que le sirviesen el cuello humano que se cocía en la olla. Y cuando Juan Cabezón lo rechazó con asco ordenó que le ofrecieran arañas, gusanos, culebras y un trozo de lagarto” (37) (So the cacique ordered that they serve him the human neck that was cooking in the pot. And when Juan Cabezón rejected it with disgust he ordered that they offer him spiders, worms, snakes and a piece of lizard). Although he is starved, Juan Cabezón categorically rejects the human flesh in favor of these other foodstuffs that might normally repulse European diners.

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It is because of his fear for his life that Juan Cabezón becomes a curandero, or healer, in the tribe. Like the historical Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the fictional protagonist of Memorias is compelled by the native Americans to serve as a shaman, a practice that he continues due to the good fortune of successful outcomes in his early attempts to cure. Also like the historical Spanish castaway, he combines Christian prayers with the native practice of blowing on the sick person in his own syncretic ritual. Again like Cabeza de Vaca, Juan Cabezón both cures the sick and brings back to life a dead man, thus significantly improving his social standing and guaranteeing his safety among the Amerindians due to their belief that not only can he heal and resuscitate but he is also capable of causing them harm.30 Whereas the historical Cabeza de Vaca was initially forced into shamanism under the threat of having his food withheld, Juan Cabezón is coerced into serving as a curandero with the perceived threat that if he refuses or fails, he will be the cacique’s next meal. He considers protesting that he cannot cure the chief’s wounded son because he is not a doctor, but “al oírlo castañetear los dientes amenazadoramente se dio cuenta de que en sanarlo o no le iba la vida” (37) (upon hearing him clack his teeth threateningly he realized that his life depended on whether he cured him or not). After the youth’s miraculous recovery, the Spanish shaman is given a new name, Anacacuia, meaning “spirit of the center.” His adoption of the name Juan Cabezón Anacacuia indicates the protagonist’s identification with the native culture. The anxiety of identification, however, leads him to maintain a certain distance, especially as regards cannibalism. He adapts to the local culture and accepts the four wives offered him by the chief; his fear of being eaten, however, affects his relationship with his fourth wife: “Como ella le había hecho saber que le gustaba mucho comer carne humana él besaba su boca con espanto, tratando de no sacar demasiado la lengua ni hacérsela visible” (40) (As she had let him know that she truly enjoyed eating human flesh, he would kiss her mouth with trepidation, trying not to stick his tongue out too much or make it visible). Thus, in spite of the months he spends living in the midst of the Caribs, Juan Cabezón continues to experience the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of colonial desire toward their cannibalistic practices. Although he becomes identified with the Carib tribe in the sense that he forms part of their society in the privileged role of shaman, when the Europeans return it is clear that Juan Cabezón has not abandoned his Spanish identity by going native altogether. Whereas the historical Cabeza de Vaca had great trouble readapting to Hispanic customs and his first thought when reencountering the Spaniards was to protect his indigenous companions from mistreatment and enslavement on the part of the conquistadors, the fictional Juan Cabezón quickly readapts and even soon commits his first recorded act of violence toward the Amerindians. Not having forgotten his Spanish alliances, when Columbus’s crew captures Caonabó, the Taino chief responsible for the Navidad massacre, Juan Cabezón kicks him in the head while other Spaniards

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pin him to the ground: “El cacique asesino besó el polvo y Juan Cabezón le dio un puntapié en el costado en recuerdo de los hombres que había matado en la Navidad” (45) (The murderous cacique kissed the dust and Juan Cabezón gave him a kick in the side in memory of the men he had killed in Navidad).31 Thus begins Juan Cabezón’s difficult career as a conquistador with ambivalent feelings toward violence; although here he physically attacks an enemy Amerindian, it will be many years before he eventually kills one, after his sword remains bloodless through the first battles of the conquest of Mexico. The protagonist’s ambiguous loyalties are apparent through the end of the portion of Memorias dealing with Columbus’s voyages, as Juan Cabezón, having served the admiral faithfully, later witnesses his downfall without taking any action to prevent it. When Comendador Francisco de Bobadilla is sent by the Catholic monarchs to investigate charges that Columbus has mistreated the Spaniards, Juan Cabezón witnesses every step of the investigation that culminates in Columbus being sent back to Spain from his third voyage in chains, but does nothing to help the admiral in spite of the fact that both share the ambivalent position of conversos. The Inquisition also continues to haunt the later voyages, as Rodrigo Rodríguez reappears dressed as a Dominican friar intent on exposing Columbus as a crypto-Jew. The section of the novel on Columbus ends in medias res, with Juan Cabezón managing to escape the notice of the inquistional spy. The next section likewise begins in medias res, with Hernán Cortés, who has already been joined by his native interpreter, la Malinche, receiving emissaries from Moctezuma and having them placed in chains. Nearly thirty years have passed since Juan Cabezón’s participation in Columbus’s first voyage, and Aridjis’s protagonist is an old man by the time he joins Hernán Cortés’s expedition to Mexico. His status as a semiconquistador is confirmed in contrast to the full conquistador status of another fictional character, Gonzalo Dávila; as discussed in Chapter 2 of the present study, this other fictional conquistador serves as a foil against whom Juan Cabezón is measured. Significantly, whereas Gonzalo Dávila’s first action on Mexican soil is to obey Cortés’s order to place the Mexican messengers in shackles, Juan Cabezón’s first action in this section of the novel is to pick up a stone and absentmindedly toss it in the water. Clearly, the antihero whose adventures began in 1492 is not to be the same kind of man of action as Gonzalo Dávila, nor will he be as cruel and sadistic in his treatment of the Amerindians. Juan Cabezón’s initial pacifism is carried to the absurd extreme of defending imaginary Amerindians. When some Spaniards are playacting on the beach, feigning a skirmish with some invisible foes, shouting at them to kneel and at each other to kill them, Juan Cabezón sticks his neck out to protect the imaginary victims, admonishing the conquistadors to leave them alone. Although he accompanies the conquistadors, Juan Cabezón’s personal beliefs appear to diverge from the ideology of the conquest, as he is willing to speak out against violence even in this case where the

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victims are not real. His intervention is met with scorn by the men, who laugh and scoff at the idea of being threatened by “el viejo Cabezón” (53) (Old Man Cabezón). The first assignment the protagonist receives in Mexico has an air of the fantastic as well, because it consists of hunting down the phantasmal Quintalbor, Cortés’s Amerindian double. The chimerical Quintalbor appears among the Spaniards, imitating Cortés’s gestures and following him around like a living shadow. Although the captain’s lookalike is a source of amusement and fascination for the soldiers, his presence causes much distress and irritation to the fictionalized Cortés. As discussed in the Introduction to the present study, as Freud observes in his essay on the uncanny, the double is one of the most unnerving of entities, because it transgresses ego boundaries and takes us back to a time before our ego was sharply demarcated, that is, back to the psychic undifferentiation that characterized precultural life previous to what Jacques Lacan calls the mirror stage. Here Hernán Cortés cannot identify with his indigenous Other, because the anxiety of identification kicks in as a defense mechanism to protect the ego of the fictionalized conquistador who is “herido por la burla de ver a otro semejante a sí mismo en su condición espectral” (56) (hurt by the taunt of seeing another in his own image in his spectral condition). Juan Cabezón is successful in capturing the Amerindian apparition, tricking him by pretending to be asleep in the sand and then grabbing the phantom double’s legs when he bends down to see his face. Juan Cabezón delivers Quintalbor to Cortés who is able to interrogate him through interpreters before he vanishes into thin air, only to reappear again periodically throughout the remainder of this portion of the novel, much to the dismay of Cortés, who repeatedly endeavors to kill his alter ego. It is significant that although his orders had been to bring in the simulacrum dead or alive, the protagonist uses cunning rather than brute force on the otherworldly Amerindian. Juan Cabezón is clearly on the Spanish side of this encounter, because he does capture and hand over the indigenous apparition to Cortés, who intends to annihilate him; his own part in the episode, however, is a relatively nonviolent one. Thus, during the conquest of Mexico, Juan Cabezón will not be, for example, a renegade who will desert the Spanish cause and become a leader in the indigenous resistance, nor will he be the most cruel and sadistic of conquistadors, like Gonzalo Dávila of the same Aridjis novel, or Nuño de Guzmán of Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito. One might expect, based on his experience as a marginal in late-fifteenthcentury Spain, that Juan Cabezón might identify with the Amerindians and opt for passive resistance, becoming a species of “conscientious objector” among the ranks of the conquistadors. Based on his own ambiguous actions and reactions in the context of inquisitorial Spain, however, it would be more fitting to expect him to be in this new setting the same sort of “betwixt and between” picaresque character that he had been in the previous novel. As in Spain where he had identified himself as neither Old Christian nor crypto-Jew, the converso ex-curandero now in the Americas re-

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mains in character by refusing to accept an identification as either conquistador or anticonquistador. As discussed in Chapter 2, Juan Cabezón’s name is repeatedly coupled with that of conquistador Gonzalo Dávila: both initially serve as caretakers for the horses on Cortés’s expedition; together they guard the chief of Cempoala; they fight side by side in the battle against the Tlaxcalans; they jointly witness the surrender and baptism of the kings of Tlaxcala; together they deliver the priests of Cholula to Cortés and la Malinche, contributing indirectly to the discovery of the Cholulans’ plan for an ambush, which permits the Spaniards to devise their own surprise first strike;32 and later the two fictional conquistadors travel together incognito to reconnoiter Tenochtitlan, where they witness the spectacular human sacrifice examined in Chapter 2. When the battles first begin, however, the two characters diverge significantly: whereas Gonzalo Dávila becomes the image of the conquistador, forceful, cruel, and unrelenting, Juan Cabezón is reluctant to take an active role in the combat. It is not always clear whether this is due to an identification with the indigenous Other or a matter of sheer cowardice and the instinct of self-preservation. This divergence is manifest even in their physical appearances. Gonzalo Dávila, as seen in Chapter 2, cuts a fine portrait of a conquistador who, mounted on his mare, fights energetically in the early battles. In contrast, Juan Cabezón emerges for battle dressed more like a Don Quixote on a decrepit nag: Juan Cabezón, armado con cota, coracinas y una celada con visera negra, llevaba encima una ropa astrosa, dando la apariencia de soldado ruin, de los más dispensables. Montaba un caballo zaino, largo y seco como un palo. (63) (Juan Cabezón, outfitted with armor, coat of mail, and a helmet with a black visor, was wearing on top of these some shabby clothes, giving the appearance of a wretched soldier, of the most dispensable kind. He rode a pure black horse, long and dry like a stick.)

In the battle against the Tlaxcalans, Gonzalo Dávila is on the offensive, wounding and killing many men, whereas Juan Cabezón merely defends himself, again reinforcing his ambiguous status as a conquistador and anticonquistador. Even in defending himself, Juan Cabezón is not successful, as he is portrayed as the victim of an assault in need of defense. When he finds himself under attack by a group of Tlaxcalans, including a “ferocious” dwarf, several Spaniards in turn rush to defend Juan Cabezón, among them Gonzalo Dávila, who kills the dwarf. The contrast between the two Spaniards is apparent in the following: Gonzalo Dávila, entonces, hundió las espuelas en los ijares de su yegua y arremetió contra sus atacantes, hiriéndolos en la cara y en el pecho. Juan Cabezón, de cuyo caballazo se había colgado el enano, no podía ni con puntapiés ni con lanzazos deshacerse de él. (64)

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(Gonzalo Dávila, then, dug his spurs in his mare’s flanks and charged against his attackers, wounding them in the face and the chest. Juan Cabezón, from whose steed the dwarf was dangling, could not with either kicks or blows of the lance free himself from him.)

Here Gonzalo Dávila appears as a man of action, whereas Juan Cabezón is incapable of so much as defending himself. The portrayal of Juan Cabezón as an anticonquistador addresses the problematic issue of how Aridjis chose to represent the conquest through the eyes of a marginal protagonist; because he is marginalized, Juan Cabezón is a sympathetic character, yet in order for the narration to follow the principal historical events through his eyes, he must be a witness and thus on some level be implicated as a participant in the conquest. After the battle with the Tlaxcalans, Juan Cabezón overhears Cortés say, “Juan Cabezón, aunque viejo, es gran sufridor de trabajos y un buen hombre de a caballo. Gonzalo Dávila es la mejor lanza que ha pasado a las Indias. Con hombres como éstos tomaremos presto el reino de Moctezuma” (65–66) ( Juan Cabezón, albeit old, is long-suffering and a good horseman. Gonzalo Dávila is the best lance that has come over to the Indies. With men like these we will soon conquer Moctezuma’s realm). Although up until this point the reader has seen little evidence to support such confidence, it is apparent here that Juan Cabezón is considered a valuable member of Cortés’s campaign. His age must be a considerable factor, because in 1492 he had told inquisitorial familiar Agustín Delfín that he was growing old and needed to seek his fortune, so by 1519 he must be at least in his midfifties. Nevertheless, Cortés counts him among the men who are going to make possible the conquest of Tenochtitlan. The preemptive strike on the Cholulans is witnessed by Juan Cabezón as an outof-body experience. His detachment begins when earlier he is sent by Cortés to examine the temple of Cholula, from which he gazes at the volcano Popocatépetl: “En su observación, Juan Cabezón se sintió en el centro de la vida, pero muy lejos de sí mismo” (73) (In his observation, Juan Cabezón felt himself in the center of life, but very far from himself). During the battle, the volcano remains his focus, allowing him to distance himself from the violence. In this massacre, Juan Cabezón finally bloodies his virgin sword: “Clavó su espada en un indio de unos cuarenta años y le sorprendió la blandura de su carne, la facilidad de la muerte” (74) (He plunged his sword into a forty-or-so year old Indian and he was surprised by the suppleness of his flesh, the ease of death). His aloofness from the events occurring in front of him somehow erases the blood from his hands and his conscience: “Juan Cabezón . . . se sintió tranquilo. Su mano, sin huellas de sangre, sin remordimientos de conciencia, estaba quieta. Silencioso, igual que si nunca hubiese matado a hombre alguno, miró los volcanes” (74) ( Juan Cabezón . . . felt peaceful. His hand, without a trace of blood, without remorse of conscience, was at ease. Silent, as if he had never killed a man, he looked toward the volcanoes). In his own mind at least, this impression of de-

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tachment relieves Juan Cabezón of a sense of responsibility for having taken a human life.33 His fellow conquistador Gonzalo Dávila, however, is not surprised, because he realizes how attractive violence can be, even to an ostensible pacifist like his friend: Sabía bien la repugnancia de Juan Cabezón hacia los actos cruentos, pero no se había sorprendido viéndolo empuñar la espada, junto a los hombres fieros que estaban dispuestos en todo momento a derramar sangre. Era como si a la vez condenara el crimen y buscara su espectáculo. En la contienda lo había visto seguir a los más aviesos y crueles, atestiguando con ansias su saña y traición. (75; emphasis mine) (He knew well the repugnance Juan Cabezón felt toward bloody acts, but he had not been surprised to see him raise his sword, alongside the fierce men who were always ready to shed blood. It was as if at the same time he condemned the crime and sought its spectacle. In the battle he had seen him follow the most perverse and cruel soldiers, bearing witness with anxious yearning to their rage and treachery.)

Here the ambivalence of the colonial situation is patent, as even gentle Juan Cabezón is drawn in by the simultaneous attraction and repulsion that the violence inspires in him. His ambiguous status as a conquistador and anticonquistador is underscored by the above sentence: “It was as if at the same time he condemned the crime and sought its spectacle.” This corresponds to Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of the “anticonquest” as “the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony.”34 As of this moment, Juan Cabezón, in spite of prior claims of “innocence” due to his pacific nature and sense of detachment from the violence, is a legitimate conquistador, having at length wet his sword with the blood of conquest. After the massacre at Cholula, Cortés sends Juan Cabezón and Gonzalo Dávila on the reconnaissance tour of Tenochtitlan discussed above in Chapter 2. There the two, dressed as Mexicans with their faces tinted, witness a spectacular human sacrifice. In this scene, it is apparent that Juan Cabezón has adapted more fully to his surroundings than has his companion. Having experienced marginality as a converso in inquisitorial Spain, he is more open to transculturation than hardened conquistador Gonzalo Dávila. Juan Cabezón understands the native languages better than his comrade-in-arms, occasionally using indigenous terms in his speech, and at this stage seems to have a greater comprehension and respect for Mexican culture, including its religious aspects. For example, when his fellow conquistador considers stealing an emerald necklace from a statue of the god Tláloc, it is Juan Cabezón who prevents him from doing so. Both Spaniards are horrified by the skeletons and flayed skins they see in the temple, and they realize that they not only are the voyeurs, but have the sense that they are the object of a gaze as well; as Juan Cabezón remarks: “Nos miran desde adentro de nosotros” (80) (They are looking at us from inside ourselves). As earlier, when

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Columbus had asked Juan Cabezón to keep an eye on an island chief, here with the sacrifice victims the panoptic gaze goes both ways: “A la luz de la luna, Juan Cabezón y Gonzalo Dávila observaron a esas criaturas, que a su vez los observaban desde los huacales, con el maravillamiento con que había visto Xicoténcatl el Viejo a Hernán Cortés” (83) (By the light of the moon, Juan Cabezón and Gonzalo Dávila observed the sacrifice victims, who in turn observed them from their prison, with the same fascination with which Xicoténcatl the Elder had seen Hernán Cortés). In this Mexican novel that ostensibly presents the conquest from the perspective of the Spanish conquerors, it is significant to note that Europeans do not gaze unilaterally upon the Amerindians; rather, as Mary Louise Pratt has noted in her book on travel writing and transculturation, the gaze is multilateral. First as passive spectator, then as active participant, Juan Cabezón becomes inured to the violence of conquest: “Juan Cabezón se había acostumbrado poco a poco a percibir a distancia el peligro” (75) (Juan Cabezón had become accustomed little by little to witness the danger at a distance). The protagonist’s attitude toward the conquest, however, remains ambiguous: upon their arrival in Tenochtitlan, Juan Cabezón gazes without sympathy upon the wealthy but persecuted emperor. The contrast between these two as conquistador and anticonquistador follows them to the imperial capital, where Cortés orders Gonzalo Dávila to place Moctezuma in chains, then immediately afterward orders Juan Cabezón to take them off. In Tenochtitlan, Juan Cabezón continues to make efforts to establish his status as an anticonquistador. After Cortés has gone to Veracruz to waylay Pánfilo de Narváez, leaving Pedro de Alvarado in charge of the Spanish forces in the capital, some of the conquistadors attend a festival, which will ultimately turn into the bloody temple massacre. Before the violence begins, the conquistadors converse as they attend the dance of the sacrificial victims. Alvarado remarks: “Cabezón, aún traes espada virgen. . . . La que su dueño ha tenido en la vaina y no ha derramado sangre no conoce todavía su virtud” (94) (Cabezón, you still carry a virgin sword. . . . The sword whose owner has kept in its sheath and has not shed blood does not yet know its virtue). When Gonzalo Dávila responds by discussing various ways to wound with his sword, the protagonist takes the verb herir out of context: “Herir la cuerda entre músicos es tocarla para que suene—murmuró intencionadamente distraído Juan Cabezón” (94) (“To wound the string among musicians is to play it so that it makes a sound,” Juan Cabezón murmured, intentionally distracted). The notion that his distraction is intentional underlines the idea that the protagonist is purposely trying to fashion a selfimage as an “innocent” anticonquistador, detached from the violence, in spite of the fact that his sword has ceased to be virginal since the massacre at Cholula. The conversation at the festival then turns to the indigenous practice of human sacrifice. When Pedro de Alvarado remarks that in 1487 twenty thousand prisoners were sacrificed, and adds the value judgment, “¿Habéis visto tal crueldad?” (94) (Have you ever seen such cruelty?), Juan Cabezón responds by referring to the In-

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quisition: “¿Qué estaba haciendo ese año nuestro piadoso Inquisidor General en toda España?” (95) (What was our pious grand inquisitor doing that year in all of Spain?). Alvarado misses the connection, retorting with a guffaw, “Sin duda, quemando herejes, mi viejo Juan” (95) (Doubtless, burning heretics, my old Juan). From the Old Christian perspective, there is no logical connection between the senseless human sacrifice of the Aztecs and the sacred auto-da-fé of the Holy Tribunal. But even more significant than the fictionalized Alvarado’s blindness in this regard is the blind spot that all of the conquistadors share: the obvious answer to Alvarado’s query about whether they have ever seen such cruelty is that they are currently participating in one of the greatest acts of genocide in recorded history, the conquest of the Americas. Although Juan Cabezón, as a marginal converso, can draw the parallel between the sacrificial priests as murderers on a par with the inquisitors who persecuted him, he is incapable of making the additional logical leap from Inquisition and sacrifice to conquest. Thus, Juan Cabezón does not identify with the Aztecs as victims like himself, nor does he foresee or attempt to prevent their destruction. During the temple massacre in Tenochtitlan, Juan Cabezón attempts to recover his innocence by becoming once again a detached observer. Defining himself as an anticonquistador in contrast to the cruelty of hardened conquistadors such as fictional Gonzalo Dávila and fictionalized Pedro de Alvarado, Juan Cabezón again resorts to detachment as a way to insulate himself from the violence of conquest. Although he has just been conversing with Alvarado, in the heat of the battle he cannot identify with him: “Juan Cabezón vio como a un desconocido a aquel hombre que los mexicanos llamaban Tonatiuh; quien era tan agraciado de facciones que aún en la violencia extrema parecía amable” (97) (Juan Cabezón looked at the man the Mexicans called Tonatiuh as if he were a stranger who had such agreeable features that even in extreme violence he seemed pleasant). Although he had killed a man earlier in Cholula, Juan Cabezón manages to convince himself that his sword has truly reverted to its virginal state. While Gonzalo Dávila is dripping with blood and splattered with gore and Pedro de Alvarado continues fighting when all he has left of his lance is a stump, Juan Cabezón remains on the sidelines: “Incapaz de matar a mansalva, Juan Cabezón vio las armas bermejas de sus compañeros, que . . . parecía que estaban en una feria de muerte, compitiendo por el precio de la crueldad” (98) (Unable to kill in cold blood, Juan Cabezón saw the crimson arms of his companions, who . . . seemed to be in a festival of death, competing for the price of cruelty). During this massacre, Juan Cabezón will waver one last time before finally establishing his identity, as the pendulum swings from conquistador to anticonquistador to conquistador. After the massacre, the anxiety of identification forces Juan Cabezón to examine his comportment in the battle. Unable to bring himself to identify with the cruelty of the conquistadors, he tries to justify letting himself off the hook: “Exhausto de todo, Juan Cabezón alzó los ojos hacia las estrellas, cuyo titilar parecía decir a su alma que

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estuviese tranquilo, que él no había sido responsable de la matanza, sólo tomado parte en ella” (100) (Exhausted from everything, Juan Cabezón raised his eyes toward the stars, whose flickering seemed to say to his soul that it should be calm, that he had not been responsible for the massacre, only taken part in it). But there is clearly a gap in the logic of the last sentence, such that Juan Cabezón cannot convince even himself, much less the reader, that it is possible to take part in the conquest without dirtying his hands: “Anduvo, sacó su espada de la vaina, la metió de nuevo, con la vergüenza de que ya no era virgen, sino había vertido sangre inocente y para él esto era como haber maculado toda su existencia” (100) (He wandered off, took his sword out of its sheath, put it back in, with the shame that it was no longer virgin, but had spilled innocent blood and for him that was the same as having stained his entire existence). Even the other conquistadors, who have some stake in maintaining the innocence of Old Man Cabezón, who with his virgin sword was able to serve as a yardstick against which they could measure their own exploits, now claim him as one of their own: “Eres uno de nosotros—le dijo Hojeda el Tuerto, poniéndole con una sonrisa la mano velluda sobre el hombro derecho—. No es posible volver a ser lo que eras” (100) (“You are one of us,” the one-eyed Hojeda said with a smile, placing his hairy hand on his right shoulder. “It is not possible to go back to being what you were”). In spite of this explicit pronouncement, sealed by the gesture of the conquistador’s hand on his shoulder, Juan Cabezón makes one last-ditch effort to protest his innocence to himself: “‘Hubo muertos, pero no fueron míos,’ se dijo, mientras andaba con ansias que oprimían su corazón” (101) (“There were deaths, but they were not at my hand,” he said, as he drifted about with anxious pangs that weighed down his heart). But again, he fails to convince even himself as he murmurs: Tal vez sí fueron míos. ¿Cómo saber cuál fue la mano que les dio el golpe letal? El hecho es que están muertos, haya sido yo u otro soldado el que los mató. Yo les di una estocada, pero vinieron más españoles y les dieron más estocadas. Murieron. Eso es todo. (101) (Perhaps they were at my hand. How am I supposed to know which was the hand that gave them the lethal blow? The fact is that they are dead, whether it were I or another soldier who killed them. I gave them a lance blow, but other Spaniards came and gave them more blows. They died. That is all.)

Ultimately, Juan Cabezón must accept that his participation in the conquest implicates him in its goals and means. There are no innocent witnesses among the conquistadors, as their very presence imbricates them in the entire process of the conquest. As Juan Cabezón muses above, even if he did not kill a particular warrior, the fact is that Amerindians were killed. In like terms, even if Aridjis were able to write into this historical narrative a character who could be fully marginal to the conquest, he could not through his literary endeavor undo the deaths that really occurred.

