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Julio Enríquez-Ornelas
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The Language of Pained Bodies:
History, Translation, and Prostitu-
tion in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie
me verá llorar (1999)
Julio Enríquez-Ornelas
W
literary texts, and in doing so
reimagines the assumptions fin de
siècle Mexican novelists Manuel
alter Benjamin Gutiérrez Nájera and Federico
has proposed, “The interior is Gamboa make about the prostitute
the asylum of art. The collector in their fiction. Indeed, Rivera Garza
is the true resident of the rids all of these fin de siècle objects of
interior. He makes his concern their commodity value by rewriting
the transfiguration of things. To them and translating them into her
him falls the Sisyphean task of own work; in turn the use value of
divesting things of their commodity these objects is transformed into
character by taking possession of a connoisseur value. Moreover,
them. But he bestows on them only when Rivera Garza, who was
connoisseur value, rather than use trained as an academic historian,
value” (9). In Nadie me verá llorar incorporates the narratives of
(1999), Mexican novelist Cristina marginalized people into her body
Rivera Garza functions as one such of work—specifically the stories
collector of objects. She rewrites fin of the insane, the indigenous
de siècle Mexico by appropriating poor, and the prostitutes found
ruined objects from Mexican in obscure and virtually forgotten
history, such as photographs, medical records—she destabilizes
newspapers, medical records, and the commonly accepted historical
The Language of Pained Bodies | 76
photograph. (20)
Joaquín is unable to forget this image because “[p]hotography was a way, his
way, of stopping the wheel of the world’s pain, spinning ever faster under
the lights, on narrow metal tracks” (21). A concrete example of Rivera
Garza’s overarching metaphor is the photograph of the beaten and bruised
woman left to die on the street, since it presents a pained body that is never
whole but always in parts—much like Rivera Garza’s texts. Rivera Garza’s
character Joaquín, like her, is interested in disarticulated pained bodies,
which leads to his obsession with Matilda. From beginning to end Joaquín
wants to reassemble Matilda’s painful past.
Meanwhile, Matilda represents a version of the archetypical
character in nineteenth- century French naturalist and realist narratives.
In Rivera Garza’s version, Matilda moves out of the countryside and into
the city to live with her uncle, Marcos Burgos, a prominent doctor and
firm believer in Porfirian positivism. Matilda leaves this rural space due to
her mother’s and father’s deaths, the latter from alcoholism. In accordance
with the French naturalist formula, the social conditions and environment
determine the characters’ outcomes in life. In order to make Matilda a
decent woman and to change her predetermined destiny, Marcos attempts
to instill discipline and order in her life. As designed by her uncle, Matilda
must adapt to the following rules:
Matilda was sick because she was alive. All bodies wither, all
minds become degenerate, everyone falls. We are all mortals.
We are all, in one way or another, sick. (my trans.)
Matilda está enferma porque está viva. Todo cuerpo se
marchita; todas las mentes se atrofian; todos caemos. Todos
somos mortales. Todos estamos, de una o de otra
manera, enfermos. (Interview by Emily Hind 60).
history, ready to slip and fall out of its spell and yet always inside it. Very
much inside it” (192). She questions the genre of the conventional historical
novel by placing her characters within a context in which the battles of the
Mexican Revolution, for example, do not have a direct impact in their lives.
Matilda and Joaquín, instead, “have missed all the grand historic occasions”
(191). The reader does not find the story of a soldier who fought in the
Mexican Revolution or the intellectual who was (or was not) in support of
the Porfirian era of modernization. This uncommon perspective provides
different insight on the same past, which so many other historical novels
do not provide. The reader does not learn explicitly about national heroes,
but implicitly about Porfirio Díaz’s failed attempts to civilize the common
people through control of their bodies.
Rather than directly confronting master narratives of Mexican
history, the narrator places the plot in an urban space and in medical
institutions and places important historical dates and battles of the
Mexican Revolution only on the margins of Matilda’s and Joaquín’s lives. In
her dissertation, Rivera Garza muses,
at this juncture that the reader realizes that these ruined objects from the
past have been redeemed and brought to the present with newly acquired
meanings.
Indeed, in Nadie me verá llorar, Rivera Garza remembers the
Porfirian era of modernization through old legends and, using Walter
Benjamin’s concepts from both “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and
“The Task of the Translator,” brings to light marginalized narratives from the
past, which results in new interpretations of fin de siècle Mexico. Following
Benjamin, she appropriates ruins such as photographs, newspapers,
medical records, and literary texts from fin de siècle Mexico and rids them of
their commodity value. As a result, she rewrites fin de siècle histories and
literatures of prostitution in Mexico by illuminating the policing apparatus
of the process of modernization and women’s resistance to it. In doing
so, she destabilizes the dominant national narrative of progress. When
Rivera Garza focuses on forgotten pasts, she illuminates the brutal realities
experienced by everyday people, specifically prostitutes and the insane. In
this way, she critiques how government institutions controlled these pained
bodies during the Porfirian era of modernization. Echoing Borges, Rivera
Garza states,
The stories of the defeated hold more historical value than the stories of the
powerful. As Borges once suggested, the defeated could achieve a degree of
dignity because in loss they exemplify a higher moral standard.
Aware of history’s malleability, Rivera Garza employs the past
differently in order to destabilize the dominant narrative of fin de siècle
Mexico. Her historical narrative does not attempt to separate itself from the
superimpositions of imagination because she is well aware that history is
always a series of superimposed imaginations. For her, the task of both the
From Rivera Garza’s political act, readers can compose a new history for
themselves—one illuminated by the language of pained bodies.
Works Cited
———. “Sí hay tal lugar: Una conversación con Cristina Rivera Garza.”
By Diego Armando Arellano, Cuadrivio proteico, 2012. cuadrivio.net/
cuadrivio-proteico/si-hay-tal-lugar-una-conversacion-con-cristina-rivera-
garza/. Accessed 8 January 2013.