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Rather than attempt to erase real historical events, novels such as Memorias del Nuevo Mundo display the gaps in the rhetoric of conquest in order to confront head-on Latin America’s ambiguous origins in a violent and contradictory conflict. Although Juan Cabezón initially resists identifying with the conquistadors, it is really their violence that allows him to define himself as an innocent bystander to the bloodshed. It is because of their excessive cruelty that Juan Cabezón is able to stand apart, fashioning himself an identity as a pacifist. But, as his comrade-in-arms Gonzalo Dávila points out, Juan Cabezón is both repulsed and attracted by the violence, and he ultimately cannot resist its pull. Drawn in by the conquest, Juan Cabezón ultimately accepts the self-definition as a conquistador. As a result of this metamorphosis, there is an immediate change in his comportment in the following battles: whereas earlier he had looked like a ragged soldier and had to be saved from an attack by a dwarf whom he could not kick off his horse, in a new battle the reborn conquistador is injured but vigorously rips off his clothes to bind his wound. After his ultimate self-definition, the contrast between conquistadors Juan Cabezón and Gonzalo Dávila is blurred: “Juan Cabezón, en su caballazo, se endosó la armadura, blandió la lanza e hirió a un guerrero en el pecho. . . . A su lado, estuvo Gonzalo Dávila” (109–10) ( Juan Cabezón, on his mighty steed, shouldered his armor, brandished his lance and wounded a warrior in the chest. . . . At his side, was Gonzalo Dávila). There is no turning back: Juan Cabezón is now clearly one of the conquistadors. As a pícaro and converso in the Old World, Juan Cabezón had vacillated continually between identifying with the Jews and crypto-Jews who were persecuted and expelled by inquisitorial Spain. Whereas in the Old World, as a converso he had been one of the Others against whom hegemonic Spaniards defined themselves, here Juan Cabezón looks to the New World as a theater in which he can refashion his own identity. But in America, as in Spain, Juan Cabezón vacillates between the various identities that are available to him. His many years as a converso half-outsider in Spain and his year cohabiting with cannibalistic island Caribs make him somewhat more sensitive to the situation of the Amerindians, but he nevertheless does not hesitate to kick a Taino chief when he is down. In the early battles of the conquest of Mexico, Juan Cabezón stays his hand, repulsed but attracted by the violence, until he is gradually drawn in by it. At first he attempts to remain detached from his own behavior, but he must ultimately accept the responsibility. Having gone full circle from converso to curandero to conquistador, Juan Cabezón’s identity now remains fixed for the remainder of the conquest of Tenochtitlan. After the conquest, however, Juan Cabezón once again becomes the peace-loving man he had been before. This is due to his circumstances more than to his nature, however, because when the spoils of war are distributed, Hernán Cortés and Gonzalo Dávila get more than their share, whereas “A Juan Cabezón le tocó nada. O tan poco, que lo consideró nada. Con las manos vacías . . . ” (125) ( Juan Cabezón got nothing. Or so little that he considered it nothing. With empty hands . . . ). Later he

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remembers what another Spaniard who apparently survived the Navidad massacre had told him: “Sólo codicia y cólera tenemos, lo demás es hambre. Hambre de todo: de vida, de años, de dinero, de mujeres, de muerte” (154) (All we have is greed and wrath, everything else is hunger. Hunger for everything: life, years, money, women, death). Having come full circle from being a hungry, ragged orphan in Spain to a poor ex-conquistador in New Spain, Juan Cabezón determines to use what little money he has and borrow additional funds to open an inn. In the end, it is only his hunger and poverty that allow him to be a gentle innkeeper rather than a cruel encomendero like Gonzalo Dávila. Like the pícaro of the Hispanic literary tradition, Juan Cabezón adapts his behavior and even his personality to his circumstances. As in Spain, in Mexico City he conforms to the status quo, and in order to avoid drawing attention to his difference, he even attends the auto-da-fé in which don Carlos of Texcoco is burned for heresy and idolatry.35 As the narrator explains, “En su posada, Juan Cabezón comprendió que por más que le repugnara el espectáculo de la quema de un hombre, tenía que estar presente; pues de lo contrario, se levantarían sospechas contra él” (229) (In his inn, Juan Cabezón understood that as much as the spectacle of the burning of a man might be repugnant to him, he had to be present; since were he absent, he himself would be suspect). As a picaresque antihero, Juan Cabezón’s incessantly wavering convictions do not allow him to be either the committed cryptoJew in inquisitorial Spain or the “conscientious objector” in the conquest that the reader might want him to be. Memorias del Nuevo Mundo continues after the conquest of Tenochtitlan and narrates several years into the early colony of Mexico City, which is being reconstructed with the sweat and blood of its former rulers. In this postconquest period, various characters from 1492 resurface. The inquisitorial dwarf, Rodrigo Rodríguez, reappears at the end of Memorias and once again propitiously pretends not to recognize Juan Cabezón. Although the blind man Pero Meñique had died in the earlier novel in his failed assassination attempt, his son, Pánfilo Meñique, comes to New Spain where he works as a botanist and naturalist and falls in love with the Spanish niece of Gonzalo Dávila, who gives him permission to marry her only to see them both die in an epidemic. And Juan Cabezón’s own son, the friar Juan de Flandes, arrives in the New World after having fulfilled the request of Emperor Carlos V, who has not mastered the Spanish language, that Fray Juan accompany him from Flanders to Spain. In Spain, the young friar rediscovers his converso roots, and demonstrates an interest in learning more about his Judaic origins. When he tours a Dominican school where the scholarships are paid for with the confiscated funds of conversos convicted by the Inquisition, he realizes that he cannot identify with the Christian religion as it is practiced by the inquisitors: “[C]ruzó por su mente la imagen de su madre perseguida por ellos y sintió la urgencia de entregarse a una religión de amor y no de terror, de amistad y no de odio entre los hombres” (253) ([T]he image of his mother persecuted by them crossed his mind and he felt the urgent need to devote him-

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self to a religion of love and not terror, one of friendship and not hatred between men). In order to learn more about the Jewish people, he sets about reading the many antiSemitic tracts that inquisitorial Spain has produced; as he studies them, he realizes that “aunque desbarataba las razones en las que estaban basados, no podía explicarse el rencor vicioso de esas almas fanáticas” (258) (although he pulled apart the logic on which they were based, he could not understand the vicious rancor of those fanatical souls). He is curious to learn more about his mother who was persecuted and exiled and his father who preferred to “perderse en los caminos oscuros de este mundo, durante los días de la expulsión de los judíos de España, que someterse al tribunal del Santo Oficio” (257) (lose himself in the dark paths of this world, during the days of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, rather than submit to the tribunal of the Holy Office). Although he is a member of a religious order, Juan de Flandes refuses to reject his converso parents: “[E]n lo íntimo de su alma no había renunciado a ellos” (257) ([F]rom the bottom of his heart he had not disavowed them). Rather, he determines to seek out his father in the New World. Juan de Flandes manages to embark on the same voyage as Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, who is bringing with him the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) intended to reform treatment of the Amerindians. In Mexico, Juan de Flandes falls in love with a Spanish widow who is one of Gonzalo Dávila’s lovers and who has a fatal disease. Soon after the widow dies, the friar from Flanders becomes ill also, after a mission to Chichimeca territory in Zacatecas where he impregnates an indigenous woman. His mother, Isabel de la Vega, reaches Mexico City and is reunited with Juan Cabezón just in time to see their son die. Significantly, during the intervening years before and after the conquest of Mexico, the protagonist had never made any effort to keep his promise to search for his wife and son in Flanders. Nor does it appear that he was sexually constant to Isabel, because for most of the conquest he is accompanied by a Tlaxcalan woman. As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo ends with Juan Cabezón’s first-person narration of the blood sacrifice of Gonzalo Dávila. During his first-person narration, Juan Cabezón says that if he were a chronicler of the Indies, he would describe his own life thus: Vino con los primeros descubridores y conquistadores del Nuevo Mundo un hombre flaco e insignificante que anduvo en nave, a caballo, en mulo y a pie miles de leguas en estas tierras. Buscó riquezas, pero siempre llegó tarde a una fortuna que se entregó a otros. (373) (With the first discoverers and conquerors of the New World arrived a weak and insignificant man who traversed thousands of leagues in these lands by ship, on horseback, on mule and on foot. He sought riches, but he always arrived late to a fortune that was handed over to others.)

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This is how narrator Juan Cabezón summarizes his own experience as a conquistador on the margins of the conquest. Now nearly a hundred years old, Juan Cabezón prepares to leave the world as he entered it, “sin nada entre las manos” (372) (empty-handed), the poor, hungry orphan of Castile. Evoking the conversation he had overheard in 1492 upon entering Teruel—when the ragged man, asked whether he was a Jew or a New Christian, responded that he was neither, only a man—at the end of Memorias, Juan Cabezón participates in the following exchange when he is interrogated by a Spaniard on the street: “— ¿Sois conquistador, poblador o vagamundo?—Fui conquistador.—¿Qué sois ahora?—Un hombre” (379) (“Are you a conquistador, a settler or a vagabond?” “I was a conquistador.” “What are you now?” “A man”). The final word on Juan Cabezón’s identity is reminiscent of a passage from Octavio Paz’s essay “The Sons of la Malinche,” the first part of which was cited in the Introduction: “The Mexican does not want to be either an Indian or a Spaniard. Nor does he want to be descended from them. He denies them. And he does not affirm himself as a mixture, but rather as an abstraction: he is a man.”36 Aridjis’s two novels recounting the adventures of Juan Cabezón are paradigmatic of this entire corpus of new Latin American historical novels that rewrite the conquest because they address the problematic question of how to narrate the conquest from a marginal perspective. In order to represent the initial encounter between Europeans and Amerindians from the perspective of a marginal character, the novel must somehow account for the protagonist’s presence in the conquest, without changing the basic facts of history. In the case of 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, this question is dealt with by making Juan Cabezón an ambiguous figure, a marginal participant in the conquest, but an antihero with whom we cannot entirely identify because of his vacillation between ideological positions. Converso, curandero, and conquistador, Juan Cabezón refuses to be the unwavering “conscientious objector” of the conquest that the reader might want him to be. As Albert Memmi explores in The Colonizer and the Colonized, everyone who lives in a colonized state—or even in the far-off homeland of the colonizer—is somehow implicated in the colonial process. There is no way to avoid dirtying one’s hands. In this examination of the representation of marginal conquistadors in the work of Saer, Martínez, Posse, and Aridjis, we have come full circle from the initial anecdote that marks the beginning of this book, and we have seen how contemporary authors have addressed this question: who are the true children of the colonizers, those who remained in the motherland and enjoyed the fruits of the colony and of the often forced labor therein, or those criollos and mestizos whose ancestors were the literal conquistadors, but who rebelled against the European colonizers and established the independent nations of Latin America?

Conclusion

Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Conquest in the New Latin American Historical Novel

n the novels explored in the preceding chapters, we have covered the trajectory from love to hate: from “loving cannibalism” to “converso self-hatred.” The case of the fictional Juan Cabezón in Homero Aridjis’s 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo is perhaps the most paradigmatic of the issues raised by the passage from Carmen Boullosa’s Llanto: Novelas imposibles cited at the beginning of the Introduction, because his anxiety of identification is clearly directed both toward the colonized Other and toward the colonizing self. Whereas in Juan José Saer’s El entenado we saw the nameless narrator’s colonial desire directed toward the anthropophagous Amerindian, and in the case of the fictional conquistador Gonzalo Dávila of Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo we saw a similarly ambivalent sentiment directed toward native sorcery and sacrifice, in Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán we witnessed a transition from a concern with the “Other without” to the “Other within,” as the fictionalized conquistador Nuño de Guzmán vacillates between the impulse to oppress the sodomitic Other and to give in to his own homoerotic desire. In Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante, in turn, we observed how the fictionalized Cabeza de Vaca expresses the ambivalence of colonial desire toward both the Amerindian Other and a “significant Other” within Spain: the converso. Whereas Cabeza de Vaca’s own Old Christian identity is never in doubt, in Aridjis’s two historical novels we saw colonial desire turned back inward toward the self, in the form of protagonist Juan Cabezón’s ambivalence toward his own Judaic roots as well as toward the Amerindians. As noted at the end of Chapter 5, Aridjis’s novels in particular address the thorny question of how to narrate the conquest from a marginal point of view. From a strictly practical perspective, if an author wishes to write a novel about the initial encounter between Europeans and Amerindians, but wishes to relate it from the perspective of a marginal European character, that author must somehow account for the protagonist’s presence in the voyages of discovery, exploration, and conquest. One

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solution might be to make the marginal protagonist a stowaway on the voyage, and thus one who is not officially enrolled in the expedition. This strategy could serve to absolve the protagonist from express complicity with the goals of conquest. This recourse is rarely used, however, as more often the marginal protagonist is a cabin boy, scribe, or foot soldier, one who is a legitimate member of the crew, yet one who is alienated from the center of power both on land and at sea. This is the case of the unnamed narrator of Saer’s El entenado and the character of Juan Cabezón in Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. In Saer’s El entenado and Posse’s El largo atardecer, the material failure of the expeditions and the protagonists’ prolonged cohabitation with indigenous peoples lead to a transculturation that dilutes the narrators’ identification with the enterprise of imperialism. Nevertheless, in spite of their lack of identification with the goals of conquest, all of these marginal characters are portrayed as extremely ambivalent toward Amerindians. In other novels in this corpus, the theme of the conquest is tackled head-on by representing the narrative through the first-person perspective of successful conquistadors themselves, as in Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán, or with a focus on a particular conquistador in a third-person narrative, such as Gonzalo Dávila in Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. In these novels also, an ambivalent marginal perspective is incorporated as the fictional and fictionalized conquistadors grapple with their simultaneous attraction and repulsion toward the sexually or religiously marked Other, whom through their anxious identification they incorporate as an “Other within.” Ultimately, these novels do not answer the question of how to represent the conquest from the dual perspective of the transcultural Latin American criollo or racially and culturally mixed mestizo. In these five novels, there is a notable lack of any effort to narrate the perspective of either Amerindians or mestizos or even to introduce characters with names and distinct personalities representing these groups. In the novels explored in the previous chapters, there are few developed characters representing indigenous men, or women of any race. For example, as in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios, in which there is a single named indigenous adult male, in Posse’s El largo atardecer, the explorer’s fictional Amerindian wife and mestizo children all have names but no direct voice in the narrative; in like manner, in Martínez’s Diario maldito, all of the female characters, named and nameless, are prostitutes and concubines subordinated to the whim of fictionalized conquistador Nuño de Guzmán who filters their representation through his own colonizing perspective. One exception to this general pattern is Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, which has several welldeveloped female and indigenous characters; this novel is also problematic, however, because it has this subcorpus’s only example of a developed mestizo character, the cruel Gonzalito, who combines the most violent aspects of both conquering and conquered cultures. Although they do not provide exemplary models of Amerindian

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and mestizo characters, what these authors do is address many pertinent cultural issues by using the Latin American literary imagination to reconstruct what might have been the thoughts of the conquistadors upon first encountering the native American Other, and using this perspective to deconstruct the rhetoric of conquest by pointing to the gaps and contradictions in the imperial enterprise. Since the conception of the movements that culminated in political independence for most of Latin America in the nineteenth century, Latin American writers have looked to indigenous roots for a sense of cultural autochthony that would distinguish their incipient nations from Europe and distance them from their colonial past. In the years surrounding the 1492–1992 quincentenary, rather than a renewed fervor for historical novels in the vein of literary indigenism, however, what we see is a turning back to critically examine European cultural roots. Since the publication of Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975), authors have begun to shift their gaze back to Old World history; in doing so, Latin American writers acknowledge their European cultural ancestry, but, not wishing to identify with the hegemonic enterprise of conquest and colonization, they look instead to marginal groups within the conquering society as their potential cultural ancestors. They thus create myths that, like Argentine Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s fictionalized autobiography and Venezuelan Alicia Freilich’s innovative novel discussed in the Introduction, insert marginality into this European heritage, sometimes in ways that strain the imagination. This is the case when Freilich calls upon her reader to imagine Columbus as a poor, old Jewish woman confined in a psychiatric hospital, and when Dujovne Ortiz’s narrator insists on believing in a secret indigenous ancestor in her lineage, and yearns not only to have her Eastern European Jewish background, but also to have a crypto-Jewish ancestor burned at the stake on her Spanish Catholic side. Writers such as these two and the authors examined in the above five chapters use the literary imagination to reinvent the New World, constructing new “creation myths” for Latin America during the quincentenary and at the turn of the millennium. In Carmen Boullosa’s Llanto: Novelas imposibles, cited in the Introduction, the fictional narrative story line narrates the chain of events that unfolds when three women find Moctezuma alive and sleeping in a park in contemporary Mexico City, while another narrative strand documents various historiographic versions of Moctezuma’s death, and yet a third interwoven strand meditates on the difficulty of writing a novel about the Aztec emperor. It is in one of the meditations on the act of writing that the narrator makes the following inconclusive statement: “Sí que el siglo veinte se parece a la época de la conquista. Nos enfrentamos a nuestro propio dominio: no entendemos con qué nos estamos dominando. . . . Tal vez, si aceptáramos nuestra situación de conquistados por nosotros mismos, nuestra situación de ser, como fue Moctezuma, personajes en la frontera, seres situados entre dos territorios, expulsados tal vez de ambos por nuestra incertidumbre, tal vez si lo viéramos . . . ”

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(“Indeed the twentieth century is similar to the period of conquest. We confront our own dominion: we don’t know with what we are dominating ourselves. . . . Perhaps, if we accepted our situation as conquistadors of ourselves, our situation of being, as Moctezuma was, characters on the border, beings situated between two territories, expelled perhaps from both by our uncertainty, perhaps if we saw this . . . ”)1

Unfortunately, Boullosa does not finish this sentence, but rather concludes a chapter with this ellipsis and the quotation marks that indicate the fragments of the novel that contemplate the act of writing. The novel’s subtitle, Novelas imposibles (Impossible novels), is reflected in this citation, as well as in the fragments of the text on historiography, which offer dissenting versions of the death of Moctezuma in order to suggest the impossibility of recuperating a historical truth, and in the fragments on the act of writing, which conclude that it is impossible to write a novel about Moctezuma alive and well and living in contemporary Mexico City. The fictional narrative strand of Llanto also ends inconclusively, as one of the three women takes Moctezuma to her apartment, where they have sexual relations, but both dissolve into thin air before any kind of mestizo offspring can be produced. Thus, Boullosa does not answer the question of racial miscegenation; rather, she addresses the question of cultural mestizaje by observing that Latin Americans find themselves in perpetual exile, in an indeterminate position between two worlds, and that they should become aware of this duality. The final ellipsis in the above citation indicates Boullosa’s own refusal to offer suggestions as to where this awareness will lead Latin Americans. The novels of the corpus discussed in the previous five chapters also refuse to offer absolute answers as to how knowledge about the Iberian origins of Latin American culture can help us understand the past, act in the present, or look forward to the future. They do succeed, however, in exploring the colonizing mentality from a variety of perspectives, generally through an ironic gaze. Representing the conquistadors as struggling between identifying with the native cultures and rejecting this same identification that has caused them anxiety over the potential loss of the self in the Other, the novels analyzed here deconstruct the discourse of colonization by pointing to contradictions that constitute a breach in the ostensibly impenetrable rhetoric of conquest. While they do not offer answers, these novels make a significant contribution to the genre of historical fiction by addressing many important issues pertaining to the complex cultural history of Latin America. As Carmen Boullosa’s narrator has stated in Llanto in reference to the gains and losses of the conquest, “Es imposible que entendamos: necesitamos entender” (It is impossible for us to understand: we must understand).2 Although this comprehension can never be fully achieved, the novels studied here represent an effort to understand the conquest as the origin of a Latin American transculturation born of the violent conflict between two worlds.

Notes

Introduction. Colonial Desire and the Anxiety of Identification in the New Latin American Novel of the Conquest 1. Translation mine. 2. The expression “imperial eyes” was introduced by Mary Louise Pratt in her book of that name. The phrase “rhetoric of empire” refers to David Spurr’s book, The Rhetoric of Empire, and also to the general concept of colonial discourse as discussed by Edward Said in Orientalism and Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture. The term colonial desire, in turn, comes from Robert Young’s book of that name. My use of the expression “reinventing the New World” refers to the phrase “the invention of America,” coined by Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman in his 1958 La invención de América, and revisited by Enrique Dussel in The Invention of the Americas and José Rabasa in Inventing America this term describes the way in which Europe, rather than “discovering” a new world, imposed preconceived notions on a preexisting landscape, its people, and their cultures, thus “inventing” the Americas through the creation of chronicles, histories, cosmologies, and cartographic and pictorial representations that projected European desires more than they depicted an existing reality. 3. Carmen Boullosa, Llanto: Novelas imposibles, 97– 98; emphasis and translation mine. 4. Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel, 22–25. In the traditional historical novel since Sir Walter Scott as defined in Georg Lukács’s Historical Novel, the invention of fictional characters who accompany well-known historical figures predominates. Menton notes, however, that in the new historical novel, famous historical figures themselves generally serve as protagonists. In the subcorpus of historical novels that rewrite the conquest, both patterns are evident. 5. Fernando Aínsa, “La reescritura de la historia en la nueva narrativa latinoamericana” and “La nueva novela histórica latinoamericana.” In reference to Aínsa’s category of novels that follow the historical record with painstaking attention to detail and documentation, some of the new historical novels blur the line between history and fiction by including bibliographies; for example, Homero Aridjis ends Memorias del Nuevo Mundo (Memories of the New World) with an extensive list of sources, and the back matter for Marisol Martín del Campo’s Amor y conquista: La novela de Malinalli mal llamada la Malinche (Love and conquest: The novel of Malinalli misnamed la Malinche) includes footnotes, maps, a chronology, a genealogy, a glossary, and a full bibliography. In spite of these appendices, however, as discussed below, Martín del Campo’s work is one of the more literary of the biographical novels on Hernán Cortés’s interpreter known as la Malinche. 6. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of Postmodernism; Hayden White, The Content of the Form; Viviana Plotnik, “Postmodernity, Orphanhood, and the Contemporary Spanish American Historical Novel,” 36. 7. Regarding the controversy over the terminology proposed to replace the traditional designation “discovery,” see Santiago Juan-Navarro and Theodore Robert Young’s introduction to their collection of essays, A Twice-Told Tale: Reinventing the Encounter in Iberian/Iberian American Literature and Film (11). During the quincentennial controversy, the term encounter

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gained ground over discovery; whereas discovery is a less than ideal term due to its implicit Eurocentrism, encounter, in turn, tends to have peaceful connotations, thus implicitly erasing the violence of the conquest. As my explicit purpose here is to contextualize the origins of Latin American identity in the violence of the conquest, I do not necessarily prefer encounter over discovery. 8. Many historical novels published through the 1970s take a traditional stance defending the conquest. Since the 1980s, novels have sporadically appeared in Spain, the United States, and Spanish America that continue to portray the conquistadors as heroes; the predominant trend in recent decades, however, has been to critique the conquest implicitly or explicitly. 9. The controversy surrounding the planning of quincentennial celebrations in the United States is examined in Stephen Summerhill and John Williams, Sinking Columbus: Contested History, Cultural Politics, and Mythmaking during the Quincentenary. Colorful titles such as Andrés Vásquez de Sola’s Me cago en el quinto centenario, which can be translated politely as “I defecate upon the quincentenary,” published in Spain in 1988, demonstrate that while events observing Columbus’s first voyage were being planned in the years prior to 1992, in those same years objections were already being raised. In Latin America, several collections of essays published in the years surrounding 1992—in particular El descubrimiento de América que todavía no fue (The discovery of America that didn’t happen yet, 1987) by Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano; a collection of essays by different authors compiled by Adolfo Colombres (1989) and two separate collections compiled by Leopoldo Zea (1989, 1991); a collection of essays published in 1989 under the title Nuestra América frente al V Centenario (Our America facing the quincentenary), by Uruguayan Mario Benedetti and other authors, and a similar volume published in 1990 under the title 1492–1992, by Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli and others; and Mexican Carlos Fuentes’s cultural history The Buried Mirror (1992)—all demonstrate concern over the representation of the conquest in the years leading to the quincentenary. 10. In 1995, Luis Leal and Rodolfo Cortina published an edition of Jicoténcal under the name of Cuban author Félix Varela, with an introduction offering compelling arguments, albeit no definitive proof, of Varela’s authorship. Ireneo Paz is the grandfather of Nobel laureate essayist and cultural critic Octavio Paz. Several nineteenth-century Mexican authors rewrite the conquest and colonization of central Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula in literary works such as those by José María Lafragua (1832), Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona (1862), Eligio Ancona (1866, 1870), and Juan Luis Tercero (1875). There are also a number of historical novels that represent the Inquisition in colonial Spanish America, such as those published in the mid-nineteenth century by Argentine Vicente Fidel López, Chilean Manuel Bilbao, and Mexicans Vicente Riva Palacio and Justo Sierra O’Reilly. Another thematic subcorpus consists of pirate novels, including those by Argentine Vicente Fidel López (1854); Colombian Soledad Acosta de Samper (1886); and Mexicans Justo Sierra O’Reilly (1841–1842), Eligio Ancona (1864), and Vicente Riva Palacio (1869), which are focused on the later colonial period. See Nina Gerassi-Navarro’s Pirate Novels for a recent study of this latter group of nineteenth-century novels. 11. As Octavio Paz notes in his foreword to Jacques Lafaye’s Quetzalcoátl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, however, the emphasis on Amerindians that began during the period leading up to independence was ambivalent: “The exaltation of the dead Indian past coexisted with hate and fear for the living Indian” (xvii). 12. Plotnik, “Postmodernity, Orphanhood,” 36. On this topic, see also Concha Meléndez, La novela indianista en Hispanoamérica (1832–1889). 13. On the role of decentering and marginality in Spanish American novels that rewrite the conquest, see also Plotnik, “Postmodernity, Orphanhood.” 14. The latter half of the twentieth century marked a boom in the Latin American historical novel in general. Some of the best-known historical novels dealing with figures and peri-

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ods in the centuries following the conquest include: Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces (1962), translated as Explosion in a Cathedral; Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo (I, the supreme, 1974); Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa’s La guerra del fin del mundo (The war of the end of the world, 1981); Mexican Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del imperio (News from the empire, 1987); and Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’s El general en su laberinto (The general in his labyrinth, 1989). 15. In his prologue to El reino de este mundo (The kingdom of this world, 1949), a novel set in colonial Haiti, Cuban Alejo Carpentier discusses Latin American history as a chronicle of lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real) and notes both the influence of literature on the colonial chronicles and the influence of the colonial chronicles on literature. Apart from oft-cited examples such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s references to the “caballeresca” literary tradition along the lines of Amadís de Gaula in his Historia de la conquista de la Nueva España, there is also the more general idea that the events of the conquest themselves had an air of literary invention (Noé Jitrik, “De la historia a la escritura,” 25). Regarding the issue of the literary nature of the chronicles, see Mercedes López Baralt, Icono y conquista: Guaman Poma de Ayala, 19 –25; Roberto González Echevarría, “Prólogo al coloquio”; Enrique Pupo-Walker, “Primeras imágenes de América: Notas para una lectura más fiel de nuestra historia”; and Viviana Plotnik, “Postmodernity, Orphanhood,” 41– 42. 16. Carlos Fuentes, Cristóbal Nonato, 13–14; Christopher Unborn, 6. 17. Although the focus here is on Latin America, in the years surrounding 1992, Spain also marked an increase in publication of historical novels recounting the conquest and colonization of the New World. Some of these are 1979 and 1988 novels by Luisa López Vergara, one 1991 novel for a juvenile audience and two 1992 novels by Vicente Muñoz Puelles, and novels by Juan Rey (1991), José María Merino (1992), José Manuel Fajardo (1992), Manuel Villar Raso (1992), Ramón Hernández (1992), and Serafín Fanjul (1994). As in Latin America, in Spain historical novels set in the colonies have continued to be published through the 1990s and into the new millennium, with novels by Rubén Caba (1996), Antonio Enrique (1998), José Manuel Fajardo (two in 1998), Carlos Laredo Verdejo (1999), and Pedro Piqueras (2000). Although some of these novels by Spanish authors are critical of the ideological enterprise of conquest, many retain the traditional view of the explorers and conquerors as heroic “great men” of history. The United States in recent decades has also seen the publication of a steady stream of novels in English engaging the theme of European exploration, conquest, and colonization in the Americas, including those by Jane Lewis Brandt (1979), Stephen Marlowe (1987), Newton Frohlich (1990), Anita McAndrews (1990), Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (1991), Alejandro Morales (1992), José Barreiro (1993), Guy Garcia (1994), Joseph Sánchez (1995), Miguel Encinias (1997), Lana Harrigan (1997, 1998), and Alfred Rodriguez (2001). These authors are from various backgrounds, and their creative works, a select few of which have been published in Spanish translation, reveal diverse ideological perspectives on the conquest. 18. Shorter Mexican theatrical pieces on the conquest include the dialogues Malinche y Carlota and Cuauhtémoc y Eulalia in Salvador Novo’s collection of short plays published in 1985; the fragments on Aztec emperor Moctezuma in Homero Aridjis’s Espectáculo del año dos mil (Spectacle of the year 2000, 1981); and the one-act play about Christopher Columbus in Aridjis’s Gran teatro del fin del mundo (Great theater of the end of the world, 1989). 19. In parallel fashion, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s 1991 Crown of Columbus meditates on the process of uncovering history through the story of a Native American woman academic who travels to the Caribbean after discovering some documents pertaining to Columbus in the Dartmouth archives. 20. A few of the narratives engaging the conquest that refer most explicitly to twentieth-

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century politics include Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975), Argentine Pedro Orgambide’s 1977 novel, Argentine Abel Posse’s Daimón (1978) and Los perros del paraíso (The dogs of paradise, 1983), Guatemalan Arturo Arias’s Jaguar en llamas (Jaguar in flames, 1989), and Argentine Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s El árbol de la gitana (The gypsy woman’s tree, 1997), among others. Mexican plays such as Carlos Fuentes’s Todos los gatos son pardos (All cats are gray, 1970)—written in the wake of the 1968 student massacre in the Plaza de Tlatelolco—and Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda’s La Malinche (2000) also have overt political references. Numerous other literary works set in the period of the conquest refer implicitly to contemporary politics. 21. In her preface to Argentine Libertad Demitrópulos’s 1981 novel translated as River of Sorrows, translator Mary Berg makes an explicit comparison between Demitrópulos’s historical project and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in late-twentieth-century Buenos Aires, in the sense that both call attention to the need to remember those whose names have been erased by official history (1–2). In her article “Eficacias del verosímil no realista: Dos novelas recientes de Juan José Saer,” María Luisa Bastos points out that Argentine Juan José Saer’s El entenado (The witness, 1983) comments implicitly on censorship in his treatment of a historical topic without reference to particular names and events. 22. The present study does not focus on this aspect, but the theme of contemporary politics in this corpus is a fascinating vein for research. Scholars who have investigated this subject in individual works include Seymour Menton in Latin America’s New Historical Novel, Elzbieta Sklodowska in La parodia en la nueva novela latinoamericana, and Mark Hernández in “Rewriting the Discovery and Conquest of the New World in the Mexican and Southern Cone Novel.” 23. See Menton’s Latin America’s New Historical Novel for a detailed analysis of Orgambide’s 1977 novel following the character Edmund Ziller as he witnesses several centuries of Latin American history, and Scliar’s 1983 novel tracing the history of Brazil through the story of Rafael Mendes and multiple generations of his forefathers, all sharing the same name. 24. In their respective studies, Concha Meléndez and Myron Lichtblau document Argentine literary works on Lucía Miranda, who Martiniano Leguizamón concludes is a legendary figure not based on historical fact. These creative works include novels and plays by Rosa Guerra (1860), Eduarda Mansilla de García (1860), Miguel Ortega (1864), Alejandro Rómulo Canepá (1918), and Hugo Wast (1929), most of which were published in Argentina. See Nancy Hanway, “Valuable White Property: Lucía Miranda and National Space,” for an analysis of the approaches to the legendary Lucía Miranda in the 1860 novels by Rosa Guerra and Eduarda Mansilla. Presumably, the legend’s failure to inspire renewed interest is due to the fact that it reflects the racial politics of the Argentine period of national formation. 25. Beginning with an early-seventeenth-century theatrical production by Spaniard Juan Pérez de Montalván, whose comedia was staged during the Monja Alférez’s lifetime, the interest in Catalina de Erauso continued to be demonstrated in literary representations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, primarily in the form of the plays and novels that are documented in Rima de Vallbona’s critical edition of Erauso’s autobiography. This remarkable figure has been the subject of novels published in France, Germany, England, and Spain. Latin American biographical novels on the ensign nun include those by Luis Ángel Rodríguez (1937), Raúl Morales-Álvarez (1938), Carlos Keller Reuff (1972), and Lucas Castillo Lara (1992), with no marked peak of Latin American literary interest in the quincentennial period. Erauso’s memoirs have also, however, inspired considerable scholarly interest in recent years due to their representation of female-to-male cross-dressing, as evidenced by a recent English edition with a foreword by Marjorie Garber as well as critical studies such as Sherry M. Velasco’s Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso.

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26. Because many waver between historical biography and fiction, the novels on la Malinche over the past several decades display varying degrees of literary value. Recent works on la Malinche by authors from around the world include those by U.S. author Jane Lewis Brandt (1979), published the following year in Spanish translation in Mexico City, Barcelona, and Bogotá; Mexicans Ramón Valdiosera (1982), and Otilia Meza (1985); Francophone writer Kim Lefevre (1994); Mexican Eugenia Imandt (1998); Colombian Flor Romero (1999); Spaniard Carlos Laredo Verdejo (1999); and Mexicans Marisol Martín del Campo (1999) and Delfino Carro Muñoz (2000). Of these, among the most sophisticated in literary terms is Martín del Campo’s Amor y conquista, which narrates the story of the conquest of Mexico from the first-person perspective of la Malinche herself, alternating with third-person narration and significantly with the firstperson voice of a fictional Aztec noblewoman sent to infiltrate the interpreter’s household for the purpose of spying on her. In this novel, the question of la Malinche’s ambivalent feelings about her role in the conquest are problematized to a greater extent than in other novels. There is also an entire corpus of dramatic works on la Malinche published during the second half of the twentieth century; they include works by Cuban Alejo Carpentier (1956); Mexicans Jesús Sotelo Inclán (1957), Celestino Gorostiza (1958), Sergio Magaña (1967), Willebaldo López (1980), Margarita Urueta (1985), and Carlos Fuentes (1991); and Spaniard Jerónimo López Mozo (1990). Notable as one of the most recent and innovative theatrical productions on la Malinche is Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda’s play that premiered in 1998 and was published in 2000. This play incorporates references to contemporary Mexican politics and includes innovative scenes such as la Malinche on trial and on the analyst’s couch. In the production diary published in the same volume as his La Malinche, Rascón Banda claims that the play was withdrawn from the theater under the pretense of economic reasons, but that the cancellation was really due to a form of indirect censorship (277). The most comprehensive sixteenth-century source on doña Marina is Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia de la conquista de la Nueva España, which recounts how she was sold into slavery by her mother who wished to protect the patrimony of younger children by a different father. The literary representation of la Malinche as a traitor can be traced as far back as the anonymous 1826 novel Jicoténcal and was synthesized in Octavio Paz’s essay “Los hijos de la Malinche” published in his 1950 El laberinto de la soledad (The labyrinth of solitude). This portrayal has been challenged in recent decades in Mexican and Chicana essays, poetry, short stories, and novels. Some of the better-known works that transform the image of la Malinche are the short story “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas” (1964), by Mexican author Elena Garro, formerly married to Octavio Paz; Mexican Rosario Castellanos’s poem “La Malinche” (1972) and play El eterno femenino (1975); the collection of essays edited by Margo Glantz; landmark essays by Chicana writers Adelaide del Castillo, Norma Alarcón, and Cherríe Moraga; and numerous Chicana poems compiled in the anthology Infinite Divisions, ed. Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana Rivero. An invaluable resource on the literary representation of this figure is Sandra Messinger Cypess’s study, La Malinche in Mexican Literature. 27. Virtually all of the authors engage this question on the level of emotion rather than on a political plane, offering Malinche’s love for Cortés as the explanation for her role in the conquest. The ideological perspectives these novels manifest vary greatly. One recent novel, by the Spaniard Carlos Laredo Verdejo, in defending Malinche, also justifies Cortés’s actions in the conquest of Mexico. 28. Novels, essays, and plays on the Mapuche–Spanish mestiza landowner doña Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, known as la Quintrala, include those by Domingo Izquierdo (1885), Antonio Bórquez y Solar (1914), Magdalena Petit (1932), Carlos Barella (1938), Guillermo Guzmán Valenzuela (1948), Raúl Montenegro Lillo (1955), Armando Arriaza (1963), Olga Arratia (1966), Lautaro Yankas (1974), Benjamín Morgado (1985), Mercedes Valdevieso (1991), and José M. Mínguez (1995). Most of this interest has been shown by authors pub-

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lishing in Chile and Argentina; one novel by a non-Chilean author is Mínguez’s Acuarela sangrienta (Bloody watercolor, 1995), published in Barcelona, a postmodern palimpsest of Magdalena Petit’s 1932 La Quintrala. The body of literary works on la Quintrala also includes essays, poems, and short stories. A primary source for these creative works is Benjamín Vicuña MacKenna’s 1877 history, which both transcribes and contributes to the legends and myths about the seventeenth-century Chilean woman. See Ivonne Cuadra’s study of la Quintrala in Chilean literature for an analysis of this figure as represented in history and fiction, as well as for a comparison between la Quintrala and la Malinche. 29. This romanticized image of Columbus was popularized by Washington Irving, who among his other tales and legends wrote The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. This nineteenth-century image of Columbus as a dreamer has subsequently become a staple of elementary-school curricula. 30. A counterexample can be found in Alfredo Turbay’s Oro para Pizarro: Novela incaica (Gold for Pizarro: Incan novel, 1983), which, in spite of the title, de-emphasizes Pizarro in order to focus primarily on indigenous protagonists. 31. Ibero-Suyo refers to the Spanish conquest of Tahuantinsuyo, a place-name in preHispanic Andean geography. The theme of Columbus’s rumored affair with the queen is addressed in several of the new historical novels. The better-known examples are Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s El arpa y la sombra (The harp and the shadow, 1979), in which fiction the rumor is confirmed; and Argentine Abel Posse’s Los perros del paraíso (The dogs of paradise, 1983), in which it is discussed but denied. 32. For an in-depth discussion of the representation of mestizaje in Solares’s novel, see Carrie Chorba’s “Metaphors of a Mestizo Mexico: New Narrative Rewritings of the Conquest.” As Chorba notes, because both Nen and Felipe die immediately after the rape, they produce no mestizo offspring. 33. The African Latin American is another invisible Other in this corpus, but in reference to the novels that represent the first moment of discovery and conquest, this absence can be explained in terms of the historical fact that the massive African slave trade had not yet been initiated. A few of the novels that deal with the later colonial period do examine the African presence in Latin America, although in many, characters of African descent remain notably absent. 34. Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, El árbol de la gitana, 109, 88. The fact that author and narrator share the name Alicia and the surnames Dujovne and Ortiz, as well as the fact that the narrator receives a grant to work on a book about her ancestors and the author was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, points to the novel as an autobiographical fiction. 35. Ibid., 106. 36. Regarding the narrator’s ambivalent identification as victim and victimizer, see ibid., 101–2, 110, 164 – 65, 278–80. 37. Plotnik, “Postmodernity, Orphanhood,” 39, 44. Octavio Paz wrote in 1950 in reference to the Mexican context, “La historia de México es la del hombre que busca su filiación, su origen” (The history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins) (El laberinto de la soledad, 18; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 20). Novels that explicitly address the theme of orphanhood include Argentine Libertad Demitrópulos’s 1981 novel translated as River of Sorrows and Brazilian Ana Miranda’s Desmundo (Unworld, 1996). 38. See George Yúdice, “We Are Not the World,” for a critique of efforts to translate and export the concept of multiculturalism from the United States to Latin America. 39. A literary reference to the segundones can be found in Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s 1997 novel, in which a son complains of his parents’ arrogant identification with ancestors who are conquistadors: “En primer lugar, el antepasado que se vino a las Indias habrá sido un segundón, un muerto de hambre, que si no, no se habría venido” (In the first place, the ancestor that

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came to the Indies must have been a segundón, dying of hunger, otherwise he wouldn’t have come) (El árbol de la gitana, 164). 40. The novels on Pizarro and his brothers include those by Austrian-Ecuadoran writer Diego Viga (1978), Spanish writer Luisa López Vergara (1979), Peruvian Alfredo Turbay (1983), Spaniard Juan Rey (1991), Argentine Rosa Boldori (1992), Peruvian Guillermo Niño de Guzmán (1995), and Peruvian-Argentine writer Hugo Müller (1998). As is the general trend, some of the novels written prior to 1980 portray Pizarro in a traditional vein as a hero, whereas novels published in more recent decades tend to decenter the historical figure by focusing on fictional marginal protagonists who are foot soldiers, scribes, or indigenous interpreters. This tendency to demythologize Pizarro can be traced at least as far back as British playwright Peter Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964). 41. Fernando Reati discusses the representation of Jewishness as a paradigmatic form of marginality in recent Latin American novels set in the period of the conquest (“Cristóbal Colón y el descentramiento del sujeto histórico: Colombina descubierta de Alicia Freilich,” 82). 42. As Judith Laikin Elkin outlines in The Jews of Latin America, most Latin Americans who can currently trace a Jewish lineage are from later waves of Ashkenazic or Eastern European immigration rather than colonial Sephardic immigration. 43. Novels set in the colonial period that emphasize Jewish presence include those by Cuban Reinaldo Arenas (1969), Argentine Pedro Orgambide (1977), Argentine Abel Posse (1978, 1983, 1992), Cuban Antonio Benítez Rojo (1979), Brazilian Moacyr Scliar (1983), Mexican Homero Aridjis (1985, 1988), Guatemalan Arturo Arias (1989), Uruguayan Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León (1990), Mexican Julián Meza (1991), Brazilians José Roberto Torero and Marcus Aurelius Pimenta (1997), and Ecuadoran Juan Cárdenas Miño (1998). 44. In Marrano as Metaphor, Elaine Marks uses the expression significant other to refer to the role of converted Jews in European society. For details on the social life of conversos in early modern Spain, see Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of “La Celestina.” As Amaryll Chanady observes, the tendency to look for otherness within Spain through the specific image of Jewishness has a long literary tradition; as she notes, this representation “problematizes the ‘Spanish’ identity of the colonizers” (“Introduction: Latin American Imagined Communities and the Postmodern Challenge,” xviii). 45. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied Cortés in the conquest of Mexico but did not write a chronicle until several decades later, records these admonitions in different combinations in his Historia de la conquista de la Nueva España (87, 104, 147, 164, 166). As René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini observe, what idolatry, cannibalism, and sodomy have in common is that they all correspond to what the European colonizers perceived as an inability to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate religious, dietary, and sexual objects (“Introduction: The Construction of a Colonial Imaginary: Columbus’s Signature,” 20–21). 46. On Jews accused of cannibalism, see Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation, 5; and Peter Hulme, “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene,” 15 –16. On the conflation of Jewishness and homosexuality in the European imaginary, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 172; Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 136 – 37, 142–66; Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History, 266–68; and Rudi Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750 –1918, 20. On the association of homosexuality and cannibalism, see David Bergman, “Cannibals and Queers: Man-Eating,” chap. 8 in Gaiety Transfigured, 139 – 62. On the topic of scapegoating, see René Girard, The Scapegoat and Violence and the Sacred. 47. See Hulme for a discussion of how a European identity was forged and community boundaries created through the purging of the Other from the heart of Europe (Colonial Encounters, 84 – 86).

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48. The Caribbean cultural movement of négritude discussed in Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is one example of how a characteristic traditionally used to oppress a group can be transformed into a symbol of empowerment. 49. Seymour Menton’s “Christopher Columbus and the New Historical Novel”; Raymond Souza’s “Columbus in the Novel of the Americas: Alejo Carpentier, Abel Posse, and Stephen Marlowe”; Roberto González Echevarría’s “Colón, Carpentier y los orígenes de la ficción latinoamericana”; Donald Shaw’s “Columbus and the Discovery in Carpentier and Posse”; and Juan José Barrientos’s “Colón, personaje novelesco” discuss Spanish American Columbus novels, while Ilan Stavans’s Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage examines the representation of Columbus in world literature. See Asela Rodríguez de Laguna’s article “Cristóbal Colón en el teatro hispánico” for a history of the representations of Columbus in theater of the Spanish-speaking world. As a reference source, see Moses Nagy, Christopher Columbus in World Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. See Chapter 4 of the present study for further development of the representation of Columbus as a converso in this corpus. The idea that Columbus may have had a Jewish background has been a constant in historical scholarship since the 1890s; although there is a persistent recurrence of this theme, it still makes up a fraction of the total scholarship on the figure. For more than a century, then, there has been a steady stream of books and articles on the topic of Columbus’s potential Jewish roots from a historical and genealogical perspective, through which various ethnic and national groups have attempted to claim the discoverer as their own. Curiously, however, this assertion of Columbus’s Semitic origins was not initially used by scholars who wished to underscore the role of Jews in the discovery; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was used more by scholars, such as Celso García de la Riega and Salvador de Madariaga, who wanted to associate Columbus not so much with the Jews, but rather with Spain. The affirmation that Columbus was Jewish served as a way of solidifying the assertion that he was really of Spanish rather than Italian descent, since his Judaic roots explained the fact that he was so vague about his origins. If he came from a family of Galician or Catalonian converted Jews, this information helps to explain his silence regarding his birthplace, and allowed the Spaniards to claim him as one of their own. Some of the documents upon which García de la Riega based his argument that Columbus was Galician were proved forged, however, and were officially repudiated by Spain’s Real Academia de la Historia in 1928, as noted by Simon Wiesenthal (Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus, 11). Over the past several decades, scholars have come to concede that the evidence of Columbus’s Genovese birth is incontrovertible, and claims that he is from any other national origin, which were once numerous and diverse—ranging from suggestions that he was French, English, Greek, Spanish, or Swiss—have dwindled. In more recent years, texts with primarily historical interest have tended less toward speculation about Columbus’s roots and more toward the development of the idea that various Jews and conversos were instrumental in the discovery of the Americas. In the camp of fiction, however, the idea of Columbus as a converso continues to exercise a strong hold on the literary imagination. 50. U.S. novels such as Stephen Marlowe’s Memoirs of Christopher Columbus (1987), Newton Frohlich’s 1492: Christopher Columbus (1990), and Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s Crown of Columbus (1991) also represent Columbus as a converted Jew. He is also portrayed as being of Jewish ancestry in Latin American novels in which he plays only a minor role, such as Brazilian Moacyr Scliar’s 1983 novel and Argentine Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s 1997 autobiographical fiction, in each of which an ancestor of the protagonist meets Columbus, who in both cases is searching for a new homeland where Jews will be free from persecution. 51. As with texts on la Malinche, some of the works on Gonzalo Guerrero are not clearly literary, as they blur the line between fiction and historical biography; these include works by

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Mexicans Mario Aguirre Rosas (1975), Eugenio Aguirre (1980), Otilia Meza (1994), and Carlos Villa Roiz (1995). For an analysis of the representation of Gonzalo Guerrero in Mexican culture, see Roseanna Mueller, “From Cult to Comics: The Representation of Gonzalo Guerrero as a Cultural Hero in Mexican Popular Culture.” The literary works on such well-known figures as Columbus, Pizarro, and Lope de Aguirre— like those on la Malinche, la Quintrala, and the Monja Alférez—are so extensive as to each form an entire subcorpus that merits separate study, and thus will not be dealt with in the present analysis. The novels on Lope de Aguirre include those by Venezuelans Arturo Uslar Pietri (1947) and Miguel Otero Silva (1979), Argentines Abel Posse (1978) and Jorge Ernesto Funes (1984), and Peruvian Félix Álvarez Saenz (1986). For a recent analysis of the literary representation of the renegade conquistador, see Bart L. Lewis, “‘This Miraculous Lie’: Lope de Aguirre and the Search for El Dorado in the Latin American Historical Novel.” 52. See Michel de Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage ‘I.’ ” 53. Girard discusses the notions of both the “evil twin” and the “monstrous double” in Violence and the Sacred (56 – 64, 159 – 63). Salient literary examples of apprehension of the double and the “Other within” include Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, whereas Spanish American renditions on this theme include Argentine Julio Cortázar’s “Una flor amarilla” (A yellow flower) and Jorge Luis Borges’s “El otro” (The other). In addition to horror novels and films about Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, and vampires, films that deal with twins, doubles, fear of the Other, and fear of being incorporated by an alien force include The Thing (1951 and 1982), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978), The Blob (1958 and 1988), The Fly (1958 and 1986), Dead Ringer (1964), Dead Ringers (1988), Single White Female (1992), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Being John Malkovich (1999). The fact that films of this type continue to be made and remade is an indication of the enduring nature of anxieties about the Other and the “Other within.” 54. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage.” 55. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew; Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, and Madness and Civilization. 56. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Homi Bhabha draws heavily upon Fanon’s theories in The Location of Culture. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. 57. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 44, 67. 58. Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other, 11; Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 77. For a thorough study of metaphors of incorporation in the Western imagination, see Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism. 59. Young, Colonial Desire, 19. 60. Antonio Vera León, “Hacer hablar: La transcripción testimonial”; Rolena Adorno, “El sujeto colonial y la construcción cultural de la alteridad.” See also Chanady, “Introduction.” 61. José Piedra, “Loving Columbus,” 245 – 46. 62. As psychoanalysts note, in the premirror stage a baby cannot differentiate its body from its mother’s. 63. Although the individual works in the corpus of new historical novels that rewrite the conquest have attracted critical attention, it has mostly been in the form of dissertations and articles, rather than book-length scholarly monographs. Regarding the larger corpus of the new historical novel are the books by Seymour Menton, Juan José Barrientos, and María Cristina Pons, articles by Fernando Aínsa, the critical anthology edited by Daniel Balderston, and a volume on history and fiction compiled by Roberto González Echevarría. While the aforementioned scholarly texts do not focus exclusively on the novels that represent the conquest,

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dissertations by Viviana Plotnik, Graciela Michelotti-Cristóbal, José Leandro Urbina, Mark Hernández, Carrie Chorba, and Victoria Eugenia Campos examine different combinations of new Latin American historical novels set in the period of the conquest, as do articles by Juan José Barrientos, Raymond Souza, Fernando Reati, Seymour Menton, Roberto González Echevarría, Elzbieta Sklodowska, and Donald Shaw. There are also several critical anthologies that include articles on this corpus, such as the volumes edited by Anna Housková and Martin Prochazka and by Julio Ortega and José Amor y Vásquez, and two collections edited by Karl Kohut. Most recently published is a 2001 critical anthology edited by Santiago JuanNavarro and Theodore Robert Young that features a wealth of articles examining the representation of the conquest of the Americas in Iberian and Iberian-American literature and film. 64. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban counterpoint); Ángel Rama, La transculturación narrativa; Antonio Cornejo Polar, Escribir en el aire; Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas (Hybrid cultures). As William Rowe and Vivian Schelling observe in reference to Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica, “As is usual in theories where race is substituted for culture, there is a hidden hierarchy, and the vision of integration depends on white creole strata for its accomplishment, while the touchstone of the civilized continues to be Europe” (Memory and Modernity, 161). Along similar lines, Amaryll Chanady observes, “Many Latin American discourses of identity emphasizing the mestizo nature of the continent’s culture merely subscribe to another form of monolithic ideology in which the problem of the marginalized Other can be solved by simple integration within dominant cultural, political, economic, and discursive practices” (“Introduction,” xvi). 65. See Plotnik, “Postmodernity, Orphanhood,” 39, on the representation of characters who are pícaros and orphans in Spanish American novels set in the period of conquest. 66. Ignacio Solares, Nen, la inútil, 133. As this novel has not been translated to English, all translations are mine. 67. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 78–79; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 87. 68. Solares, Nen, la inútil, 133 – 34; emphasis mine. 69. Chorba discusses this rape and its relevance to the representations of mestizaje in Solares’s novel at length in her “Metaphors of a Mestizo Mexico.” 70. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 70. The concepts of recognition and disavowal have their origin in Freud’s description of the moment in which a child sees his mother’s lack of phallus and “disavows” it, reconstructing in his mind a “phallic mother.” In his essay “Fetishism,” for example, Freud explains fetishes as totemic reminders of this critical moment in the child’s development. This simultaneous recognition and disavowal, in turn, are closely related to what contemporary psychoanalysts call denial, that is, the state of knowing something in the subconscious mind but denying awareness of it in the conscious mind. 71. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 78; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 87; Alfonso Reyes, Simpatías y diferencias, 2:265 – 66, translation mine. In this part of his 1922 letter, Reyes appears to be paraphrasing an idea from a letter Antonio Mediz Bolio had previously written to him. Carmen Boullosa, Cielos de la tierra, 67–68. 72. Plotnik develops the notion that Spanish American novels rewriting the conquest commit a symbolic form of parricide. She begins her essay on the contemporary Spanish American historical novel with an epigraph from H. A. Murena describing Latin America’s “original sin” as the cultural-historical parricide of Europe (“Postmodernity, Orphanhood,” 36). 73. Augusto Roa Bastos, Vigilia del almirante, 11–12; emphasis mine. As the novel has not been translated into English, the translations following the quotations are mine. 74. Roa Bastos, Vigilia del almirante, 11; Antônio Torres, Meu querido canibal, 9, translation mine. 75. Martín del Campo, Amor y conquista, 11; translation mine.

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76. Alfonso Reyes, La X en la frente (Algunas páginas sobre México), 21, translation mine. In a 1979 New York Times book review, Jorge Luis Borges implicitly refers to Kafka’s micronarrative “The Wish to Be a Red Indian” in a critique of Mexican identification with indigenous peoples: “I dislike Mexico and the Mexicans. They are so nationalistic. And they hate the Spanish. . . . They are just playing—at being nationalistic. But what they like specially is playing at being red Indians” (cited in an epigraph to Gustavo Sainz, Fantasmas aztecas, 11). 77. Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference, x. 78. Solares, Nen, la inútil, 137; Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal, Pepe Botellas, 88, translation mine. Álvarez Gardeazábal’s title refers to Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, who acquired the nickname “Pepe Botellas” (Pepe Bottles) due to his drinking habit. The novel uses the image of the brother whom Napoléon sent to rule Spain from 1808 to 1813 as a point of departure for examining the questions of exile and foreign rule. 79. Sainz’s epigraph refers to Oscar Wilde’s 1891 Intentions (Fantasmas aztecas, 11). Roa Bastos, Vigilia del almirante, 12. 80. Bill Ashcroft et al. introduce “the empire writes back” in their book of that name. The question “Can the subaltern speak?” is posed and answered in the negative by Gayatri Spivak. Miguel León-Portilla’s compilation with the title Visión de los vencidos (Vision of the vanquished, originally published in 1959), as well as his subsequent volume El reverso de la conquista (The reverse of the conquest) gather documentary material from sources such as the codices in order to salvage silenced indigenous voices on the topic of the conquest. LeónPortilla’s compilations have seen many editions over the past several decades and have been translated into numerous languages. 1. Loving Cannibalism: Cannibalism and Colonial Desire in Juan José Saer’s El entenado 1. To a greater extent than any of the novels examined in the following chapters, Saer’s El entenado has been the subject of numerous critical articles, including those by Arcadio DíazQuiñones, Rita Gnutzmann, Amaryll Chanady, María Cristina Pons, Susana Beatriz Cella, Gabriel Riera, María Luisa Bastos, Evelia Romano Thuesen, and Rita de Grandis, and chapters of the books by María Cristina Pons and Amy Fass Emery. Translations are all from Margaret Jull Costa’s English version titled The Witness, including Saer’s epigraph cited here. In this case, the use of the word cannibal is anachronistic, since the term did not exist at the time Herodotus was writing. Indeed, in the original Greek, the text did not even read “Anthropophagoi,” meaning Human-eaters, but “Androphagoi,” specifically “Man-eaters,” as is apparent in the Spanish translation cited by Saer. 2. Jeremy MacClancy, Consuming Culture, 178. 3. Hulme, “Introduction,” 3; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 111. In Totem and Taboo, and later elaborated in Moses and Monotheism, Freud proposes his own creation myth to explain the origins of culture, which consists of a fantasy of the “primal horde” who killed and ate their father in order to acquire access to his wives and power. 4. Laurence Goldman, “From Pot to Polemic: Uses and Abuses of Cannibalism,” 1. 5. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 163. Before rescuing Friday from the cannibals who sought to make him their victim, Robinson Crusoe foresees this event in a dream and numerous daytime reveries. 6. In an epigraph to The Man-Eating Myth, Arens cites eminent anthropologist E. E. EvansPritchard as saying that Europeans have a morbid interest in cannibalism and tend to believe any tale told them on the subject (1). Herman Melville anticipates Arens’s skepticism, when his narrator in Typee says,

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It is a singular fact, that in all our accounts of cannibal tribes we have seldom received the testimony of an eyewitness to the revolting practice. The horrible conclusion has almost always been derived either from the second-hand evidence of Europeans, or else from the admissions of the savages themselves, after they have in some degree become civilised. The Polynesians are aware of the detestation in which Europeans hold this custom, and therefore invariably deny its existence, and, with the craft peculiar to savages, endeavor to conceal every trace of it. (183–84)

Notably, the narrator of Typee himself never witnesses cannibalism firsthand. 7. A little more than a month after arriving in the Caribbean, Columbus records on November 23, 1492, “They said that this land was very extensive and that in it were people who had one eye in the forehead, and others whom they called ‘Canibals.’ Of these last, they showed great fear . . . because those people ate them and because they are very warlike” (Cecil Jane, The Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 180). The alleged belligerent and anthropophagous qualities of the Caribs are still being debated; the idea of men with eyes in their foreheads is evidence, however, of the Europeans’ limited linguistic ability and tendency to impose preconceived notions when they did not understand. Some of the earliest documents reporting cannibalism among the Caribs can be found in Columbus’s journal, which has been passed down to us through the transcription of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (see Jane’s Voyages; for an analysis of the transcription process, see Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus); a letter by Dr. Diego Álvarez Chanca, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage (translated in Cecil Jane, The Four Voyages of Columbus, 20– 73); and a letter by Nicolò Syllacio based on letters from a friend who had been on Columbus’s second voyage (Samuel Eliot Morison, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 229 – 45). Both Chanca and Syllacio claim that the Caribs castrated boy captives and fattened them for the kill. Michele de Cuneo, whose letter from Columbus’s second voyage is also transcribed by Morison, refers to the Caribs also but elaborates on the theme of sodomy rather than anthropophagy. All three of these letter writers, Chanca, de Cuneo, and Syllacio, use these markers of difference—cannibalism, sodomy—to distinguish between “indios” and Caribs with positive and negative value judgments attached to each group, respectively. Widely read in Europe from the first decade of the sixteenth century were the writings of Amerigo Vespucci, as well as those of Peter Martyr, both of which elaborate on anthropophagy in the Americas. As Frank Lestringant observes in his book Cannibals, the term cannibal soon loses its particular geographical association with the Caribbean and comes to more generally refer to anthropophagi. In The First Voyage around the World, Antonio Pigafetta, who embarked in 1519 with Magellan on the first voyage to circumnavigate the globe (which returned without Magellan in 1522), applies the term to South America, and records the rumor that explorer Juan de Solís and his men were eaten by cannibals in the Río de la Plata region in the 1515 –1516 voyage that inspired Saer’s El entenado (13). 8. Columbus’s diary reveals that virtually from the first moment of his arrival in the Caribbean, he was beginning to think of ways to profit from trading the indigenous peoples as slaves. In his journal on October 12, 1492, the very day of the first landfall, he spoke of what he understood to be the indigenous practice of slavery and added, “They should be good servants and of quick intelligence” ( Jane, Voyages, 149). In later letters and diary entries, Columbus further develops the idea of a slave trade, going so far as to suggest prices for slaves. This posed an ethical dilemma for the Spanish crown, since upon arriving, the explorers and conquistadors began to claim the lands in the name of Spain, making the Amerindians royal subjects, who as such should be protected from enslavement. See Michael Palencia-Roth’s “Cannibal Law of 1503” for a detailed examination of the document signed by Queen Isabel that gave permission to enslave those Amerindians who resisted evangelization and colonization and persisted in the practices of idolatry and cannibalism. Philip Boucher cites the dates of

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later edicts reaffirming this law in 1511, 1525, 1547, and 1569 (Cannibal Encounters, 16). See Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters for a detailed analysis of the history of the term cannibal (15 –16); quote on 83. 9. Talal Asad, introduction to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, 14–15. Conscious of the ethnocentric bias of anthropology, over the past decades, cultural critics have turned the gaze of anthropology upon ethnographers themselves, manifested in the sort of metaethnography practiced by George Marcus and Michael Fischer in Anthropology as Cultural Critique and the contributors to James Clifford and George Marcus’s Writing Culture. Scholars such as these were among the first social scientists to turn their scientific gaze back upon themselves and examine the very basis of their discipline through meta-ethnographic writing. Hulme, “Introduction,” 7. 10. Hulme, “Introduction,” 9; Root, Cannibal Culture, 15; Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 5; Hulme, “Introduction,” 5. Native American writer Jack D. Forbes’s suggestive title Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism underscores the connection between cannibalism and colonialism. Goldman observes, “The literary history reveals the manner in which cannibal claims were embedded within colonial myths variously employed to rationalize subjugation, land aggrandisement, and forms of marginalization” (“From Pot to Polemic,” 4). Cannibalism has also been studied as a metaphor for the “eat or be eaten” world of capitalism and economic neocolonialism, which is seen as a form of “consumer cannibalism.” On this topic, see Root, Cannibal Culture; John Kraniauskas, “Cronos and the Political Economy of Vampirism”; Jerry Phillips, “Cannibalism qua Capitalism”; Maggie Kilgour, “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time”; and Crystal Bartolovich, “Consumerism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism.” 11. On his return voyage, the crew and passengers on Léry’s ship suffered hunger such that if they had not been rescued precisely when they had, the captain had determined that they would draw lots the next day to determine who should be sacrificed for the purpose of survival cannibalism (History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, 214). Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” 85, 77. Montaigne ends his essay with a sarcastic comment calling attention to Eurocentrism: “But wait! They don’t wear trousers” (“Of Cannibals,” 92). In reference to Montaigne’s cultural relativism, Goldman observes how imputations of cannibalism serve as mirrors of the self: “Cannibalism was at once a prism that refracts predications of otherness as well as a practice through which the self is situated vis-à-vis humanity at large” (“From Pot to Polemic,” 2). Montaigne describes the warfare of the Tupi as “wholly noble and generous” and based on valor, because “They are not fighting for the conquest of new lands, [and] they have no wish to enlarge their boundaries” (“Of Cannibals,” 86). Thus, he critiques European conquest by contrasting it with what he considers more justifiable indigenous practices. See Certeau’s “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’ ” for a detailed analysis of Montaigne’s essay. 12. Regarding the type of revisionist practice that would reinterpret the history of the world according to Western ethics, Reay Tannahill observes: To deny the existence of, for example, human sacrifice and/or cannibalism in pre-Columbian America is simply another way of reaffirming the superiority of Western Christian morality. By rejecting, on behalf of others, what offends against their own ingrained beliefs, the revisionists are also rejecting the early Americans’ entitlement to have minds of their own and a religious code that regarded human sacrifice and/or cannibalism not as the ultimate evil but as a means of saving the world from destruction. (Flesh and Blood, 105)

Arens has indeed been accused of revisionism, primarily by scholars who claim that he does deny that ritual cannibalism ever existed anywhere in the world. 13. Although some scholars simply misread Arens, attributing to him an outright denial of the existence of cannibalism, others read him carefully and engage him on his own terms. For

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example, Don Gardner deconstructs The Man-Eating Myth using its own methodology. Whereas Arens points out that accusations of cannibalism reveal the ethnocentrism of Western culture, Gardner signals that in spite of his ostensibly disinterested rhetoric, Arens falls prey to this same ethnocentrism by assigning an implicitly negative value to anthropophagy, judging evidence unevenly based on this bias, and ultimately privileging Western eyewitness accounts as the only potentially legitimate evidence of the practice since when Arens says he has found no reliable firsthand accounts of cannibalism, he is referring only to accounts by Westerners (“Anthropology, Myth, and the Subtle Ways of Ethnocentrism,” 28–29, 36–45). Evidence of Arens’s implicitly negative judgment can be found in a comment he made regarding archaeologists who are looking for evidence of cannibalism among the Anasazi of what is now the U.S. Southwest; Christy Turner cites Arens as admonishing archaeologists to turn their work toward another aspect of Native American culture (Man Corn, 8). When Arens says, then, that “I think we should leave the subject alone and concentrate on something more positive in the history of Native Americans than the possibility that they’re actually eating each other,” he is implicitly assigning a negative cultural value to anthropophagy (quoted in Lawrence Osborne, “Does Man Eat Man?” 34). 14. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, 9. Osborne summarizes the controversy in “Does Man Eat Man?” See Hulme, “Introduction,” 7– 8, for a general overview of objections raised to The Man-Eating Myth and pp. 10 –14 for a detailed analysis of the controversy that sparked when Arens was accused of revisionist history equated with denying the reality of the Holocaust. Equally controversial, but for precisely the opposite reason, is Turner’s Man Corn, which is based on research conducted by himself and his late wife, Jacqueline. Turner claims that the Anasazi, ancient ancestors of the Pueblo cultures of what is now the southwestern United States, practiced cannibalism at certain times in their history. This study, based on analysis of patterns of damage to human bones, has inspired controversy in part due to the reigning cultural presumption that the Anasazi were a peaceful people. On a discursive level, I would add that Man Corn also implicitly assigns a negative value judgment to cannibalism, by interpreting the archaeological data in such a way as to disassociate the Anasazi, widely thought to be a peaceful people, from the origins of the practice; Turner does so by attributing the introduction in this region of what he characterizes as a “pathological” behavior instead to the Mesoamericans, whom he anachronistically refers to as “Mexicans.” Much as Arens can be said to fall prey to the very ethnocentrism he sets out to combat, Turner can be said to reveal certain cultural prejudices in his interpretive assertion that cannibalism was brought to what is now the U.S. Southwest by what he refers to as “immigrants from Mexico” (484). 15. Although he himself is never an eyewitness to cannibalism, the narrator of Melville’s Typee develops opinions on the subject that anticipate the skepticism of many contemporary scholars: In truth, so horrific and improbable are these accounts, that many sensible and well-informed people will not believe that any cannibals exist . . . [w]hile others, implicitly crediting the most extravagant fictions, firmly believe that there are people in the world with tastes so depraved, that they would infinitely prefer a single mouthful of material humanity to a good dinner of roast beef and plum pudding. But here, Truth, who loves to be centrally located, is again found between the two extremes; for cannibalism to a certain moderate extent is practised among several of the primitive tribes in the Pacific, but it is upon the bodies of slain enemies alone. (160)

16. H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 41, 42; emphasis mine. The author of the earliest comprehensive book in English on the subject of cannibalism and human sacrifice, Garry Hogg, naively claims that missionary accounts can be considered the most reliable: “Among the countless reports that accumulated during the nine-

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teenth century, the least suspect, of course, were those from missionaries in the field” (Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, 23). Writing during the mid-twentieth century and before the recent wave of self-criticism on the part of ethnographers, Hogg fails to take into account the fact that missionaries had their own ideological agenda that would inevitably influence their writings. Jeremy MacClancy comments on how missionaries capitalized on the sensational connotations of mentioning the practice; regarding accounts of cannibalism, he says: “Their popularity tells us more about Western sensationalism than about the manners of non-European peoples. As astute missionaries knew, putting ‘cannibal’ in the title of their books widened their market and increased sales or donations from fervent Christians” (Consuming Culture, 168). As Gananath Obeyesekere notes, there was a “proliferation of travel adventures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of which contained the word ‘cannibal’ . . . in the title, even when cannibalism never appeared in their contents” (“Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Fiji: Seamen’s Yarns and the Ethnographic Imagination,” 80). 17. Obeyesekere notes that “the overwhelming number of cases of imputed cannibalism were products of the European fantasy” (“Cannibal Feasts,” 64). Marshall Sahlins, “Raw Women, Cooked Men, and Other ‘Great Things’ of the Fiji Islands,” 88. The contributors to Francis Barker et al.’s Cannibalism and the Colonial World and Laurence Goldman’s Anthropology of Cannibalism delve deeply into the implications of the rhetoric on cannibalism to determine what it says about both Westerners and non-Westerners who employ this discourse. Although the ostensible purpose of their Ethnography of Cannibalism is to refute Arens’s claims, editors Donald Tuzin and Paula Brown also recognize that “Without affirming this part of Arens’s thesis [their interpretation that Arens has denied outright the existence of ritual cannibalism], one might yet admit the plausibility—at least in certain instances—of the author’s suggestion that the common attribution of cannibalism is a rhetorical device used ideologically by one group to assert its moral superiority over another” (“Editors’ Preface,” 3). In her essay in the same collection, Shirley Lindenbaum admits that “an adequate anthropological analysis goes beyond the matter of whether or not cannibalism actually occurs, and requires an investigation of the symbolic or ideological dimensions of reported acts or beliefs” (“Cannibalism: Symbolic Production and Consumption,” 96). 18. Hans Askenasy, Cannibalism: From Sacrifice to Survival, 13, 229; William Arens, “Rethinking Anthropophagy,” 40; Askenasy, Cannibalism, 52. 19. Hulme, “Introduction,” 20. Michael Pickering, “Consuming Doubts: What Some People Ate? Or What Some People Swallowed?” 56. Melville’s narrator repeats this idea several times, with variations such as “They likewise dwelt upon the cannibal propensities of the Happars, a subject which they were perfectly aware could not fail to alarm us; while at the same time they earnestly disclaimed all participation in so horrid a custom” (Typee, 83). 20. Alfred St. Johnston, Camping among Cannibals, 230. 21. W. Cooke Taylor, Natural History of Society in the Barbarous and Civilized State, 1:129– 30; emphasis mine. 22. Hulme, “Introduction,” 6. 23. William Endicott, Wrecked among Cannibals in the Fijis: A Narrative of Shipwreck and Adventure in the South Seas, 56. In his essay “Cannibal Feasts,” Obeyesekere argues convincingly that Endicott’s tale of witnessing cannibalism is a seaman’s yarn. Melville, Typee, 103, 187. In reference to another literary example, that of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Lestringant observes, “The fearful sight of these butchered bodies seems to hold a morbid attraction for the exiled Puritan. The hatred of the flesh which he feels, on both the erotic and the alimentary level, is equalled only by his obsession with the latter” (Cannibals, 140). 24. James Cook, The Journals of Captain Cook, 319; all misspellings in original. Cook’s European crewmen reacted with disgust to this scene, as did the Tahitians among them, cannibalism apparently being a practice equally alien to them. This incident, on his second voyage

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in 1773, was not Cook’s first encounter with Maori anthropophagy. A few years earlier, Cook had been in New Zealand on his first voyage and had seen evidence of cannibalism after the fact. To confirm his suspicions, he tested a Maori by claiming that the human arm bone he was holding was that of a dog, which the Maori denied, “and to convence us that they had eat the flesh he took hold of the flesh of his own arm with his teeth and made shew of eating” (102). For further confirmation, “Mr. Banks got from one of them a bone of the fore arm much in the same state as the one before mention’d and to shew us that they had eat the flesh they bit a[nd] naw’d the bone and draw’d it thro’ their mouth and this in such a manner as plainly shew’d that the flesh was to them a dainty bit” (102– 3). This performance with the bones—which the captain later admits was merely circumstantial evidence—clearly adds to Cook’s curiosity to witness cannibalism firsthand on his second voyage. 25. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, 138, 139. In Melville’s Typee, when the narrator’s companion gestures to communicate the idea of eating, he frightens two natives, “till I verily believe the poor creatures took us for a couple of white cannibals who were about to make a meal of them” (52). 26. Obeyesekere, Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 174, emphasis mine; William Wormsley, The White Man Will Eat You! 77. Alan Rumsey cites similar examples of children being frightened into obedience by threats that white cannibals would eat them (“White Man as Cannibal”). 27. Obeyesekere, Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 139. In his introduction to Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Hulme observes that since the time of Columbus’s second voyage, regarding which Dr. Diego Álvarez Chanca wrote a letter describing human remains in a Carib village, the simple presence of human bones has been perceived by Westerners as sufficient evidence of a cannibal feast: “[T]he primal scene of ‘cannibalism’ as ‘witnessed’ by Westerners is of its aftermath rather than its 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). 28. Wormsley, White Man Will Eat You! 81. Rumsey records a New Guinean’s perspective on a context in which a native had stolen a handkerchief that had been hung out to dry, to which the Australian authorities responded swiftly and forcefully “with their guns and dogs. Some men tried to fight them, and we saw two of our men get killed. We had said the red men [white men] were going to eat us, and now it looked as if they were going to do just that. We thought about the men we had seen get killed and didn’t know what to make of it. . . . But as for the red men, we had said they were cannibals, and now they had indeed started killing people” (“White Man as Cannibal,” 109). This passage makes it clear that the New Guinean’s perspective highlights the logical connection between colonialism and cannibalism. Along similar lines, but referring to the African slave trade, Hulme notes that “the fear of cannibalism ran both ways, with Africans often convinced that whites were buying them in order to eat them” (“Introduction,” 35). 29. Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form, 135; Sidney Langford Hinde, The Fall of the Congo Arabs, 66; Obeyesekere, “Cannibal Feasts,” 63. This idea that native peoples can use rumors of cannibalism to manipulate the movements of Europeans is present as early as the version of the journal of Columbus’s third voyage handed down to us through his son Fernando Colón and Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas: “They said, as far as they could understand by signs, that there were in that district certain islands, where there was much of that gold, but that the inhabitants were Cannibals, and the admiral says here that this word ‘Cannibal’ all there regarded as a reason for enmity, or, perhaps, they used it because they did not wish the Christians to go there” (cited in Jane, Voyages, 280). 30. In characterizing cannibalism as “something good to think about” (The Man-Eating Myth, 8), Arens draws upon the notion set forth in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classic treatise The Raw and the Cooked that humans choose their foods not on the basis of what is “good to eat” but rather on the basis of what is “good to think.”

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31. Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 3 –19. In his essay “The White Man as Cannibal in the New Guinea Highlands,” Alan Rumsey says that cannibal fantasies can serve as “a spectre that is capable of revealing latent possibilities within ourselves, for better or worse” (117). 32. Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger, 27. 33. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 125. 34. MacClancy, Consuming Culture, 168. 35. Evelia Romano Thuesen, María Luisa Bastos, Rita de Grandis, Amy Fass Emery, and María Cristina Pons each deal extensively with the ill-fated Juan de Solís expedition that forms the historical background for Saer’s El entenado. 36. The picaresque aspect of Saer’s novel is mentioned in several of the critical articles, including those by María Cristina Pons and Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, and in Pons’s chapter on Saer’s novel in Memorias del olvido. Plotnik observes that protagonists who are pícaros are common in the corpus of Spanish American novels set in the period of conquest (“Postmodernity, Orphanhood,” 39). See Claudio Guillén’s “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque” for a list of characteristics of the genre. The picaresque genre is examined in further detail in Chapter 5 of the present study. 37. None of the European or Amerindian characters in the novel have proper names, with a single exception: Padre Quesada, the protagonist’s confessor after he returns to Europe, who presumably is granted a name because he is the one person who really seems to understand the narrator. 38. B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, xxxix, 54. See Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality. 39. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 101; Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 286; Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger, 13. Although Martin does not consider the term homosocial useful in describing male friendships in Melville, in Between Men, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick finds that by broadening the term to refer in a more general sense to how males bond economically and emotionally within patriarchy, the notion of the homosocial can apply to many literary situations. In the context of the Latin American novel of conquest, Sedgwick’s theory is especially applicable to Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán, as Chapter 3 of the present study will demonstrate. 40. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 604; Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 86 – 88; Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 3. In their research on rural and urban Mexico, respectively, Guillermo Núñez Noriega and Matthew Gutmann document the testimony of male prostitutes who do not consider themselves homosexual (Núñez Noriega, Sexo entre varones, 209–10; Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City, 127–28). 41. K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 108. Regarding the hierarchical model of intermale sexual relations, see Chapter 3 of the present study. 42. Regarding penetration as an abdication of male privilege, see David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, 149 – 50; Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 212. 43. María Cristina Pons notes the parallels between Saer’s fictionalized narrator and historical chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in that both are writing as eyewitnesses but at a distance of many decades and from a marginal perspective, and both contest official versions of history (“The Cannibalism of History,” 166 – 67). 44. In Melville’s Typee, the narrator is alternately consoled and confused by the “excess of deferential kindness” that the Typee continually demonstrate toward him, although he can imagine no service he can provide them, other than ultimately as a meal (78). 45. See Tannahill, Flesh and Blood; and Askenasy, Cannibalism, for numerous examples of famine and survival cannibalism. 46. Even some of the earliest writers on the subject recognize that human flesh is never

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merely another foodstuff; for example, Antonio Pigafetta, who documented the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1519–1522, referring to Brazilian natives, says, “They eat the human flesh of their enemies, not because it is good, but because it is a certain established custom” (First Voyage, 10). Sanday observes that cannibalism always has “cultural connotations beyond gustatory considerations”; for example, treating an enemy as food can be the ultimate symbol of domination (Divine Hunger, 6). Arens refers to the recategorization of ritual practices as a matter of change in “intellectual tastes” (“Rethinking Anthropophagy,” 46). 47. Jean de Léry, writing in the midst of the struggle between the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter Reformation, draws an analogy between cannibalism and the Christian sacrifice of the Eucharist (History of a Voyage, 40 – 41). For a discussion of transubstantiation, the theological idea that the host literally becomes Christ’s body, see Tannahill, Flesh and Blood, 77– 82; and Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 77–85. 48. Thomas Ernst, “Onabasulu Cannibalism and the Moral Agents of Misfortune,” 148– 49; Goldman, “From Pot to Polemic,” 5. 49. Other recent Latin American literary representations of cannibalism in the period of conquest include the Brazilian novels Terra Papagalli (1997), by José Roberto Torero and Marcus Aurelius Pimenta; Meu querido canibal (2000), by Antônio Torres; and Domingos Vera Cruz (memórias de um antropófago lisboense no Brasil) (2000), by Glauco Ortolano. In Terra Papagalli, as in Saer’s El entenado, cannibalism does appear as a central cultural characteristic of the tribe among whom a group of Portuguese sailors land. Meu querido canibal, on the other hand, capitalizes on the sensationalism with the title “My Dear Cannibal,” but in the novel itself de-emphasizes this aspect and critically examines the culture that labels indigenous peoples as different and reads difference as inferior. Domingos Vera Cruz, in turn, uses the notion of anthropophagy both literally and figuratively. 50. Writing in the first decade of the sixteenth century, Amerigo Vespucci noted the distinction between exophagy and endophagy; referring to the natives of the island of Trinidad, he relates, “They do not eat one another, but . . . go to neighboring islands or lands in search of prey from among the races that are either their enemies or different from them” (Letters from a New World, 9). 51. Like many ethnographic terms, the word taboo originated in a particular cultural context and then was applied to other cultures by analogy. The term encompasses various and apparently contradictory meanings, including a prohibition and someone or something that is set apart as special. In Melville’s Typee, which uses the word in its Polynesian context, both meanings appear; significantly, the sacred grounds where the narrator presumes cannibalistic rituals take place are referred to as the “Taboo Groves.” 52. Even among some cultures that acknowledge practicing cannibalism, allegations of the indiscriminate practice of “gustatory” cannibalism can be used as a marker of the “Other”: for example, Fitz John Porter Poole reports that the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea say that their distant neighbors beyond their known social world “consider human beings to be ordinary food” (“Cannibals, Tricksters, and Witches,” 11). In the anthropological literature on cannibalism, it is evident that in different cultures various taboos hold: in reports of some cultures, only men or only women may participate in a cannibal feast; for example, Gillison documents cannibalism among women in one Papua New Guinean culture. In some records of cannibal cultures, only adults can eat human flesh; in others, men, women, and children partake. Sanday cites a Fijian example where infants are fed portions to accustom the palate to the taste of human flesh (Divine Hunger, 161). Some cultures apparently segregate human flesh eaters into secret societies into which members must be initiated. This is reported to be the case of the Leopard Societies of Sierra Leone in Africa and the Hamatsa among the Kwakiutl in North America (Sanday, Divine Hunger). Other accounts document practices in which certain relatives must avoid eating certain others, in an analogy of the incest taboo, as is reported for different cultures in Papua New Guinea (Poole, “Cannibals, Tricksters, and

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Witches,” 15 n. 10; Gillison, “Cannibalism among Women,” 41 n. 8). In “Raw Women, Cooked Men,” Marshall Sahlins presents the case of a Fijian creation myth that has as its underlying message the need to regulate the practices of both cannibalism and incest; in Divine Hunger, Sanday further elaborates this analysis of Sahlins’s account (150–58). In the existing literature, hearts, livers, brains, and genitalia often have special significance as body parts to either be eaten or be avoided. Sanday analyzes the meaning of some of these organs in reference to Aztec sacrifice (Divine Hunger, 175). Means of cooking flesh most often include boiling or roasting. In Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss examines the cultural significance of varying methods for preparing food. At the sites discussed in Christy Turner’s controversial Man Corn, which imputes cannibalism to the Anasazi, human bone deposits are generally separate from animal bone deposits, evidence that humans were rarely treated indiscriminately as a food source. 53. Hogg, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, 135, 168, 70. Sagan uses the term affectionate cannibalism to refer to cases such as those cited here (Cannibalism, 22). In Mark Twain’s short story “Cannibalism in the Cars,” the train passenger who tells his tale of cannibalism—which is ultimately revealed to be a fantasy—repeatedly refers to how much he “liked” the victims he claims to have eaten on a train stranded in the snow. Thus, when in the end he tells the narrator, “I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you. I would like you as well as I liked Harris,” the narrator expresses concern about this “perilous affection” (15, 16). 54. Nigel Davies, Human Sacrifice, 276, 220. Sanday analyzes reports of an Iroquois practice similar to that of the Tupinamba, in which a prisoner of war is adopted, treated with deference, then taunted, tortured, and killed, while still being verbally treated with formulaic expressions of respect (Divine Hunger, 125 – 50, esp. 140 – 42). Sanday notes that in some cases the victim may be a “surrogate kinsperson” taking the place of a warrior killed in battle (143, 148). She also discusses the symbolic father-son relationship between captor and captive in Aztec sacrifice (185). 55. In the narrative of his sixteenth-century travels in Brazil, History of a Voyage, Léry frequently compares the Tupinamba to Europeans in reference to various aspects of their culture. Missionary G. T. Basden, referring to his nineteenth-century Nigerian travels, records, “I have been acquainted with many erstwhile cannibals and have not noticed any difference between them and other folk in the ordinary affairs of life” (Niger Ibos, 127–28). Here the reference to “other folk” underscores the essential sameness of all humans. 56. Hogg cites the example of an anonymous French missionary who describes a young Maori man as “a particularly gentle and lovable disposition, very shy—even timid, and extremely popular with everyone at the mission where he was employed” who goes on to kill and eat a young girl (Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, 183). Here the contrast between his “lovable disposition” and brutal cannibalism highlights the cultural difference of the cannibal Other. In his 1863 Naturalist on the River Amazons, Henry Walter Bates relates the case of a “fierce, indomitable, and hostile” cannibal tribe with a propensity to “intercept and murder all travellers, especially whites”; members of this tribe had recently feasted on “two young half-castes (nearly white)” and then fled their settlement presumably to escape the authorities. Bates describes a young girl who had been left behind when the tribe vacated the scene of the crime: She was decidedly the best-humoured and, to all appearance, the kindest-hearted specimen of her race I had yet seen. She was . . . in color much lighter than the ordinary Indian tint, and her ways altogether were more like those of a careless, laughing country wench, such as might be met with any day amongst the labouring class in villages in our own country, than a cannibal. I heard this artless maiden relate, in the coolest manner possible, how she ate a portion of the bodies of the young men whom her tribe had roasted. (2:406– 8)

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Whereas her sameness is indicated by the author’s comparison of her to a careless English country wench, the cool manner of relating repugnant events that Bates attributes to this artless maiden is a sign of her ultimate cultural difference. 57. Hogg describes the revenge exocannibalism of two Nigerian tribes in terms of simultaneous love and hatred: Lust for flesh, coupled with the only just less bestial motive of the ultimate revenge, was paramount among these particular Nigerian tribes. The Tangales even had a ritual prayer—or rather, an incantation—which was both an expression of hatred and lust and an incitement to greater displays of these primitive emotions: “Here is my enemy. He hates me, and I hate him. He kills me when he meets me. My god has now brought him under my feet. Let my enemy’s people have their strength taken from them.” (Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, 88; emphasis mine)

Whatever the reality of this kind of cannibalism, we can be certain that Hogg’s description demonstrates the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of colonial desire in the form of the attribution of both lust and hatred to Nigerian anthropophagi. 58. Poole, “Cannibals, Tricksters, and Witches,” 31. Hogg sees purification rituals surrounding anthropophagous acts as indications of ambivalence regarding cannibalism, a manifestation of what he calls a “lurking sense of guilt” (Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, 66). For Hogg, the attribution of guilt is used to confirm the Western notion that there is some instinctive aversion to eating human flesh, as he claims that cannibals somehow know they are committing a crime against nature. Poole observes ambivalence, horror, and disgust in the way Bimin-Kuskusmin men and women narrate their participation in anthropophagous acts. Although he acknowledges that this might be in part due to his interviewees’ knowledge of Europeans’ judgmental attitudes toward cannibalism, Poole says that he himself detected extreme reticence and ambivalence in acts of funerary cannibalism that he witnessed on several occasions (“Cannibals, Tricksters, and Witches,” 9 n. 4). Gillison also speculates that the willingness of a Papua New Guinean culture to abandon the practice of cannibalism after colonization was due to a preexisting ambivalence (“Cannibalism among Women,” 43 n. 10). 59. The “protein deficiency” argument has been much debated among anthropologists. The hypothesis is that in regions where animal meat is scarce, populations may begin to eat human flesh in order to supplement the protein in their diet. For example, Michael Harner and Marvin Harris use this cultural materialist argument in reference to Aztec human sacrifice (Harner, “The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice”; Harris, Cannibals and Kings). Sanday notes, however, that there are cultures with few animal resources that do not resort to cannibalism, as well as cultures that partake in cannibalism but do have other sources of protein (Divine Hunger, 15 –20). In their research note on the potential nutritional value of cannibalism, Stanley M. Garn and Walter D. Block observe that a lean man skillfully butchered would yield enough protein to feed sixty adults for one day, or as a supplement to cereal protein for a week. They conclude that human flesh is not an efficient source of protein, “Considering its cost, then, the nutritional value of cannibalism may therefore be viewed as questionable, unless a group is in a position to consume its own number in a year. While human flesh may serve as an emergency source of both protein and calories, it is doubtful that regular people-eating ever had much nutritional meaning” (“The Limited Nutritional Value of Cannibalism,” 106). 60. In late-seventeenth-century Mexican scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, which he claims to be the faithful transcription of the tale of a Puerto Rican–born criollo who survives a shipwreck and captivity among English pirates, Alonso Ramírez narrowly escapes being forced to participate in shipboard anthropophagy with the British buccaneers when among the spoils of war they bring on board a human arm, of which they relentlessly insist he partake. Ramírez ultimately manages to avoid eating the flesh because the Englishman who offers it to him is distracted by someone calling for a toast.

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In Melville’s 1846 fiction Typee, two young British sailors who are captive among the Typee, reputed to be cannibals, are served a meat that the narrator reckons is veal. His companion points out the lack of cattle on the island and claims he is eating a member of the neighboring Happar tribe: “A baked baby, by the soul of Captain Cook! . . . I tell you, you are bolting down mouthfuls from a dead Happar’s carcass, as sure as you live, and no mistake!” To this, the narrator replies, “Emetics and lukewarm water! What a sensation in the abdominal regions,” indicating his repulsion. However, even before learning that it is pork, and in spite of the suspicion that he and his comrade are being fattened for the kill, the narrator nevertheless intends to partake: “But I resolved to satisfy myself at all hazards” (76). 61. Before he had learned the Tupinamba language, Léry was offered a roasted human foot to eat, but took it as a threat to his own person: “Indeed, I thought that by brandishing the human flesh he was eating, he was threatening me and wanted to make me understand that I was about to be similarly dealt with. . . . I firmly expected shortly to be eaten” (History of a Voyage, 163). A similar fear is expressed by early-twentieth-century explorer Algot Lange, who was rescued by a cannibalistic tribe after having been lost, alone and feverish in the Amazonian jungle. Lange describes the chief in the ambiguous terms of colonial desire: “He had a very pleasant, good-natured smile, and almost constantly displayed a row of white, sharpfiled teeth. This smile gave me some confidence, but I very well knew that I was now living among cannibal Indians” (In the Amazon Jungle, 320). Whereas Lange’s description of the chief ’s “pleasant, good-natured smile” indicates an approximation to his own cultural referents, the mention of his filed teeth designates the chief as the cannibal Other. Lange soon learns that among these people it is considered impolite to refuse any dish, no matter how repugnant it might be, and that refusal carries potentially grave consequences. As the fires are being built after two Peruvian mixed-race rubber workers are killed, Lange says, But now I could only hasten to my hammock and simulate sleep, for I well knew, from previous experience, that otherwise I would have to partake of the meal in preparation: a horrible meal of human flesh! . . . An awful thought coursed through my brain when I beheld the men bend eagerly over the pans to see if the meat were done. How long would it be, I said to myself, before they would forget themselves and place my own extremities in the same pots and pans? (346–49)

Lange even has the good humor to include the chief in the list of people whom he acknowledges in his preface, since he had spared his life; having promised Lange he would not be eaten “either fried or stewed,” Lange thanks the chief “because he did not order me to be killed and served up, well or medium done, to suit his fancy (which he had a perfect right to do)” (349, xii). 62. The loving contemplation described in Saer’s novel is similar to that described by Léry in reference to the Tupinamba gazing upon the roasting flesh of their enemies: “When the flesh of a prisoner . . . is thus cooked, all those who have been present to see the slaughter performed gather again joyfully around the boucans [grills] on which they gaze with a furious and covetous eye, contemplating the pieces and members of their enemies” (History of a Voyage, 127). 63. In some documented exocannibal cultures, it is taboo for the warriors who killed the victim to participate; in others, the slayer must eat the slain. In some kinds of endocannibalism, the family of the one eaten may not partake; in others, the family of a cannibalized tribe member is ceremonially offered a piece. 64. Lévi-Strauss elaborates on various indigenous Brazilian cultures that use images of eating to describe the sexual act (Raw and the Cooked, 269–70). In turn, Kilgour observes that eating and sexuality have a long tradition of metaphoric association in the Western imagination (From Communion to Cannibalism, 7– 8). 65. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Peggy Sanday cites the example of a Fijian culture in which “licentious dancing and sexuality [are] associated with the cooking of the

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victims’ bodies” (Divine Hunger, 162). In reference to this same culture, Sanday says, “Activity during the four days after the warriors’ return alternated between unrestricted sexuality and aggression, and forced observation of rigid rules of behavior” (163). For a discussion of sexuality and cannibalism as parallel forms of communion between self and Other, see Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 7–8, 226–33. During his sojourn among an Amazonian tribe, Algot Lange observed the following: “It is true that the Mangeromas are cannibals, but at the same time their habits and morals are otherwise remarkably clean” (In the Amazon Jungle: Adventures in Remote Parts of the Upper Amazon River, Including a Sojourn among Cannibal Indians, 346). In her description of a female cannibal ritual in Papua New Guinea, Gillian Gillison observes that women “ate a male corpse in a deliberately chaotic, orgiastic manner,” which according to Gillison highlights “the discrepancy between everyday life and ritual” (“Cannibalism among Women in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea,” 48, 50). 66. Mary Douglas notes that anthropologists tend to maintain that primitive cultures do not distinguish between the sacred and the unclean, whereas advanced cultures do make this distinction; Douglas considers this approach oversimplified and signals the need to examine the issue more closely (Purity and Danger, 8 –11). In Violence and the Sacred, Girard discusses both the sacred and the ritually impure as parallel in that both are categories referring to things with which one should avoid direct contact. 67. This taunting suggests a parallel between the Def-ghi and the scapegoat, upon whom the sins of a given culture are ritually heaped. See Girard, The Scapegoat and Violence and the Sacred. 68. The function of memory is one of the most studied aspects of El entenado; it is the subject of María Cristina Pons’s Memorias del olvido as well as numerous articles on Saer’s work. 69. This is the first and only time the tribe is referred to with this proper name. The name Colastiné or Colestiné appears in anthropological literature on indigenous tribes of South America. 70. One wonders at the naïveté of the narrator, who does not attempt to deceive the soldiers regarding the site of the village of which he had grown so fond. 71. Regarding this aspect of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s own narrative of his adventures in Naufragios and Argentine novelist Abel Posse’s interpretation of them in El largo atardecer del caminante, see Chapter 4. Saer’s narrator’s declaration that the clothes scratch his body is similar to the reaction to wearing clothing manifested by the historical Cabeza de Vaca as well as that of Posse’s fictionalized version of the explorer. 72. What is clear in these passages of the novel is the notion of autocensorship, that is, the narrator edits his own text, keeping in mind that the things he would prefer to write would not be accepted, an implicit reference to censorship during Argentina’s “dirty war” of the late 1970s and early 1980s. A more explicit literary example of the internalization of censorship can be found in Argentine Luisa Valenzuela’s “Los censores,” published in 1983, the same year as Saer’s El entenado. In this short story, which has been published in an en face bilingual edition of Valenzuela’s work, a man writes a perfectly innocuous letter to a friend abroad, then begins to work for the censorship bureau, where he ends up condemning himself by denouncing his own letter as subversive. In her article “Eficacias del verosímil no realista: Dos novelas recientes de Juan José Saer,” María Luisa Bastos discusses El entenado’s avoidance of proper names for people and places as an implicit comment on the need to evade censorship during this period in Argentine history. 73. Although he recognizes his own subjectivity and the fact that his knowledge of the indigenous language is limited, Saer’s narrator does not radically question the concept of truth. As María Cristina Pons notes in Memorias del olvido, El entenado engages poststructuralist notions of history, but does not ultimately deconstruct history in postmodern fashion. In their

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respective articles, Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones (“El entenado: Las palabras de la tribu”) and Rita de Grandis (“El entenado de Juan José Saer y la idea de la historia”) also discuss how Saer’s novel contests traditional concepts of history and truth without deconstructing them entirely. 74. In her chapter on El entenado in The Anthropological Imagination in Latin American Literature, Amy Fass Emery discusses the application of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of being and nothingness to Saer’s novel. 75. In first- and secondhand testimonials regarding cannibalism, Europeans’ fear of being eaten appears to be greater than their fear of being killed. In the sixteenth-century accounts of both Hans Staden and Jean de Léry, for example, early references to the fear of being slain and eaten are soon reduced to shorthand references to being eaten. For example, referring to the day they first sighted land in Brazil, Léry and his companions encounter a tribe allied with the Portuguese and who thus are enemies of the French. He at first refers to the possibility of the French “being slain and cut to pieces, and serving as a meal for them,” but he soon reduces this to “the danger of being seized and boucané—that is, roasted” and “this was merely to lure us and trick us into coming ashore so that afterwards . . . they could cut us to pieces and eat us” (History of a Voyage, 26 –27). In Staden and Léry, as in later narratives by explorers, travelers, and missionaries, the fear of being killed is not described nearly as explicitly as the fear of being eaten. 76. As will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3, most scholars agree that in Latin America, the “active” or insertive partner in an intermale sexual encounter neither gains nor loses social prestige, whereas the “passive” or receptive partner is stigmatized. See, for example, Roger Lancaster’s research on Nicaragua, Ian Lumsden’s book on Cuba, research by Joseph Carrier and by Matthew Gutmann on Mexico, Tomás Almaguer’s study of Chicano practices, Stephen Murray’s book on Latin American male homosexualities, and work by Richard Parker and by James Green on Brazilian sexual practices. 77. As discussed above, some groups that acknowledgedly practice ritual cannibalism reportedly distinguish themselves from neighbors who they claim practice unrestrained or indiscriminate gustatory cannibalism. Saer’s description of his fictionalized Colastiné’s conception of the universe is strikingly similar to ethnographer Fitz John Porter Poole’s description of the “cultural map of a regional landscape of anthropophagic beings and practices” drawn by the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea. According to Poole, “Bimin-Kuskusmin traditionally partition all known ethnic groups into four concentric zones of beings, and different modes of anthropophagy are among the distinctive features that define each zone. From the center to the periphery of the traditionally known world, these zones are: true men . . . human men . . . human creatures . . . and animal man-beings” (“Cannibals, Tricksters, and Witches,” 7–8). Significantly, the Bimin-Kuskusmin accuse their closest neighbors of treating human flesh as ordinary food. 78. Although Costa’s translation “the desire to eat one another” communicates the idea of endocannibalism, “el deseo de comerse a sí mismos” would more literally translate as “the desire to eat themselves,” which communicates an even greater sense of identity between eater and eaten, what we might dub “autophagy.” 79. Apart from the abstract considerations about history and fiction, memory and forgetting, self and Other, which are the focus of most of the criticism on Saer’s novel, including the present chapter, El entenado’s representation of a periodic cannibal feast could also be interpreted as a specific metaphor for Argentina’s periods of oppression. The 1983 novel’s reference to an earlier time when the Colastiné ate one another rather than eating members of other tribes could implicitly refer to the guerra sucia (dirty war) of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which the Argentine government “disappeared” those Argentines who questioned official history. Like the historical Argentine Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the fictional Def-ghi’s function is to preserve the memory of individuals who have been wiped out through the willful vi-

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olence of the dominant power. Saer’s abstract meditation on the compulsion to repeat could be read as a comment that history repeats itself if we do not examine it critically. His narrator’s assertion that the Colastiné forget about their cannibalism in the interim between feasts can be a remark on the necessity of not denying the oppression of the past, but discussing it openly in order to avoid repeating history. As discussed in the Introduction, the way in which novels set in the period of conquest reflect concerns about twentieth-century politics is an aspect that has been touched upon by scholars, but merits further study. 2. Violence and the Sacred: Idolatry and Human Sacrifice in Homero Aridjis’s Memorias del Nuevo Mundo 1. Memorias del Nuevo Mundo received the Premio Literario Internacional Novedades y Diana for 1987–1988. Editorial Diana also published it along with 1492 in a special boxed set to commemorate the 1492–1992 quincentenary. 1492 has been translated into English by Betty Ferber as 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile. In contrast, Memorias del Nuevo Mundo (Memories of the New World) has not been translated to English to date; thus, the translations here are mine, and page numbers in parentheses refer to the original novel. For 1492, the first page number in parentheses refers to the original, and the second to Ferber’s translation. Little critical scholarship has been devoted to these two texts apart from a dissertation on both Juan Cabezón novels by Campos, “Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican History and the Juan Cabezón Novels of Homero Aridjis.” There are a few critical studies on the first novel, including a brief article by Susana Beatriz Cella comparing 1492 and Saer’s El entenado. In-depth critical study of Memorias can be found in Campos’s dissertation and in an article by Dolores Llamas, both of which focus on the protagonist, Juan Cabezón, and his historical context but also devote some attention to the character of Gonzalo Dávila and his mestizo son, Gonzalito. Whereas Campos considers Gonzalo Dávila to be one of three main fictional characters of the middle section of the novel, Llamas considers him a coprotagonist of the entire novel, alongside Juan Cabezón. 2. The book 1492 is the first full-length novel published by Aridjis, a prolific writer in many genres who has been publishing creative work steadily from the late 1960s through the present. Apart from these novelistic representations, Aridjis has also incorporated the theme of the conquest in his theater, for example, in Gran teatro del fin del mundo, a collection of plays, the first of which parallels many of the early scenes of Memorias del Nuevo Mundo dealing with Christopher Columbus, and Espectáculo del año dos mil, dramatic fragments of which represent Moctezuma. The theme of the conquest also appears in Aridjis’s poetry, in collections such as Quemar las naves (Burning the ships, 1975), a title that clearly alludes to Cortés’s burning of his ships upon arriving on the Mexican mainland in order to prevent his men from turning back; Vivir para ver (Living to see, 1977); and Imágenes para el fin de milenio y Nueva expulsión del paraíso (Images for the end of the millennium and new expulsion from paradise, 1990). Aridjis’s other novels—La leyenda de los soles (Legend of the suns, 1993); El señor de los últimos días (The lord of the last days, 1994); and ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? (Who do you think of when making love? 1995)—all demonstrate a preoccupation with both the past and the future. 3. According to Francisco A. Icaza’s Conquistadores y pobladores de Nueva España and Víctor M. Álvarez’s Diccionario de conquistadores, after serving in Pánuco under both Francisco de Garay and later governor Nuño de Guzmán, under whom he occupied several administrative posts, a historical Gonzalo de Ávila was awarded an encomienda in that region. These same sources attest that this Gonzalo de Ávila was born in the town of Llerena-Badajoz, the

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legitimate child of Spanish parents, that he had two illegitimate daughters whom he wished to marry off, and that he himself had not married because he claimed to lack the means. Aridjis’s character Gonzalo Dávila is also unmarried and has illegitimate children, notably a son who is his namesake and who is even more cruel and sadistic than his father, but because of the lack of Spanish women in the early colony, this is too typical a pattern among the conquistadors to indicate a link with a specific historical figure. Aridjis’s fictional Gonzalo Dávila is from Trujillo, and after serving under Hernán Cortés receives an encomienda without any connection to the region of Pánuco. 4. Under the encomienda system, a certain number of Amerindians were commended (thus the terms derived from the verb encomendar) to the keeping of Spaniards in reward for services performed for the crown. In theory, the encomendero was to be responsible for the souls of those entrusted to him, and was obligated to ensure that they were converted to Christianity. In practice, it became a system of landholding and forced labor, in which encomenderos showed little concern for their charges’ welfare. 5. Before Cortés embarked on the expedition to conquer Mexico, governor of Cuba Diego Velázquez had sent word to him that his command had been revoked. Ignoring this rescindment, Cortés went forward with his campaign as a renegade. When Velázquez sent Pánfilo de Narváez after him, Cortés left forces with Pedro de Alvarado in Tenochtitlan and set off toward the Gulf Coast where he defeated the Spaniards who had come to subdue him. 6. This geographical and chronological reference would make the fictional Gonzalo Dávila a compatriot of Francisco Pizarro and potentially a relative. Francisco Pizarro was born around 1478 in Trujillo (Cáceres) and was accompanied in his South American conquests by his half brothers, including one Gonzalo, born around 1502, who was never in Mexico. Gonzalo was such a common name in the Pizarro family that at any given time there were many Gonzalo Pizarros in Trujillo (Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Pizarro, 10–11); it was the name of Francisco Pizarro’s father and son as well as this half brother, who was recognized by their father without a mother’s name specified. There is no Luz Pizarro in the immediate family tree (Rafael Varón Gabai, Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers, 8). Juan Cabezón had stayed at Gonzalo Dávila’s mother’s inn when he passed through Trujillo in his adventures in the novel 1492. This fictional character Luz Pizarro, who is said in Memorias to have given birth to Gonzalo Dávila during 1492, in the novel 1492 gives no sign of being pregnant, and there is no mention of a poor hidalgo named Pedro Dávila, as the only other guest at the inn is a nameless merchant. There is a character named Pero (an old form of Pedro) Dávila mentioned briefly in 1492, but according to the novel’s chronology, he would have died some ten years before Gonzalo Dávila’s birth. Juan Cabezón, in fact, was in the right place and time to have been Gonzalo Dávila’s father; the text of 1492 reveals, however, that Luz Pizarro attempts unsuccessfully on several occasions to seduce Juan Cabezón, who resists her charms because he is in love with his long-lost conversa wife, Isabel. Luz Pizarro also admits to having a long-lost love, a backsliding friar, now dead. Gonzalo Dávila’s mother and father are presumably Old Christians, but according to the local gossips of Trujillo, Luz Pizarro has the nickname “the Spain of all three religions,” since she allegedly had borne children by a Jew, a Moor, and a Christian (1492: Vida y tiempos, 260; 1492: Life and Times, 233). 7. Built over a lake, Tenochtitlan was strategically constructed to have a limited number of viable exits in an emergency situation. On the Noche Triste, when they were forced to retreat from the imperial city after Moctezuma was presumably stoned to death by his own people, the Spaniards withdrew through Tacuba. 8. In 1525, several rumors reached Mexico City that Cortés and his men were lost while on an expedition to Honduras. In November of that year, Cortés and the members of his expedition were officially pronounced dead and a formal funeral was held for them in Mexico City. Cortés returned to New Spain in May 1526, rumors of his death having been greatly exagger-

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ated. From the Gulf Coast, he wrote a letter with a long satirical comparison between his resurrection and that of Christ. The political instability that had reigned in his absence was not, however, reversed with his return ( J. Benedict Warren, The Conquest of Michoacán, 106–14). 9. There are various versions of the legend of Tezcatlipoca and his antagonistic relationship with Quetzalcóatl. He can be perceived as representing Quetzalcóatl’s evil brother, because according to some versions, Tezcatlipoca tricked his brother into looking at himself in the smoking mirror, and Quetzalcóatl’s glimpse of his own darkness led him to become drunk and commit incest with his sister and then flee, leaving the Aztecs subject to evil until he could effect his return (Root, Cannibal Culture, 2– 3). It is widely believed that the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan was in part facilitated by the Aztecs’ belief that Hernán Cortés might be the returning Quetzalcóatl. 10. Askenasy compares cannibalism to “syphilis, which the Italians called the French disease, the French the Italian disease, and so on” (Cannibalism, 51). 11. Francisco Guerra, The Pre-Columbian Mind, 227. 12. David Noble Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 27. 13. Regarding the connection between sodomy and conquest, Guerra cites a 1583 catechism document that reads: “Let it be known that the reason why God has allowed that you the Indians should be so afflicted and vexed by other nations is because of this vice [sodomy] that your ancestors had, and many among you still have” (The Pre-Columbian Mind, 241). Regarding both sodomy and syphilis, see Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 3:270–71; Sander L. Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness, 76; Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, 205. 14. These descriptions of Gonzalo Dávila gone native stand as a mirror image of Fuentes’s final description of the Mayan god gone Western in “Chac Mool”: Apareció un indio amarillo, en bata de casa, con bufanda. Su aspecto no podía ser más repulsivo; despedía un olor a loción barata; su cara, polveada, quería cubrir las arrugas; tenía la boca embarrada de lápiz labial mal aplicado, y el pelo daba la impresión de estar teñido. (30) A yellow-shinned Indian in a smoking jacket and ascot stood in the doorway. He couldn’t have been more repulsive; he smelled of cheap cologne; he’d tried to cover his wrinkles with thick power, his mouth was clumsily smeared with lipstick, and his hair appeared to be dyed. (“Chac-Mool,” 14)

Gonzalo Dávila’s raiment corresponds with Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s description of how the Aztecs attired the victim who represented Tezcatlipoca for a year before being sacrificed (Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, 107– 8). 3. Eros and Colonization: Homosocial Colonial Desire in Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán 1. None of these novels by Herminio Martínez have been translated to date nor been the object of sustained critical attention. The four titles would translate, respectively, as “The Accursed Diary of Nuño de Guzmán,” “The Doors of the World,” “Invaders of Paradise,” and “The Return.” All four novels demonstrate the themes of sexuality and colonial desire, but none to the extent that the Diario maldito does. Because the Diario maldito has not been translated, the translations of passages cited here are mine, and page numbers in parentheses refer to the original novel. The Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán has been the object of a 1991 review in Hispania by Menton, who also catalogs it in Latin America’s New Historical Novel; the novel is also listed in the article “La (nueva) novela histórica mexicana,” by Francisco Álvarez. Curiously, the Diario maldito is mentioned by Adrián Blázquez and Thomas Calvo’s historical text on the

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conquistador; they refer to Martínez’s novel as a continuation of the novelization of the life of Guzmán begun by Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias they implicitly refer to as fiction, “literatura novelesca” (Guadalajara y el Nuevo Mundo, 48). The most extensive analysis of the Diario maldito can be found in Mark Hernández’s dissertation, “Rewriting the Discovery and Conquest,” in which Hernández engages the question of the black legend in reference to this literary depiction that both humanizes and hyperbolizes the conquistador Guzmán. 2. This is the spelling as it is used in the novel to serve as the character’s name since he is referred to as Calzoncin without the use of the definite article. In the original documents, the Tarascan word Cazonci or Caçonçi or the Nahuatlized Caltzontzin refers to the title of the lord of the Tarascans. The Cazonci at the time of Guzmán’s arrival—and whom he did in fact imprison, torture, and execute—was Tzintzicha Tangaxoan, baptized by the Franciscans as don Francisco, who had recently assumed that post after the death of his father, Zuangua, from the smallpox virus brought by the Spaniards. 3. On the feminization of colonized peoples, see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism; and Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. 4. This accusation is found repeatedly in the writings of both Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Francisco López de Gómara in reference to various Amerindian groups who are described alternately as grandes sodomíticos, sométicos, sodométicos, sodomitas (great sodomites) or grandísimos putos (male prostitutes). Some of the earliest mentions of what the Spaniards called sodomy among the native Americans are found in references from Columbus’s second voyage: the 1494 letter from Dr. Diego Álvarez Chanca, who wrote that the Caribs castrate captive boys to fatten them up, and “use” them (presumably sexually) until they are grown, and Michele de Cuneo’s 1495 letter claiming that both Caribs and Arawaks were “largely sodomites” although probably unaware that it is a vice ( Jane, Four Voyages, 32; Morison, Journals and Other Documents, 220). The document referred to as Hernán Cortés’s “Primera carta de relación,” dated July 10, 1519, sent by the Council of Vera Cruz, is an early reference to Mesoamerican sodomy: “[H]emos sabido y sido informados de cierto que todos son sodomitas y usan aquel abominable pecado” (Cartas de relación, 22–23) (We have learned and been informed for certain that they are all sodomites and practice that abominable sin). Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas urged the monarchs to shun such generalizations about the Amerindians’ sexuality in his Brevísima relación. Curiously, Pedro de Cieza de León, who in his writings on the natives of Peru was one of the most assiduous in documenting same-sex sexual practices, himself admits that Spaniards should avoid such blanket accusations (Crónica del Perú, 1:304, 2:74). 5. Guerra, The Pre-Columbian Mind, 223; Ed Cohen, “Legislating the Norm: From Sodomy to Gross Indecency,” 173; Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation, xi. 6. Spain was the first Western European land to criminalize sodomy; even the seventhcentury Visigoths had antisodomy laws in the Iberian Peninsula, laws that were later revived in thirteenth-century Castile (Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, 250). During the period of the conquest, monarchs Fernando and Isabel specified burning as the means of execution (Guerra, The Pre-Columbian Mind, 222). Documents such as Gregory Kimball’s “Aztec Sexuality: Textual Evidence” and Antonio Requena’s “Sodomy among Native American Peoples” attest to indigenous traditions among the Incas and the Aztecs of punishing what the Spaniards called sodomy; Richard Trexler doubts the accuracy of these accounts of native antisodomy laws written by the Peruvian mestizo el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Mexican mestizo Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, which he suspects reflect a post-Columbian Christian morality (Sex and Conquest, 156–61). 7. Trexler, Sex and Conquest, 84.

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8. Like syphilis, sodomy is always believed to have originated “elsewhere”: for example, in early modern England, buggery—the word itself is a corruption of the term Bulgarian—was said to have come from France or Italy. See Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period, 13 –15; Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 75; and Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century England, 52. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 85 – 90, for a discussion of cannibalism and sodomy as “unnatural” in the Western mind. For a discussion of the representation of sodomy in the rhetoric of the conquest, see also Bleys, Geography of Perversion, 22–29. 9. As discussed in the Introduction, chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who had accompanied Cortés in the conquest of Mexico, records the conquistador’s exhortations to each new group to abandon the practices of sodomy, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and idolatry. These appear in different combinations in his Historia de la conquista de Nueva España (87, 104, 147, 164, 166). Jonathan Goldberg observes that although these references to sodomy came to occupy a place in the ritual of possession and justification, Bernal Díaz never once describes anyone performing an act of sodomy, and even feigns uncertainty in recognizing its representation in pottery, “a self-protective gesture no doubt meant to ensure that what the natives do cannot be numbered among the practices of the Spaniards” (Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, 199). Thus, for Goldberg, “Sodomy would seem to be an empty category, merely part of the ritual of Cortés’s performance” (200). Sodomy became part of a formula that Cortés would utter upon approaching each new population, beginning with Cempoala; Goldberg remarks that this explicit reference to sodomy is thus applied retroactively to the previous vague references to unspecified evils and “abominations” regularly listed as part of the routine, and that thereafter sodomy became a regular part of Cortés’s litany as recorded by Bernal Díaz. It is important to remember that Bernal Díaz was writing his memoirs half a century after the conquest of Mexico, and thus it is unlikely that he recalls the exact combination of sodomy, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and idolatry that Cortés warned each particular population to abandon. What does seem apparent, however, is that these various practices were conflated in the sixteenth-century Spanish mentality. 10. This letter is reproduced in José Luis Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, ed., Crónicas de la conquista del Nuevo Reyno de Galicia y Memoria de Guzmán, 36. 11. On the figure of the berdache, see Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture; and Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman. 12. Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, Crónicas de la conquista, 35; all misspellings in original, translation and emphasis mine. Samuel Purchas translates and abbreviates this passage thus in his 1625 work: “The last which was taken, and which fought most courageously, was a man in habite of a women, which confessed, that from a childe he had gotten his liuing by that filthinesse, for which I caused him to be burned” (Purchas: His Pilgrimes, 4:1558; all misspellings in original). Sir Richard Burton cites this passage—mistakenly replacing the Mexican placename Cuitzeo with that of Cuzco—in the “Terminal Essay” to his 1886 translation of the Arabian Thousand Nights and One Night, in which he develops his theory of the Sotadic zones, or geographic areas in which he believes the propensity toward sodomy is most markedly demonstrated. 13. Trexler notes that the Europeans presumed berdaches to be sodomites because they were familiar with the link between transvestism and the sexually receptive male in some African and Asian cultures (Sex and Conquest, 62). He further observes that both Nuño de Guzmán and Bernal Díaz del Castillo make the probably false assumption that berdaches are male prostitutes (90, 131), and that Las Casas chastises the Spaniards for hastily conflating transvestism with sodomy (97).

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Historical documents attest to the existence of what the Spaniards interpreted as Amerindian male prostitution in Pánuco and Michoacán, the two regions where Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán spent the bulk of his time in New Spain. Of the natives of Pánuco, López de Gómara claims: Son asimismo grandísimos putos, y tienen mancebía de hombres públicamente, do se acogen las noches mil de ellos, y más o menos, según es el pueblo. . . . Nuño de Guzmán fue también a Pánuco por gobernador . . . el cual castigó aquellos indios de sus pecados, haciendo muchos esclavos. (López de Gómara, Historia general de las Indias, 70) (They are thus great male prostitutes, and they have public male brothels, where at night a thousand such men will gather, more or less, depending on the population. . . . Nuño de Guzmán also went to Pánuco as governor . . . where he punished those Indians for their sins, making many slaves; translation mine).

The “Relación del Conquistador Anónimo” (ca. 1519) had also remarked, “En esta provincia de Pánuco los hombres son grandes sodomitas, cobardes, y tan borrachos, que son casi increíbles los medios de que se valen para satisfacer este vicio” (in Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Colección de documentos para la historia de México, 1:387) (In this province of Pánuco, the men are great sodomites, cowards, and such drunkards that the lengths they will go to in order to satisfy this vice are almost incredible; translation mine). J. Benedict Warren cites a document from the Archivo General de Indias in which Antón Caicedo, Cortés’s mayordomo in Michoacán during most of the 1520s, claimed that before sodomy was punished in that province, in the public markets, or tianguez, “there were sodomitic Indians who were accustomed to do this and who carried it on as a business and for profit and who had it as their trade to be sodomites and to be in the aforesaid marketplaces and to do that sin and abomination with the Indians who paid them for it” (The Conquest of Michoacán, 19–20). The author of the “Primera relación anónima de la jornada que hizo Nuño de Guzmán á la Nueva Galicia” also mentions that the natives of this area “usan el pecado nefando” (practice the nefarious sin) (in García Icazbalceta, Colección de documentos, 2:295). If these Spanish accounts do not prove anything definitive about the existence of same-sex practices in pre-Hispanic Mexico, in any case they serve as evidence that Guzmán’s interpretation that the berdache “ganava su vida con los hombres al oficio” (earned his living with men in that profession) was not unique in making the connection between transvestism and sodomy, on the one hand, and same-sex practices and prostitution, on the other. 14. See the documents compiled by Manuel Carrera Stampa, Juan Rulfo, France Scholes and Eleanor Adams, José Luis Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, and Francisco del Paso y Troncoso. 15. Although the official tribunal of the Mexican Inquisition was not established until 1571, the Spanish Inquisition operated in New Spain under the authority of bishops and friars, who occasionally clashed with civil authorities; during the time period of this novel, the Inquisition was led by Nuño de Guzmán’s adversary Juan de Zumárraga. Although the extirpation of heresy was its main objective, the Spanish Inquisition and its Mexican arm did in fact take a special interest in persecuting those accused of sodomy (Richard Greenleaf, Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536 –1543, 108). 16. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 39. In the original: “Es significativo, por otra parte, que el homosexualismo masculino sea considerado con cierta indulgencia, por lo que toca al agente activo. El pasivo, al contrario, es un ser degradado y abyecto” (Laberinto de la soledad, 35). Paz associates this active-passive positioning with the conquest, which he refers to as a literal and metaphoric rape of indigenous peoples (77); he further says, “Es imposible no advertir la semejanza que guarda la figura del ‘macho’ con la del conquistador español” (74) (“It

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is impossible not to notice the resemblance between the figure of the macho and that of the Spanish conquistador”) (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 82). 17. Parker refers to “the hierarchical system of gender, with its calculus of activity and passivity,” that constructs a gender hierarchy “that builds up notions of masculinity and femininity and orders them in relation to one another” (Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions, 166–67). In his essay on Mexican representations of homosexuality, Robert McKee Irwin speaks of “This ‘Latin’ gender-based system of sexuality in which homosexuals must be categorized (or are compelled to categorize themselves) as ‘active’ (male) or ‘passive’ (female)” and notes, “Whether or not we believe that such systems dominate sexual culture in Mexico or in the United States, there is no doubt that at least since Octavio Paz famously introduced homosexuality into mainstream intellectual discourse in Mexico . . . Mexican male homosexuality has been routinely discussed as a function of active/passive” (“The Legend of Jorge Cuesta: The Perils of Alchemy and the Paranoia of Gender,” 31). 18. Scholars have speculated that the current Latin American sexual system is the result of a syncretism between Iberian and indigenous practices (Roger N. Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua, 265; Clark L. Taylor, “Legends, Syncretism, and Continuing Echoes of Homosexuality from Pre-Columbian and Colonial Mexico,” 87; Williams, Spirit and the Flesh, 147– 49). The pervasive existence throughout the Americas of the berdache tradition, in which certain males dressed and worked as women and served as receptive partners in intermale sexuality, testifies to the fact that many preColumbian American cultures differentiated between the insertive and receptive roles in sexual acts between males, and the receptive partner stood out as the socially different one, although he was integrated into society and was not negatively stigmatized (Williams, Spirit and the Flesh, 3; Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman, 5). In recent years, the Latin American model that designates the receptive partner as effeminate and the insertive partner as masculine has begun to be challenged by the existence of internacionales, who alternate roles and valorize mutual pleasure in a manner that has been compared to that practiced by members of the gay communities of the urban U.S. and European cultures. The internacionales may not radically undermine the gendered hierarchy, however, as the decision to take the insertive or receptive role with a given partner generally depends on the perceived level of masculinity and femininity of the partners relative to one another ( Joseph Carrier, De los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality among Mexican Men, 48; Williams, Spirit and the Flesh, 145). 19. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 150; John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire, 21–22; Trexler, Sex and Conquest, 31. 20. Gutmann, Meanings of Macho, 128; Ana Maria Alonso and Maria Teresa Koreck, “Silences: Hispanics, AIDS, and Sexual Practices,” 119; Stephen O. Murray, Latin American Male Homosexualities, 54; Lancaster, Life Is Hard, 244. As Annick Prieur notes in reference to Mexican practices, “But no one—except a direct witness—can know what actually happens in bed. Therefore there will always be a doubt connected to homosexual encounters and, thereby, a risk that a man’s masculinity may be perceived as impaired” (“Domination and Desire,” 94). 21. For an excellent analysis of the ambiguity of sexuality in Abel Posse’s 1978 novel on rebel Lope de Aguirre, see Terry Seymour, “Daimón and the Eroticism of Conquest.” 22. Although “Guzmania” is a fictionalized dystopian projection, biographer Donald Chipman attributes to the historical Nuño de Guzmán a “grand design” of extending his power westward from the gulf coast of Pánuco all the way to the Pacific Ocean (Nuño de Guzmán and the Province of Pánuco in New Spain, 1518 –1533, 232). He also had the utopian dream of conquering north to the fortieth parallel, where in 1530 and 1531 letters to the crown he claimed would be found a race of Amazon women who lived without men most of the year

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(Blázquez and Calvo, Guadalajara, 197). After a 1527–1528 stint as resident governor of Pánuco, during his tenure as president of the Royal Audience from 1529 to 1533, Guzmán absented himself from Mexico City and succeeded in conquering a territory extending to the Pacific, including what are now the Mexican states of Michoacán and Jalisco. The crown named him governor of this province of Nueva Galicia in 1531 in spite of the fact that many complaints had already been lodged against him regarding his mismanagement as resident and absentee governor of Pánuco. 23. R. W. Connell asserts, “[T]he ‘conquistadors’ . . . were perhaps the first group to become defined as a masculine cultural type in the modern sense” (Masculinities, 187). 24. When Léry first arrived in Brazil in the mid-sixteenth century, he experienced a similar “mooning” on the part of a group of Margaia, the bellicose and anthropophagous enemies of both the Tupinamba and the French, to whom in a conciliatory gesture the Europeans had given some shirts. The French clergyman was nevertheless able to see great humor in the episode, as he recounts in his own words: But here was the best of it. Upon their arrival these good people, all naked, had not been sparing in showing us everything they had; and now at their departure, not being in the habit of wearing undergarments or, indeed, any other kind of clothes, when they put on the shirts that we had given them and came to seat themselves in the ship’s boat, they tucked them clear up to the navel so as not to spoil them, and, revealing what should be hidden, insisted that we see their behinds and their buttocks as they took their farewell of us. Were these not courteous officers, and was this not a fine ambassadorial civility? For notwithstanding the proverb that is so common to us over here, that the flesh is nearer than the shirt, they on the contrary, as if to show us that they were not of that mind, and perhaps as a display of their magnificent hospitality, favored their shirts over their skin by showing us their behinds. (History of a Voyage, 27–28)

25. Hernández comments on this episode at some length in his dissertation (“Rewriting the Discovery and Conquest,” 140 – 41). Because of their similarity to the Spaniards in skin color, the fictionalized Guzmán follows by speculating that these island youths might be mestizo children of Christopher Columbus, and cites an apocryphal letter that he attributes to the admiral, saying, “El Nuevo Mundo, que no las Indias, ¡oh, tierra de Dios, do se acuesta uno y amanecen dos!” (42) (The New World, not the Indies, oh, land of God where one goes to bed alone and wakes up accompanied!). 26. The historical Nuño de Guzmán was responsible for issuing licenses for the branding and exportation of slaves from Pánuco to the West Indies. Chipman says that the official branding iron had an R for real marca (royal mark) and that Guzmán did indeed have his own branding iron with the letters NG for his name (Nuño de Guzmán, 208–10). Blázquez and Calvo also mention the branding irons, but maintain that G stands for Guerra and R for Rescate. These two terms refer, respectively, to prisoners of war and to slaves obtained for trade; these were considered the only legitimate ways of obtaining slaves in New Spain in the years immediately previous to Carlos V’s August 20, 1530, royal provision that prohibited trafficking in Amerindian slaves. In the case of Rescate, a word that indicates both ransom and trade, the historical Guzmán upheld in his written ordinances the letter of the royal mandate that slaves be examined to confirm that they were considered slaves in the indigenous cultures from which they were traded (Guadalajara, 104 – 5). Blázquez and Calvo, whose text is the most comprehensive collection of original documents pertaining specifically to Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, do not mention a branding iron with Guzmán’s initials. 27. Trexler, Sex and Conquest, 7, 19, 82; Pietro Martire d’ Anghiera, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, 90; Goldberg, Sodometries, 182–85; García del Pilar cited in Juan Rulfo, Noticias históricas de la vida y hechos de Nuño de Guzmán, 134. 28. The 1532 letter appears in Del Paso y Troncoso, Epistolario de Nueva España, 1505–

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1818, 2:155. Regarding the history of the trial record, see Warren, The Conquest of Michoacán, 222–23. Both Fernández de Oviedo and López de Gómara claim that Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán killed the Cazonci so that the cacique could not complain of his torture at Guzmán’s hands. Bartolomé de Las Casas does not name Guzmán but refers to the governor of Pánuco who captured the Cazonci and tortured him just to extract treasure from him. 29. These literary references to a “vara” (rod) and to a “verdasca” (switch) have some support in the historical documents pertaining to the torture of the Cazonci, because at the same time several interpreters and lords were also tortured, and in the case of at least one of the victims, “diéronle tormento en las partes vergonzosas con una verdasca” (they tortured him in his shameful parts with a switch) ( José Tudela, Relación de las ceremonias y ritos y población y gobierno de los indios de la Provincia de Michoacán (1541), 273). There is also evidence that the Cazonci himself was subjected to this same type of torture at Guzmán’s command; as two interpreters affirm in verbatim testimonies, on one occasion Guzmán had the Tarascan lord beaten on the testicles with a rod: que llamó el dicho Nuño de Guzmán a unos indios de México y que les mandó a los indios que le atasen los brazos y compañones en alto, y que le daban con una verga en los compañones, y que le preguntaban dónde tenía el oro y plata. (“Juicio seguido por Hernán Cortés contra los lics. Matienzo y Delgadillo. Año 1531,” 362, 365) ([each witness testified] that Nuño de Guzmán called some Mexica Indians and that he commanded the Indians to tie up his [the Cazonci’s] arms and his testicles, and that they beat him on the testicles with a whip made of a bull’s penis, and that they asked him where he had the gold and silver; translation mine.)

Warren notes that this incident is not confirmed by any other source, and that it is suspicious that the testimony of the two interpreters is identical (The Conquest of Michoacán, 322 n). 30. Curiously, it is not that Spaniards claim that the Cazonci was garroted and Tarascans that he was burned alive, as one might expect, but quite the opposite. For example, the interpreter García del Pilar, who was present for both the torture and the execution, claims that don Francisco was burned alive at the stake (cited in García Icazbalceta, Colección de documentos, 2:251), whereas the relación, based in part on the Tarascan lord’s adopted brother don Pedro’s testimony and compiled by Franciscans, asserts that he was mercifully killed before burning: “Y diéronle garrote y ahogáronle, y ansí murió y pusieron en rededor dél mucha leña y quemáronle (Tudela, Relación de las ceremonias y ritos, 275) (And they garroted and strangled him, and thus he died and they put a good deal of wood around him and burned him; translation mine). In his own three accounts of the execution, in his Memorias and in 1530 and 1532 letters to the crown, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán fails to specify whether the Cazonci was burned alive or garroted (Manuel Carrera Stampa, Memoria de los servicios que había hecho Nuño de Guzmán, desde que fue nombrado Gobernador de Pánuco en 1525, 63–66; Razo Zaragoza y Cortés, Crónicas de la conquista, 26; Del Paso y Troncoso, Epistolario de Nueva España, 2:155); the trial records do, however, say that Guzmán noted that the Cazonci, don Francisco, was baptized although relapsed, and offered him the possibility of being garroted before burning should he wish to die as a Christian (France V. Scholes and Eleanor B. Adams, eds., Proceso contra Tzintzicha Tangaxoan El Caltzontzin formado por Nuño de Guzmán año de 1530, 66 – 67). 31. Scholes and Adams, Proceso, 12; translation mine. The most detailed report of the Cazonci’s sodomy comes from a Tarascan named Cuaraque speaking through an interpreter: Preguntado si sabe que el dicho Caçonçi cometa y usa [sic] pecado abominable de la sodomía, teniendo consigo indios con quien fornique y cometa el dicho pecado, dijo que dice el dicho indio que sabe tiene indios con quien se echa, que se llama el uno Juanico, que está en Pascuaro que

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vendrá ahora, y otro que conoció que es mozo que se llamó Guysaquaro. Y esto que lo ha oído decir y que es notorio a todos los indios criados del dicho Caçonçi, y que cuando está borracho el dicho Caçonçi, le ha visto meter la lengua en la boca y besar al dicho Juanillo, y que desde chiquito tiene por costumbre el dicho Caçonçi de tener aquellos para aquel efecto, y que así es notorio que los tiene para aquello y por tales son habidos y tenidos entre ellos. (47) (Asked whether he knows if said Cazonci commits and uses the abominable sin of sodomy, having with him Indians with whom he fornicates and commits said sin, he said that said Indian says that he knows he has Indians with whom he lays, that one is named Juanico, who is in Páscuaro and is coming soon, and another that he met who is a youth named Guysaquaro. And that he has heard this said and that it is common knowledge among all the Indian servants of said Cazonci, and that when said Cazonci is drunk, he has seen him kiss said Juanillo and put his tongue in his mouth, and that since he was little said Cazonci has had the habit of having servants for this purpose, and that it is well known that he has them for that, and as such they are had and held among them; translation mine.)

The principal allegation of the trial that led to the Cazonci’s death, however, is that the cacique committed treason by interfering with the encomienda system and encouraging the Tarascan principales to disobey the Spaniards; by withholding information regarding the location of silver and gold; and by having ordered Tarascans to kill Spaniards and keeping their belongings (14 –15). Although not included in the official trial questions, another accusation was that after ordering Spaniards killed, the Cazonci had their skins flayed and danced in them in native rituals (Carrera Stampa, Memoria de los servicios, 65; Tudela, Relación de las ceremonias y ritos, 274). In his relación of the events, Pedro de Carranza says that some said the Cazonci was tortured to get more gold out of him, others said it was because of the Spaniards that had been killed and their flayed skins danced in, and still others said it was because of the warriors the Tarascans allegedly had waiting in another town, which never proved true (Razo y Zaragoza, Crónicas de la conquista, 137). 32. Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other, 110. 33. As Lynne Segal notes, the military is an especially homosocial institution, because powerful and exclusive bonds between men combined with compulsory heterosexuality produce a volatile tension between homoeroticism and homophobia (Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, 159). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick also observes that in the military, the prescription of intimate male bonding and the proscription of homosexuality are both stronger than in civilian society (Epistemology of the Closet, 186). 34. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 101. See also Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Segal, Slow Motion, 133. 35. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault asserts that there was a historical rupture in the late nineteenth century, at which time the expression homosexual began to describe a type of individual, replacing the concept of sodomy, which until that point had designated a vice to which any man could fall prey under given circumstances (43). Foucault’s assertion of a rupture that can be pinpointed with such precision has been disputed by some scholars, and can be countered with cases such as Bray’s example of the transitional eighteenth-century subculture of the British molly houses, where men could engage in crossdressing and effeminate behavior, and act out same-sex marriage ceremonies. Although it may have been a more gradual transition rather than an abrupt rupture, Foucault’s basic distinction between sodomitic vice and homosexual identity remains a point of departure for much of recent scholarship on the history of same-sex relations. The chronicles of conquest would seem to fit into this notion of a gradual transition, because although the Amerindians are constantly referred to as grandes sodomitas, this notion of sodomites is less of a personal identity than a description of peoples habitually addicted to what was considered a vice. 36. Trexler, Sex and Conquest, 171. Trexler further notes that in contrast to the European

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practice of punishing the insertive partner as the aggressor, accounts of native American punishments of sodomy point to a more severe penalty for the receptive partner. 37. Lancaster, Life Is Hard, 239; Murray, Latin American Male Homosexualities, 55; Gutmann, Meanings of Macho, 128; James N. Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil, 168, 254–55. 38. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 108; Bergman, Gaiety Transfigured, 43. 39. Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 73–74. 40. Franciscan missionary Diego de Landa witnessed such a ritual involving stringing together penises among the Maya of Yucatán in the sixteenth century: Otras veces hacían un sucio y penoso sacrificio, juntándose en el templo los que lo hacían y puestos en regla se hacían sendos agujeros en los miembros viriles, al soslayo, por el lado, y hechos pasaban toda la mayor cantidad de hilo que podían, quedando así todos ensartados; también untaban con la sangre de todos aquellas partes al demonio, y el que más hacía era tenido por más valiente. (Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, 49) (At other times they engaged in a filthy and arduous sacrifice, gathering in the temple and lining up together, each made a hole in his virile members, sideways, on a slant, and having done this they would thread through the hole the largest quantity of string they could, in order to end up all strung together; they also anointed those parts with the blood of the participants in this demonic ritual, and he who participated to the greatest extent was held to be the bravest.)

41. Trexler, Sex and Conquest, 68. 42. The scenes in which Martínez’s conquistador and the emperor interact have a clear intertextual relationship with Fuentes’s Terra Nostra; in Fuentes’s anachronistic version of the period of conquest, the character known simply as “Guzmán” accompanies Emperor Felipe II on his hunting jaunts in a similarly servile fashion. The real Fray Juan de Zumárraga, a Franciscan, was the first bishop and archbishop of New Spain, from 1527 to 1548, and leader of the Mexican Inquisition, from 1536 to 1543. Zumárraga became the historical Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán’s enemy during Guzmán’s tenure as president of the first Royal Audience, primarily due to differences of opinion regarding the treatment of the indigenous population (Greenleaf, Zumárraga; Chipman, Nuño de Guzmán; Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga). See René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure; and Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes toward a Political Economy of Sex.” 43. Lancaster, Life Is Hard, 236. In the introduction to his edition of Guzmán’s Memoria, Carrera Stampa includes a page on the conquistador’s erotic life; curiously, a paragraph is dedicated to what we might call a homosocial relationship with another man, one Diego Delgadillo, in whom Carrera Stampa says Guzmán found the ideal companion for his sexual exploits with indigenous women (Memoria de los servicios, 21). 44. José Piedra, “Nationalizing Sissies,” 370. 4. Colonial Desire for the Amerindian and Converso Other in Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante 1. There exists to date no published English translation of El largo atardecer del caminante; thus, the translations of passages cited here are mine, and page numbers in parentheses refer to the original. 2. This notion that Columbus was searching for a haven for persecuted Jews and conversos after the 1492 expulsion exists not only in historical fictions, but also in historiographic representations such as Wiesenthal’s Sails of Hope, originally published in German after World War II. Since the sixteenth-century chroniclers and historians there has also existed the no-

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tion that the lost tribes of Israel had made their way to the Americas such that the Amerindians were perceived as ethnically related to the Jewish people. See Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands. 3. As discussed in the Introduction, these novels include numerous narratives focused on a converso Columbus as protagonist, as well as several novels that feature him as a minor character. 4. Cabeza de Vaca’s construction of a new self corresponds to the pattern described in Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 5. On the book jacket of Daimón, the Trilogía del descubrimiento (Trilogy of the discovery) is promised to be completed with a novel in preparation called Los heraldos negros (The black heralds, a reference to Peruvian César Vallejo’s celebrated poem and collection). In an interview with Magdalena García Pinto, Posse announced that this third novel would deal with the presence of Jesuit missionaries in the New World (“Entrevista con Abel Posse,” 499). Apparently, Posse changed his mind and completed the trilogy with El largo atardecer del caminante, narrating the life of Cabeza de Vaca instead. 6. Seymour Menton, Donald Shaw, Raymond Souza, Terry Seymour, Elzbieta Sklodowska, David Bost, and Juan José Barrientos are among the scholars who have published critical articles and book chapters on the first two novels of Posse’s trilogy. Of these, only Menton’s book and Bost’s article refer to El largo atardecer del caminante; Bost’s article specifically develops the relationship between Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios and Posse’s novel. 7. The historical Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked and wandered throughout what is now the southwestern United States for nearly a decade in the early sixteenth century and then after writing the chronicle of his adventures in North America was appointed governor of the Río de la Plata region by Emperor Carlos V, a commission from which he returned in chains. The reasons given for his arrest vary; some scholars attribute his imprisonment primarily to his unpopular defense of the Amerindians (Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, 197). The most extensive original source on the issue, the Comentarios recorded by Cabeza de Vaca’s amanuensis and apologist, Pedro Hernández, points rather to a variety of political conflicts surrounding his service as governor of the Río de la Plata region. The Comentarios was published following Naufragios in various joint editions and translations, under the name Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. 8. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 4. More complete original citations refer to “no me quedó lugar para hacer más servicio de éste, que es traer a Vuestra Majestad relación de lo que en diez años que por muchas y muy extrañas tierras que anduve perdido y en cueros pudiese haber y ver” and “A la cual suplico la reciba en nombre del servicio: pues este todo es el que un hombre que salió desnudo pudo sacar consigo” (Naufragios, 76). 9. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 41. The original reads: “los que quedamos escapados, desnudos como nacimos y perdido todo lo que traíamos, y aunque todo valía poco, para entonces valía mucho” (Naufragios, 120). 10. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 42. The original reads: “[M]as cuando ellos nos vieron así en tan diferente hábito del primero y en manera tan extraña, espantáronse tanto que se volvieron atrás” (Naufragios, 120). It is in this final shipwreck episode where Cabeza de Vaca observes the ritual weeping that he will interpret as sorrow for their plight, though, as evidenced by Léry’s and Staden’s testimonies of sixteenth-century Brazil, the weeping welcome was a common greeting in different parts of the Americas. 11. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 53, 69, 75. The originals read: “Fueron casi seis años el tiempo que yo estuve en esta tierra, solo entre ellos y desnudo, como todos andaban” (Naufragios, 134); “[P]orque para el frío yo no tenía otro remedio, por andar desnudo como nací” (154); and “Ya he dicho cómo por toda esta tierra anduvimos desnudos; y como no estábamos acostumbrados a ello, a manera de serpientes mudábamos los cueros dos veces en el

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año” (161– 62). In a footnote to his edition of Naufragios, Juan Francisco Maura notes that Cabeza de Vaca persists in this representation of himself as naked, in spite of the fact that he also records repeatedly accepting gifts of blankets and furs (182 n 85). 12. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 120. The original reads: “Llegamos a Méjico . . . donde del visorey y del marqués del Valle fuimos muy bien tratados y con mucho placer recibidos, y nos dieron de vestir y ofrecieron todo lo que tenían” (Naufragios, 214). The Marqués del Valle is the title awarded by Emperor Carlos V to Hernán Cortés. 13. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 120. The original reads: “Llegados en Compostela, el gobernador nos recibió muy bien, y de lo que tenía nos dio de vestir; lo cual yo por muchos días no pude traer, ni podíamos dormir sino en el suelo” (Naufragios, 213–14). The governor referred to is Nuño de Guzmán. 14. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 114. The original reads: “Que nosotros sanábamos los enfermos y ellos mataban los que estaban sanos; y que nosotros veníamos desnudos y descalzos, y ellos vestidos y en caballos y con lanzas. Que nosotros no teníamos codicia de ninguna cosa, antes todo cuanto nos daban tornábamos luego a dar, y con nada nos quedábamos, y los otros no tenían otro fin sino robar cuanto hallaban, y nunca daban nada a nadie” (Naufragios, 205). 15. See Beatriz Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista: Mitificación y emergencia. 16. Jacques Lafaye, Los conquistadores, 76–77. 17. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 3. The original reads: “[B]ien pensé que mis obras y servicios fueran tan claros y manifiestos como fueron los de mis antepasados y que no tuviera necesidad de hablar para ser contado entre los que con entera fe y gran cuidado administran y tratan los cargos de Vuestra Majestad” (Naufragios, 75–76). 18. See Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista. 19. See Sylvia Molloy, “Alteridad y reconocimiento en los Naufragios de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,” 427. 20. Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista, 231. 21. Todorov, Conquest of America, 219. Regarding the use of indigenous lexical items, see David Lagmanovich, “Los Naufragios de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca como construcción narrativa,” 29. Regarding Cabeza de Vaca’s acquisition of indigenous symbolic practices, see Maureen Ahern, “The Cross and the Gourd: The Appropriation of Ritual Signs in the Relaciones of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Fray Marcos de Niza.” 22. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 14. The original reads: “íbamos mudos y sin lengua, por donde mal nos podíamos entender con los indios” (Naufragios, 88). 23. Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista, 227. 24. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 46. The original reads: “Cinco cristianos que estaban en el rancho en la costa llegaron a tal extremo, que se comieron los unos a los otros, hasta que quedó uno solo, que por ser solo no hubo quien lo comiese. . . . De este caso se alteraron tanto los indios, y hubo entre ellos tan gran escándalo, que sin duda si al principio ellos lo vieran, los mataran, y todos nos viéramos en grandes trabajos” (Naufragios, 125). It is curious that in reference to the last survivor, Cabeza de Vaca says not that “there was no one left for him to eat” but rather “there was no one left to eat him.” A humorous parallel to this in fiction can be found in Mark Twain’s short story “Cannibalism in the Cars,” in which a former member of Congress tells a fellow train passenger the story of a previous trip when he was stuck on a train in the snow, and after several days the passengers began to deliberate and vote on whom to sacrifice for food for the others. After this man disembarks, the conductor tells his interlocutor that it is all a fantasy, and that sometimes he tells the story all the way to where he is the only one left: “When he gets all eat up [sic] but himself, he always says: ‘Then the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived, and there being no opposi-

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tion, I was duly elected, after which, there being no objections offered, I resigned. Thus I am here’ ” (16). That is to say, there was no one left to eat him. 25. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 47, 61; Naufragios, 126, 144–45. 26. The original reads: “un híbrido incongruente—aindiado pero no indio; hispanohablante pero no español” (Molloy, “Alteridad y reconocimiento,” 447). 27. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 107. The original reads: “[N]osotros les decíamos [a los indios] que los íbamos a buscar [a los cristianos] para decirles que no los matasen ni tomasen por esclavos, ni los sacasen de sus tierras, ni les hiciesen otro mal ninguno” (Naufragios, 198). 28. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 108; emphasis mine. The original reads: “A mediodía topamos nuestros mensajeros, que nos dijeron que no habían hallado gente, que toda andaba por los montes, escondidos huyendo, porque los cristianos no los matasen y hiciesen esclavos” (Naufragios, 200; emphasis mine). Molloy, “Alteridad y reconocimiento,” 446. 29. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 112; emphasis mine. The original reads: “[V]inieron seiscientas personas, que nos trajeron todo el maíz que alcanzaban . . . mas nosotros no quisimos tomar de todo ello sino la comida, y dimos todo lo otro a los cristianos para que entre sí la repartiesen” (Naufragios, 204; emphasis mine). 30. See Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista. 31. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 65. The original reads: “paréceme que sería tierra muy fructífera si fuese labrada y habitada por gente de razón” (Naufragios, 149). 32. Jacques Lafaye, “Los ‘milagros’ de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1527–1536,” 84; Robert E. Lewis, “Los Naufragios de Álvar Núñez: Historia y ficción,” 690. 33. David H. Bost, “Reassessing the Past: Abel Posse and the New Historical Novel,” 43; Juan Bruce-Novoa, “Shipwrecked in the Sea of Signification: Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación and Chicano Literature”; Lucía Invernizzi Santa Cruz, “Naufragios e Infortunios: Discurso que transforma fracasos en triunfos,” 15. 34. José Rabasa, “Alegoría y etnografía en Naufragios y Comentarios de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,” 932; José Rabasa, “De la Allegoresis etnográfica en los Naufragios de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,” 181; Silvia Spitta, Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America, 35. Cesare Acutis’s words read: “Álvar Núñez . . . perdió junto con el vestido su identidad social, había entrado en una nueva cultura” and “ha renegado de la cultura cuyo símbolo máximo son aquellas ropas” (“La inconfesable utopía,” 55, 50). 35. Acutis, “La inconfesable utopía,” 52; Margo Glantz, “El cuerpo inscrito y el texto escrito o la desnudez como naufragio,” 416; Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista, 228; Glantz, “El cuerpo inscrito,” 417. 36. See Molloy, “Alteridad y reconocimiento”; and Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista. Todorov observes in reference to the first mention of the Amerindians in a European document, Columbus’s diary, that “the first characteristic of these people to strike Columbus is the absence of clothes—which in their turn symbolize culture” (The Conquest of America, 34). 37. The original reads: “Así desnudo, el yo sería una suerte de espacio despojado (España ha quedado atrás) que se irá llenando con lo desconocido—América—hasta lograr nuevo ser, nueva identidad” (Molloy, “Alteridad y reconocimiento,” 432). 38. Jonathan Goldberg sees Cabeza de Vaca’s nakedness as affording him the opportunity to reconstruct himself as a go-between with an indeterminate gender and unstable ethnic identity who consequently has the ability to mediate between cultures: “If Cabeza de Vaca never ceases to believe that he is a Spaniard, has he, in the very nakedness of his body, become an Indian? Or something else, a go-between that cannot inhabit either body fully?” (Sodometries, 213). 39. In Pastor’s own words, “Esta desnudez expresa la forma extrema de desposeimiento en relación con el contexto cultural e ideológico dentro del cual se definían la figura del conquistador y su proyecto”; for Pastor, the final shipwreck represents “la culminación del pro-

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ceso de cancelación del modelo español de conquista y el punto cero del desarrollo de la conciencia crítica del narrador” (Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista, 224). 40. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Castaways, 114 –15. The originals read: “[L]os cristianos nos enviaron, debajo de cautela, a un Cebreros, alcalde, y con él otros dos, los cuales nos llevaron por los montes y despoblados, por apartarnos de la conversación de los indios, y porque no viésemos ni entendiésemos lo que de hecho hicieron” (Naufragios, 206; emphasis mine). 41. Little is known about the historical Cabeza de Vaca after his return to Spain. He was imprisoned, stripped of his titles, and permanently banned from returning to the Río de la Plata region. He is believed to have died poverty stricken in the late 1550s, most likely in Valladolid, not in Seville as portrayed in Posse’s novel (Enrique Pupo-Walker, “Pesquisas para una nueva lectura de los Naufragios de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,” xxv; David A. Howard, Conquistador in Chains: Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the Americas, 190). 42. Ninety years before Columbus’s first voyage, the conquest of the Canary Islands marked the beginning of the westward movement of Spanish imperialism that culminated in the conquest of Spanish America; as Posse’s narrator claims, his grandfather set the pace for a series of conquistadors who would establish Spain as the empire whose sun never set. 43. The term morisco is a parallel to converso in that it refers to persons of Moorish background whose families converted to Christianity and remained in Iberia after it was reconquered in 1492 following nearly eight centuries of Moorish occupation. 44. The name Dulján can be seen as a tribute to the only Amerindian referred to by a proper name in the text of Naufragios, Dulchalchelín. 45. The narrator’s slogan echoes the historical Cabeza de Vaca’s plea to the emperor to promote the pacific evangelization of the Amerindians: “[I]f they are to be brought to be Christians and into obedience of Your Imperial Majesty, they must be led by good treatment, and . . . this is a very sure way, and no other will suffice” (Castaways, 108). Cabeza de Vaca’s attitude toward the Amerindians has been likened to that of Bartolomé de las Casas (Todorov, The Conquest of America, 197); Rolena Adorno observes, “His advocacy of humane treatment for these peoples makes him a Lascasian by experience rather than reading” (“The Negotiation of Fear,” 186). 46. The low price of the house is presumably due to the fact that during the 1492 expulsion from Spain, Jews were given a short period to sell their goods, and most were thus forced to give them away or sell them cheaply before their exile. 47. Posse’s Cabeza de Vaca thus renames both of the women in his life. In the case of Amaría, the narrator explains that her name in her own language means “Niña-Nube” (cloud girl) but that he chose to rebaptize her as Amaría, which the narrator says she liked. Her original name is partially restored in the next generation, when Cabeza de Vaca and Amaría name their daughter Nube. 5. Ambivalence toward Converso Self and Conquered Other in Homero Aridjis’s 1492 and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo 1. As in Chapter 2, here the English translations from Memorias del Nuevo Mundo (Memories of the New World) will be mine, and 1492 will be cited from Betty Ferber’s published translation, 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile. For 1492, the first page number in parentheses refers to the original Spanish and the second number to Ferber’s English translation; for Memorias, page numbers in parentheses refer to the original novel. 2. The picaresque nature of Aridjis’s novel has been discussed to some degree in Campos’s 1996 dissertation, “Twentieth-Century Debates.” In her exploration of the picaresque in 1492, Campos focuses less on protagonist Juan Cabezón and more on his assortment of marginal cohorts as pícaros.

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Several decades after its initial publication, Claudio Guillén’s definition of the subgenre remains the most succinct effort to categorize the picaresque. For breadth, Ulrich Wicks’s comprehensive Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions: A Theory and Research Guide is unsurpassed. In “Toward a Definition,” Guillén asserts that in the picaresque, the novel’s protagonist is a social half-outsider, an orphan, a rogue, and an antihero; the narration is a first-person pseudoautobiography; the narrator’s point of view is partial; the total view of the pícaro is reflective, philosophical, and critical on religious or moral grounds; material existence is stressed, with special attention to hunger as motivation; the pícaro is usually a servant of many masters or in any case observes a number of collective social situations and employs irony and satire to criticize them; the pícaro moves horizontally through space and vertically through society; and, finally, the novel’s structure is episodic. The picaresque, then, is characterized by its concentration on a marginal character and his conflicts with the social hierarchy; geographical and social mobility, which brings the pícaro into contact with a heterogeneous social world; a two-level narration, usually achieved through the first-person retrospective form that divides the pícaro into narrator and character; the unreliability of the narrator, who as a pícaro cannot faithfully relate his own life story; and the presence of irony, which is directed at different social types and, significantly, at the antihero himself. 3. The first novel, 1492, has the opposite dynamic, as the whole novel is narrated from the first-person perspective of Juan Cabezón until the epilogue or appendix that contains a document in the third person. This document consists of the apocryphal record of an inquisitorial trial of fictional characters Isabel de la Vega and her brother, Gonzalo, in absentia, at the end of which they are sentenced to be burned in effigy for Judaizing. 4. This connection between the picaresque novel and the status of the converso has been drawn in reference to the genre’s very beginnings. Notably, although we know virtually nothing about who might be the author of the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Américo Castro contends that he must have been a converso (Hacia Cervantes, 107–13), a notion that many later scholars have reiterated without proving or disproving. Because we have no definitive extratextual knowledge about this author, this speculation is based entirely on the content of the sixteenth-century novel. Thus, in making this claim about the Lazarillo, scholars are pointing to an implicit parallel between the social situation of the converso and the pícaro that would attract a converso author to write a picaresque novel. 5. In Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 –1604), Mateo Alemán’s narrator vacillates between identifying with and rejecting his father and the presumably converso background he represents. As do other scholars, editor Benito Brancaforte perceives this as a projection of the author’s ambivalent feelings regarding his own converso background (Introduction to Guzmán de Alfarache, 37– 51). As Brancaforte observes in his introduction and in the footnotes to his edition of Alemán’s novel, the narrator alternates between hinting at his own converso heritage and telling stories and jokes that make fun of Spaniards of Jewish lineage. As in the case of Aridjis’s fictional Juan Cabezón, Golden Age author Mateo Alemán’s ambivalence is formed within the sociohistorical context of inquisitorial Spain. 6. Ulrich Wicks, “Onlyman,” 22. Wicks’s 1975 article focuses on José Rubén Romero’s La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (1938), a picaresque narrative that, like Aridjis’s two Juan Cabezón novels, deals with the period immediately before and after another time of historical crisis, in Romero’s case, that of the Mexican Revolution. The picaresque tends to lend itself particularly to the description of periods of sociohistorical crisis, as evidenced by the genre’s initial emergence in the conflictive context of baroque Spain. Regarding this original context, see José Antonio Maravall’s La cultura del barroco and La literatura picaresca desde la historia social. See my “New World Rogues: Transculturation and Identity in the Latin American Pi-

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caresque Novel” for an analysis of Latin American picaresque novels as reflections of moments of sociohistorical transition. 7. Guillén, “Toward a Definition,” 80 (emphasis in the original), 82; Campos, “TwentiethCentury Debates.” 8. Lazarillo de Tormes’s father is also convicted of a crime, that of stealing grain, although rather than being executed he is exiled, from whence he goes to war against the Moors and dies honorably. Guzmán de Alfarache’s father, in turn, is a delinquent whose various crimes include fraud and sodomy. The third of the trio of prototypical pícaros, the title character of Francisco de Quevedo’s 1626 El Buscón, has a father who is a barber, a drunkard, and a thief, who is executed by the civil authorities, and a mother who is a conversa, a procuress, and a witch, who ends up sentenced to burn by the Inquisition. 9. Again, this passage of 1492 parallels Lazarillo de Tormes, because after Lazarillo’s father’s death, his mother begins to live with a moreno (dark-skinned man) and bears him a son. One of the Lazarillo’s most interesting scenes is when the narrator’s younger brother fears his father is a bogeyman (“Madre, coco”), without recognizing his own dark skin. This racial image of what we might call in Lacanian terms a kind of failure to “mirror” leads the narrator, Lázaro, to reflect that we often comment on aspects in others that we fail to recognize in ourselves. 10. The use of a badge indicates that the lover who led Pero Meñique astray from Catholicism was Jewish. According to Yitzhak Baer’s History of the Jews in Christian Spain, Jews were periodically mandated to wear their hair a certain way and wear some kind of distinctive clothing, and sometimes a badge, the color of which he does not specify. This practice would seem to vary widely according to period and to region, as Spain was not a united kingdom prior to the late fifteenth century. In Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Norman Roth mentions that in late-fourteenth-century Aragón-Catalonia, Jews were ordered to wear a scarlet gown or a dark cloak with a yellow badge, but he refers to this as “an attempt to reintroduce the infamous ‘badge,’ mostly ignored in Spain” (75). In Aridjis’s representation of late-fifteenth-century Castile, Jews are made to wear a scarlet badge, “la señal bermeja de los judíos,” as well as a certain type of clothing and hairstyle imposed by the Christians in an effort to mark the Jews’ difference (1492, 91, 85). 11. Guillén, “Toward a Definition,” 83. The riots over special taxes for conversos and the political upheaval surrounding the figure of Álvaro de Luna culminated in a siege of Toledo in 1449 that Roth categorizes as an “actual war” (Conversos, Inquisition, 89). As Condestable of Castile, Álvaro de Luna, whose own family background was converso, was accused of appointing New Christians to high offices. The formal charges against him included sodomy, an accusation that in early modern Europe tended to indicate political motivations, as treason and sodomy were often conflated (see Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England; Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century England; Cohen, “Legislating the Norm”; and Trexler, Sex and Conquest.) Don Álvaro de Luna and the 1449 Toledo Rebellion were intimately linked to the question of the establishment of the Inquisition; as Roth notes, even the tremendous influence of Friar Vicente Ferrer did not lead to attempts to introduce the Inquisition into Spain, but the political conflict surrounding the figure of Álvaro de Luna did lead King Juan II to appeal to Pope Nicholas V regarding the establishment of the Inquisition. Roth further suggests that were it not for Luna’s execution in 1453, the effort to bring the Inquisition to Spain would have progressed further at that time (Conversos, Inquisition, 223). 12. In 1478, Pope Sixtus IV sent a letter to Fernando and Isabel regarding the Judaizing of certain baptized people and their presumed influence on other conversos; this letter apparently was a response to a previous communication on this score from the Catholic monarchs. Complying with their request for the sanction to act against heretics, the pope authorized the appointment of inquisitors in certain Spanish cities. By the end of 1480, Fernando and Isabel

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had taken steps to implement the Inquisition in Seville, and by early 1481, the Santo Oficio (Holy Office) was in place in that city (Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, 222–23). 13. The libelous accusations that Jews scourged the crucifix were so common that the inquisitors incorporated it into their questions, asking if anyone had witnessed such an act (Baer, History of the Jews, 2:362). According to Baer, it was also a popular superstition throughout Europe that Jews desecrated the host, and in 1377, several Jews were tortured and burnt to death in Huesca on this charge (2:88 – 89). As Tannahill records in Flesh and Blood, in 1215, Pope Innocent III summoned the Fourth Lateran Council, which declared that the host not only symbolized the body of Christ, but also was transubstantiated such that “hoc est corpeum [sic] meum” (this is my body) was to be interpreted literally (77). Tannahill further notes, “Within a few decades, Christians had become so convinced that the host was the real and sentient body of Christ that they were prepared to massacre Jews accused of torturing it” (82). She cites a dozen cases in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe where entire Jewish communities were annihilated for allegedly tormenting consecrated wafers (83–84). On the subject of the Eucharist, see also Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, esp. 77–85. 14. In Jewish Self-Hatred, Sander Gilman discusses the history of the myth of the foetor judäicus (174 –75). 15. At times, 1492 loses its narrative focus on Juan Cabezón and lapses into long digressions on the Inquisition, so much that Campos considers the Inquisition the central protagonist of Aridjis’s novel. In “Twentieth-Century Debates,” Campos observes that the ultimate effect of the novel’s focus on the Inquisition is to alienate Juan Cabezón’s marginal perspective from his personal story and reorient it toward the larger historical events recounted, thus marginalizing him once again. 16. Because it was an organ of the Catholic Church, the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over Jews as such. Its efforts to eradicate heresy, however, were often directed toward Jews who had submitted to voluntary or forcible baptism and later recanted. Although the terms converso and crypto-Jew are often conflated in common parlance, they are not interchangeable: the term converso or New Christian simply refers to someone of Jewish extraction who has undergone baptism, whereas crypto-Jew specifically indicates a baptized Jew who “Judaizes,” or practices Jewish rites and customs, in secret. 17. Marks, Marrano as Metaphor, 148; Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 2, 14. Roth claims that although modern historians have repeatedly exaggerated Pulgar’s claim, the presumed Jewish ancestry of Tomás de Torquemada would have been quite remote (Conversos, Inquisition, 225). 18. Aridjis defines the familiars as an army of unpaid spies, bodyguards, and lackeys who serve the inquisitors in exchange for material privileges (1492, 149). 19. In Aridjis’s novel, familiars have permission to bear arms and are empowered to arrest heretics (ibid., 134). The reference to panopticism here refers to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. 20. Pedro de Arbués was attacked by two men with covered faces in 1485 while praying matins in church in Saragossa. Implicated in this notorious assassination were many principal conversos, including relatives of Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez, two converso treasury officials who were involved in arranging the financing of Columbus’s first voyage (Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, 258–59). 21. Here Ferber’s translation adds meaning by using the verb redoubled, which is absent in the original. 22. Her father is presumably Luis de Santángel, the merchant of Teruel who was tried by the Holy Tribunal in the mid-1480s. Roth notes that this merchant is not to be confused either with the Luis de Santángel who was accused in connection with the Arbués murder in Saragossa or with the Catholic monarchy’s treasury official of that same name (ibid., 130). 23. The La Guardia trial was an extreme example of the common blood libel that Jews rit-

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ually murder Christian children. In this case, no body representing the child who was allegedly crucified was ever produced; moreover, no effort was made to link the “holy child” to any particular missing child. Baer documents the La Guardia trial extensively, recounting the detailed testimony of alleged conspirator Yucé Franco, who admitted to crimes under torture; Franco was burned with several others in an auto-da-fé, in spite of the fact that he was an unbaptized Jew rather than a converso and thus was not subject to the inquisitorial charge of heresy (History of the Jews, 2:398 – 423). In his history of the Spanish Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea observes that in light of the lack of evidence and the discrepancies in the various depositions, it is evident that the entire affair was “the creation of the torture-chamber” (History of the Inquisition in Spain, 1:134). 24. It is not the Jewish practice to name children after living relatives; many conversos adopted this practice, however, to assimilate to Christian society. 25. As discussed in the Introduction, for more than a century, there has been a constant stream of historical scholarship claiming that Columbus was a converso. As mentioned in Chapter 4, there has also been speculation that he was searching for the lost tribes of Israel among the Amerindians or seeking a haven from persecution for the Jews and conversos. 26. Some of the men on Columbus’s first voyage remained at a harbor they named La Navidad after the Santa María had been wrecked there on December 25, 1492. When Martín Alonso Pinzón returned after having apparently deserted for several days with the Pinta, Columbus left behind some forty Spaniards to found a colony at La Navidad because he saw that the men could not all safely return to Spain on the remaining two seaworthy vessels. When he returned to Hispaniola on his second voyage, he found them all dead and the settlement destroyed. It is presumed that the problem began when the Spaniards fought among themselves over native women and gold (Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 139). Guillermo Coma, who wrote letters to his friend Nicolò Syllacio describing Columbus’s second voyage, says that the Tainos under Guacanagarí explained that the massacre was the result of the Spaniards’ having taken many women, causing the Tainos under Caonabó to retaliate (Morison, Journals and Other Documents, 239–40). 27. From the time of Columbus’s first voyage, the Europeans had divided the island natives into two groups: “gentle” Tainos, or “good” Indians (Taino meant “good” in their language), and the “fierce” Caribs, whom the Spaniards understood to be described as anthropophagi by their neighbors. Sale contends that there is no reliable evidence that the Caribs were either cannibals or warlike, but whenever the Spaniards encountered submissive or nonhostile Amerindians, they called them Tainos, and when the Amerindians defended themselves, they were categorized as Caribs (The Conquest of Paradise, 130–31). As discussed in Chapter 1, by the time of later voyages, a royal proclamation of 1503 had established that only cannibals could legitimately serve as slaves, so the Spaniards were eager to describe all Amerindians as Caribs in order to enslave them (ibid., 134; Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, 49–51). 28. Most of these claims regarding the particular anthropophagous habits of the Caribs are made by Guillermo Coma of Aragón, as transcribed by Nicolò Syllacio (Morison, Journals and Other Documents, 229–40). 29. The monstrous races the Europeans expected to find in the New World were described in the writings of Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Pliny the Elder, and Pierre d’Ailly; works by the latter three were found in Columbus’s personal library. The 1494 letter of Dr. Diego Álvarez Chanca from Columbus’s second voyage refers to a human neck stewing in a pot (Jane, Four Voyages, 32). 30. Campos discusses the parallel between the shamanistic experiences of the historical Cabeza de Vaca and Aridjis’s fictional Juan Cabezón (“Twentieth-Century Debates,” 215–16). The coincidence with Cabeza de Vaca’s experiences is not accidental, as his Naufragios is listed in Aridjis’s bibliography at the end of Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. There is also a strik-

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ing coincidence with the experiences of Hans Staden, who was likewise forced by a cannibal tribe to serve as a healer in Brazil in the mid-sixteenth century. Although Staden’s success was limited because several of the people he was bid to cure did not survive, he was nevertheless able to turn even these failures to his advantage, convincing the Tupinamba that the deaths were due to the fact that those individuals ate human flesh and threatened and mistreated Staden, for which his God was punishing them. Like the historical Cabeza de Vaca and fictional Juan Cabezón, Staden no longer had to fear for his life after taking up the practice of shamanism due to the natives’ belief in his ability to both heal and harm, and, like them, he combined Christian prayers and indigenous practices in his curing and attributed his successes to God’s will and direct intervention, as he describes in chaps. 33–34 of pt. 1 of The True History of His Captivity. 31. In the historical record, as in Aridjis’s novel, Caonabó was tricked into captivity by the Spaniards who convinced him that shackles were necklaces like those worn by the king of Spain; Caonabó died en route to Spain, where he was being sent as a prisoner (Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 154, 166–67). 32. In Aridjis’s novel, as in Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s eyewitness account, an old woman confides in la Malinche that she should save herself, because the Cholulans intend to ambush the Spaniards. Because the interpreter revealed this information to the Spaniards, who then preemptively attack Cholula, opening the door for the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the name of la Malinche would later become synonymous with betrayal. 33. As noted in the Introduction to the present study, in other Mexican works such as Fuentes’s Terra Nostra and Solares’s Nen, la inútil, the violence of the conquest is experienced by the fictional conquistadors as occurring while the protagonists are in a dreamlike state. Presumably, this is because Latin American authors who are attempting to represent the European perspective on the conquest reach an impasse in their ability to identify with this perspective when it comes to representing deliberate acts of violence against Amerindian peoples. 34. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 7. 35. As in Spain, in Mexico the Inquisition did not itself burn those it convicted, but rather practiced relajación al brazo seglar, that is, it remanded them to the secular authorities, who proceeded to execute the convicts of the Holy Tribunal, burning them alive if they were unrepentant and mercifully garroting them first if they did repent. The auto-da-fé per se was not the execution, but the procession leading to the stake. The case of don Carlos, chief of Texcoco, was one of the most famous trials for indigenous heresy in New Spain and was the beginning of the downfall of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, as the cacique had been one of the brightest students of the Tlatelolco school for training the native priesthood but in 1539 was burned for being a recalcitrant idolater (Greenleaf, Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536 –1543, 36, 67). 36. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 87. The original reads: “El mexicano no quiere ser ni indio, ni español. Tampoco quiere descender de ellos. Los niega. Y no se afirma en tanto que mestizo, sino como abstracción: es un hombre” (El laberinto de la soledad, 78–79). Conclusion. Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Conquest in the New Latin American Historical Novel 1. Boullosa, Llanto: Novelas imposibles, 98; translation mine. 2. Ibid.

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Index

Aguilar, Jerónimo de: as literary character, 7 Aguilar, Rosario: La niña blanca y los pájaros sin pies, 8, 9, 11 Aguirre, Lope de: as literary character, 7, 16, 116, 187n51, 208n21; represented in film, 7 Aínsa, Fernando, 3 Alemán, Mateo: Guzmán de Alfarache, 139, 217n5, 218n8 Alencar, José: Iracema, 4; O Guarani, 4 Alvarado, Pedro de, 203n5; as literary character, 77, 90, 168–69 Álvarez Gardeazábal, Gustavo: Pepe Botellas, 26, 189n78 Ángel, Albalucía: Las andariegas, 5, 8 Anthropophagy. See Cannibalism Arenas, Reinaldo: El mundo alucinante, 5, 185n43 Arias, Arturo: Jaguar en llamas, 8, 182n20, 185n43 Aridjis, Homero: 1492, 17, 22, 26, 37, 71, 75, 114, 138– 59, 175, 185n43, 202nn1,2, 203n6, 216n2, 217n3, 218nn9,10, 219nn15,18,19; Gran teatro del fin del mundo, 181n18, 202n2; La leyenda de los soles, 8, 202n2; Memorias del Nuevo Mundo, 17, 22, 26, 37, 71– 94, 114, 138, 139, 147, 154, 158, 159– 74, 175, 176, 179n5, 185n43, 202n1, 220n30 Asturias, Miguel Angel: Maladrón, 5 Baccino Ponce de León, Napoleón: Maluco, 17, 37, 185n43 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3, 43, 53 Barreiro, José: The Indian Chronicles, 10 Beltrán de Guzmán, Nuño. See Guzmán, Nuño Beltrán de Benítez Rojo, Antonio: El mar de las lentejas, 16, 185n43 Berdache, 97, 98, 103, 206n11, 206– 7n13, 208n18 Bhabha, Homi, 19, 23, 179n2, 187n56 Bloom, Harold, 18

257

Boldori, Rosa: La morada de los cuatro vientos, 8 Borges, Jorge Luis, 187n53, 189n76 Boullosa, Carmen: Cielos de la tierra, 8, 24; Duerme, 10; Llanto, 2, 8, 22, 175, 177–78 Brailovsky, Antonio Elio: Esta maldita lujuria, 17 Bulcão, Clovis: A quarta parte do mundo, 6 Cabeza de Vaca. See Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Cabrera Infante, Guillermo: Vista del amanecer en el trópico, 8 Calderón, doña Mencía de: as literary character, 9 Caltzontzin. See Cazonci Cannibalism, 18, 36, 121–22, 185n46, 195n45; anthropological approaches to, 28– 36, 44–47, 48, 49, 57, 189n6, 191– 92nn12,13,14, 192–93n16,17, 194nn26,28, 195n31, 196n46, 196–97n52, 197nn54,56, 198nn57,58,59, 199nn61,63,64, 200nn65,66, 201n77; and colonization, 15, 21, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 97, 185n45, 190nn7,8, 191nn10,11, 194nn28,29, 206n9, 220nn27,28; in film, 29, 46; historical documents on, 15, 30, 31, 33– 34, 46, 57, 190nn7,8, 191n11, 193– 94n24, 194nn27,29, 195–96n46, 196nn47,50, 197–98nn55,56, 198– 99nn60,61,62, 200n65, 201n75, 206n9, 214n24, 220n27; history of term, 189n7, 190– 91n8; literary representation of, 15, 21, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 42–44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 54–55, 57–58, 59, 61–62, 70, 78, 93, 161–62, 189–90nn5,6, 192n15, 193nn19,23, 194n25, 195n44, 196n49, 197n53, 198–99n60, 201–2nn78,79, 214– 15n24; postcolonial analysis of discourse on, 21, 28–29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 45, 185nn45,46, 190n7, 191nn10,11,12, 192nn13,14, 192–93n16, 193nn17,23, 194nn27,29, 206n8, 220n27; psychoanalytical approaches to, 28, 47, 189n3, 198n58

258

Index

Cárdenas Miño, Juan: En busca del paraíso, 16, 185n43 Carlos V, King of Spain, 118; as literary character, 110, 111, 172 Carpentier, Alejo: El arpa y la sombra, 5, 7– 8, 15, 184n31; El siglo de las luces, 181n14; La aprendiz de bruja, 7, 183n26; prologue to El reino de este mundo, 181n15 Cazonci (Tzintzicha Tangaxoan, baptized don Francisco), Tarascan chief of Michoacán: historical documents on, 103– 4, 205n2, 210– 11nn28,29,30,31; as literary character, 95, 103, 104– 5, 205n2 Columbus, Christopher, 186n49, 212– 13n2, 220nn26,29; as literary character, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15–16, 24, 72, 95, 114–15, 116, 138, 154, 159– 60, 163, 177, 181nn18,19, 184n31, 186nn49,50, 202n2, 209n25; writings of, 73, 190nn7,8, 194n29, 215n36 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 93 Converso, 219n16; history of, 14, 15, 185n44, 186n49, 218n11, 219n20, 220n24; literary representation of, 14, 15–16, 17, 22, 26, 37, 72, 75, 79, 114, 115, 116–17, 126, 127, 128, 134–37, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142–59, 160, 171, 172–73, 175, 185nn41,43, 186nn49,50, 217nn4,5. See also CryptoJudaism Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 22 Cortés, Hernán: historical figure, 15, 97, 118, 203n5, 203– 4n8, 206n9, 214n12; as literary character, 4, 7, 11, 74, 75, 76, 77, 84, 95, 111– 12, 132, 164; writings of, 205n4 Crosthwaite, Luis Humberto: La luna siempre será un amor difícil, 8 Cruz, Josefina: Doña Mencía, la Adelantada, 9; Inés de Suárez, la condoresa, 9 Crypto-Judaism, 219n16; literary representation of, 12, 13, 22, 114, 117, 128, 135, 142, 145, 147, 148, 150, 153– 54, 157, 163, 171, 177, 217n3. See also Converso Cuauhtémoc: as literary character, 4, 7, 181n18 Cueva, Beatriz de la: as literary character, 9 Debroise, Olivier: Crónica de las destrucciones, 16 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, 29, 189n5, 193n23 De los Ríos y Lisperguer, Catalina. See Quintrala, la Demitrópulos, Libertad: Río de las congojas, 9, 11, 16, 182n21, 184n37 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 104, 181n15, 183n26, 185n45, 195n43, 206n9, 206– 7n13, 221n32

Di Benedetto, Antonio: Zama, 5 Dujovne Ortiz, Alicia: El árbol de la gitana, 8, 12– 13, 177, 182n20, 184nn34,36, 184– 85n39, 186n50 Erauso, Catalina de. See Monja Alférez Erdrich, Louise, and Michael Dorris: Crown of Columbus, 138, 181n19, 186n50 Fanon, Frantz, 19 Felipe II, King of Spain: as literary character, 5, 212n42 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo: as literary character, 134; writings of, 104, 205n4, 210n28 Fietta, Jarque: Yo me perdono, 16 Foucault, Michel, 19, 40, 106, 107, 211n35 Freilich, Alicia: Colombina descubierta, 8, 12, 177 Frohlich, Newton: 1492: Christopher Columbus, 186n50 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 20, 23, 28, 40, 41, 68, 164, 188n70, 189n3 Fuentes, Carlos: Ceremonias del alba, 7, 183n26; “Chac Mool,” 204n14; Cristóbal Nonato, 6; El naranjo, 7, 16; Terra Nostra, 5, 6, 7, 177, 182n20, 212n42, 221n33; Todos los gatos son pardos, 7, 182n20 Galván, Manuel de Jesús: Enriquillo, 4 Gambaro, Griselda: Lo impenetrable, 5 García Canclini, Néstor, 22 García Márquez, Gabriel: El otoño del patriarca, 5 Gilman, Sander, 19, 86, 145 Girard, René, 18, 73, 110, 187n53, 200n66 Glantz, Margo: Síndrome de naufragios, 5 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis: Guatimozín, 4 Guerra, Rosa: Lucía Miranda, 4, 182n24 Guerrero, Gonzalo: as literary character, 7, 16, 186– 87n51 Guzmán, Jorge: Ay Mamá Inés, 9 Guzmán, Nuño Beltrán de: historical figure, 95, 96, 98, 103, 104, 118, 205n1, 208– 9n22, 209n26, 210nn28,29, 212nn42,43, 214n13; as literary character, 7, 17, 22, 26, 95, 96, 98, 100–113, 175, 176, 205n2, 209n25; writings of, 97–98, 103–4, 206– 7n13, 208–9n22, 210n30. See also Martínez, Herminio: Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 18 Herodotus, 18, 28, 189n1 Homosexuality: historical studies of, 39–40, 41, 42, 66, 98, 99, 106, 107, 108,

Index 195nn41,42, 211n35; psychoanalytical approaches to, 40, 41; sociological studies of, 40, 41, 66, 98– 99, 107, 111, 195n40, 201n76, 207– 8n16, 208nn17,18,20. See also Sodomy Human Sacrifice: literary representation of, 73, 78, 83, 88– 93 Inquisition, Mexican: history of, 207n15, 212n42, 221n35 Inquisition, Spanish: history of, 142, 146, 207n15, 218n11, 218– 19n12, 219nn13,16,18,19,20,22, 219– 20n23, 221n35; literary representation of, 12, 13, 98, 106, 114, 136, 139, 141, 142, 143– 44, 146– 47, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153– 54, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 169, 172– 73, 180n10, 217n3, 218n8, 219n15 Isabel, Queen of Spain, 190n8; as literary character, 11, 146, 184n31 Jews: 1492 expulsion from Spain, 15, 212n2, 216n46; literary representation of, 114, 142, 146– 47, 149, 157, 159, 160, 171, 173 Jicoténcal, 4, 180n10, 183n26 Kafka, Franz, 20–21 Kristeva, Julia, 20 Labarca, Eduardo: Butamalón, 8 Lacan, Jacques, 18–19, 21, 164, 218n9 Las Casas, Fray Bartolomé de: as literary character, 4, 7, 173; writings of, 86, 104, 190n7, 205nn1,4, 207n13, 210n28 Lazarillo de Tormes, 139, 140, 141, 217n4, 218nn8,9 Ledesma Izquieta, Genaro: La conquista del Ibero-Suyo, 11 León Sánchez, José: Tenochtitlán, 11, 25 Léry, Jean de, 209n24, 213n10; on cannibalism, 31, 46, 57, 191n11, 196n47, 197n55, 199nn61,62, 201n75 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 194n30, 197n52, 199n64 López de Gómara, Francisco, 73, 86, 104, 205n4, 207n13, 210n28 Malinche, la (doña Marina, Malintzín, Malinalli), 221n32; as literary character, 4, 7, 10, 25, 76, 163, 165, 179n5, 181n18, 183n26, 184n28 Mansilla, Eduarda: Lucía Miranda, 4, 182n24 Marlowe, Stephen: Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, 186n50 Martín del Campo, Marisol: Amor y conquista, 16, 25, 179n5, 183n26

259

Martínez, Herminio: Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán, 17, 22, 26, 95–96, 98, 100– 113, 175, 176, 195n39, 204–5n1, 212n42; El regreso, 17, 95; Invasores del paraíso, 17, 95; Las puertas del mundo, 16, 95 Melville, Herman: Typee, 29, 32, 33, 36, 189– 90n6, 192n15, 193nn19,23, 194n25, 195n44, 196n51, 199n60 Menton, Seymour, 3, 179n4, 182nn22,23 Mestizaje, 4, 11, 13, 14, 16, 20, 22, 23, 24, 36, 71, 84, 87, 92, 94, 126, 129–30, 176, 177, 178, 184n32, 188nn64,69, 209n25. See also Transculturation Meza, Julián: La huella del conejo, 16, 185n43 Miranda, Ana: Boca do inferno, 6; Desmundo, 6, 9, 184n37; O retrato do rei, 6 Miscegenation. See Mestizaje Moctezuma: as literary character, 2, 7, 75, 78, 177– 78, 181n18, 202n2 Molina, Tirso de, 7 Monja Alférez, la (Catalina de Erauso): historical figure, 9; as literary character, 10, 182n25; writings of, 182n25 Montaigne, Michel de: “Of Cannibals,” 18, 31, 191n11 Müller, Hugo: El cronista perdido, 17, 185n43 Nolla, Olga: El castillo de la memoria, 8 Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar: Comentarios, 213n7; historical figure, 61, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120–26, 127, 131, 136, 139, 162, 213n7, 214n21, 215n38, 216n41, 220– 21n30; as literary character, 7, 16, 21, 22, 26, 114, 115, 116–17, 121, 126–37, 151, 175, 216n47; Naufragios, 116, 117–26, 137, 176, 213nn6,7,8,9,10, 213–14n11, 214nn12,13,14,17,22,24, 215nn27,28,29,31, 216nn40,45; represented in film, 7. See also Posse, Abel: El largo atardecer del caminante O’Gorman, Edmundo, 179n2 Orgambide, Pedro: Aventuras de Edmund Ziller en tierras del Nuevo Mundo, 8, 182n20, 185n43 Ortiz, Fernando, 22 Ortolano, Glauco: Domingos Vera Cruz, 6, 8, 196n49 Pacheco, José Emilio, 24 Partida, Eugenio: La ballesta de Dios, 16 Paternain, Alejandro: Crónica del descubrimiento, 10–11 Payró, Roberto J.: El Mar Dulce, 5 Paz, Ireneo, 180n10; Amor y suplicio, 4; Doña Marina, 4

260

Index

Paz, Octavio, 23, 24, 98, 99, 174, 180nn10,11, 183n26, 184n37, 207– 8nn16,17, 221n36 Picaresque, 36– 42, 62, 139– 42, 143, 144, 156, 164, 172, 188n65, 195n36, 216– 17n2, 217nn4,5,6, 218nn8,9 Pimenta, Marcus Aurelius. See Torero, José Roberto Pizarro, Francisco, 203n6; as literary character, 7, 14, 184n30, 185n40 Poe, Edgar Allan: “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” 29 Posse, Abel: Daimón, 8, 16, 116, 182n20, 185n43, 187n51, 208n21; El largo atardecer del caminante, 17, 21, 22, 26, 114, 115– 17, 118, 121, 126– 37, 151, 175, 176, 213n6, 216nn41,47; Los perros del paraíso, 15, 116, 182n20, 184n31 Pratt, Mary Louise, 22, 167, 168, 179n2 Quevedo, Francisco de: El Buscón, 218n8 Quintrala, la (Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer), 10; as literary character, 10, 183– 84n28 Rama, Ángel, 22 Rascón Banda, Víctor Hugo: La Malinche, 182n20, 183n26 Reyes, Alfonso, 24, 25, 188n71 Ribeiro, João Ubaldo: Viva o povo brasileiro, 8 Roa Bastos, Augusto: Vigilia del almirante, 16, 24– 25, 26 Saer, Juan José: El entenado, 17, 22, 26, 28, 36– 44, 45, 46, 47– 70, 175, 176, 182n21, 189n1, 190n7, 195nn35,36,37,43, 200nn68,71,72, 200– 201n73, 201– 2n79 Said, Edward, 19, 30, 123, 179n2 Sainz, Gustavo: Fantasmas aztecas, 8, 26 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 19, 201n74 Scliar, Moacyr: A Estranha Nação de Rafael Mendes, 8, 182n23, 185n43, 186n50 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 95, 108, 110, 195n39, 211n33 Shamanism, 87, 120, 121, 220– 21n30; literary representation of, 139, 160, 162, 220n30 Sodomy: and colonization, 15, 96– 98, 185n45, 190n7, 204n13, 205n4, 206nn8,9,

206–7n13, historical references to, 96–98, 104, 122, 190n7, 205nn4,6, 206nn8,9,12, 206– 7n13, 207n15, 208n18, 210–11n31, 211n35, 212n36, 218n11; literary representation of, 15, 27, 39–42, 70, 95, 96, 98, 100–113, 161. See also Homosexuality Solares, Ignacio: Nen, la inútil, 11, 23, 25–26, 184n32, 188n69, 221n33 Staden, Hans, 213n10, 221n30; on cannibalism, 46, 57, 201n75 Syncretism, religious, 71, 120, 121, 136, 137, 149, 162 Syphilis, 85–87, 204n10, 13 Tapioca, Ruy: A república dos bugres, 6 Torero, José Roberto, and Marcus Aurelius Pimenta: Terra Papagalli, 6, 17, 185n43, 196n49 Torquemada, Tomás de (Grand Inquisitor), 115, 146, 219n17; as literary character, 141, 146, 148, 154, 155, 156. See also Inquisition, Spanish Torres, Antônio: Meu querido canibal, 6, 8, 25, 196n49 Transculturation, 1, 17, 22, 24, 26, 58, 59, 70, 71, 79, 88, 89, 92, 114, 115, 116, 117–26, 127, 128, 133–34, 137, 161, 162, 167, 176, 178. See also Mestizaje Turbay, Alfredo: Oro para Pizarro, 184n30, 185n40 Twain, Mark: “Cannibalism in the Cars,” 29, 35, 197n53, 214–15n24 Uslar Pietri, Arturo: El Camino de El Dorado, 5 Vasconcelos, José, 22, 188n64 Vega, Lope de: El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón, 7 Vera León, Antonio, 20 White, Hayden, 3, 20 Wilde, Oscar, 26 Young, Robert, 2, 19, 20, 84, 94, 95, 99, 179n2 Zumárraga, Fray Juan de, 207n15, 212n42, 221n35; as literary character, 95, 110, 111