Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 19

The Language of Pained Bodies: History, Translation, and

Prostitution in Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie me verá


llorar (1999)

Julio Enríquez-Ornelas

Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Volume 50, Number


1, Spring 2017, pp. 75-92 (Article)

Published by Midwest Modern Language Association


DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2017.0003

For additional information about this article


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/697761

Access provided by University of Winnipeg Library (12 Jul 2018 19:22 GMT)
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

narratives of this period.


Prior critical conversations have treated Rivera Garza’s use of
history and the figure of the prostitute separately. Traci Roberts-Camps has
commented extensively on Rivera Garza’s portrayal of women, including
prostitutes. She writes, “Rivera Garza moves beyond the vital statistics
of a woman who lived from 1885 to 1958 in Mexico, to a portrayal of a
woman—daughter, niece, prostitute, lover, patient—and her pain” (95).
Stephen Silverstein has engaged with Rivera Garza’s historical approach,
commenting, “Recent critical attention has noted the manner in which
Rivera Garza’s doctoral thesis serves as a prototext for Nadie me verá
llorar in terms of content, which the author acknowledges in the novel’s
‘Notas finales’” (533). This essay develops these two approaches further by
bringing them together, seeing Rivera Garza’s emphasis on the abject of
Mexico—and on the prostitute in particular—as a particularly powerful
undoing of the master narratives of Mexican history.
In Nadie me verá llorar, the weight of the past seems more present
than the present itself. Harking back to the past is a strategy oftentimes used
to create a source of stability and cohesion. At the same time, the past also
threatens to bring unresolved conflicts into the present. Mexican historian
Enrique Krauze affirms, “Our view of the past that was actually experienced
is influenced by the past as it came to be . . . invented. One of the duties of
a historian is to separate the past as it was from all the superimpositions of
imagination” (xiii). Rivera Garza’s fiction does not attempt to separate the
past from the superimpositions of imagination. She is aware, however, that
Mexican history from the very beginning has been a series of superimposed
imaginations. Thus she undertakes the task as a historian and novelist to
rewrite the superimposed imaginations of the past as it had already been
invented in late nineteenth-century Mexico. Her work therefore echoes
Hayden White’s concept of metahistory, which assumes that history and
fiction follow a narrative structure and that both emerge out of a writer’s
imagination.
According to Mexicanist Brian L. Price, historical fictions—
among them Enrique Serna’s El seductor de la patria (1999), Eugenio
Aguirre’s Victoria (2005), Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s Pancho Villa: Una biografía
narrativa (2006), Ignacio Solares’s La invasión (2005), Martín Moreno’s
México mutilado (2004), and Pedro Ángel Palou’s Zapata (2006), Morelos:
Morir es nada (2007), and Cuauhtémoc: La defensa del Quinto Sol (2008)—

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


Julio Enriquez-Ornelas

inundated the market by 2010. These novels reflected a tendency toward a


recanonization of common spaces and figures of Mexican historiography.
Price suggests that Rivera Garza steered away from this form of narrative.
Although these other novels that revisit Mexican history and Rivera Garza’s
Nadie me verá llorar are marketed to the same audience, their treatment
of history is vastly different. For example, the novels to which Price refers
ask readers to consume books that perpetuate an already stable historical
narrative that continues to emphasize the stories of foundational and
national heroes such as Benito Juárez, Francisco Villa, and Emiliano Zapata.
Rivera Garza’s novel, however, tells the story of peasants disenfranchised
by Porfirian modernization projects. Far from a straightforward, linear
narrative, as Caitlin Fehir points out, “Rivera-Garza’s writing is thick, heavy
prose that relies a great deal on metaphors. The thoughts of characters
are complex monologues that require an attentive, engaged reader. Like
the doctor at the asylum, we are diagnosticians, trying to understand the
illnesses of the inmates” (12). The form of the novel itself, Fehir suggests,
indicates Rivera Garza’s different approach to historical fiction.
In this novel, a fundamental metaphor is this continual image
of a pained or mutilated body. This metaphor is consistent across what
Silverstein calls Rivera Garza’s “prototext,” “text,” and “post-text”: her 1995
doctoral dissertation on Latin American history, titled “Masters of the
Street: Bodies, Power, and Modernity in Mexico 1867–1930”; Nadie
me verá llorar; and her 2010 book-length essay, La Castañeda: Narrativas
dolientes desde el Manicomio General, México 1910–1930. Unified by
the pained body, Nadie me verá llorar is therefore the center of Rivera
Garza’s tripartite body of work. In respect to genre, these units are all
very distinct and independent, but in content they are all deeply inbred;
and when they are placed alongside one another, their significance can be
illuminated. Indeed, Silverstein affirms that Walter Benjamin’s “Theses
on the Philosophy of History” serves as the framework for Rivera Garza’s
novel and her dissertation. Both are constructed by a historical materialist,
who goes on “picking through the rubbish of Mexican modernity at the
fin de siècle, and salvaging neglected objects from the trash-bin of history”
(Silverstein 553). For Silverstein, the main historical materialist in Nadie
me verá llorar is the narrator, Joaquín Buitrago. As the writer, however,
Rivera Garza is another historical materialist who, in all three of her texts,
is the ventriloquist of appropriated historical objects.

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


The Language of Pained Bodies | 78

While Rivera Garza’s threefold body of work focused on pained


bodies can be seen as a unified historical text in the mold of Benjamin’s
“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” yet another one of Benjamin’s essays
can aid in analysis of Rivera Garza’s written body, this one illuminating the
differences in its three parts: “The Task of the Translator.” Indeed, the notion
of “articulation” can be useful here: not only does the notion of articulation
connote a linguistic utterance, but articulation is also a joint, a place where
two distinct parts of a body are fused. As a result, Benjamin’s work on the
linguistic iterations of translation can be useful when applied to Rivera
Garza’s threefold body of historical work; translation can be used to further
understanding of each of its parts, both when considered separately and
when taken together as a whole.
The first segment of Rivera Garza’s body of work considered
here, her dissertation, was written in English on Latin American history.
Its source materials include medical documents, photographs, and fiction
in a manner similar to Nadie me verá llorar. These documents, of course,
were originally written in Spanish, so in writing their English-language
interpretation, Rivera Garza had to serve as their literal translator.
The second text, Nadie me verá llorar, was published in Spanish; as an
experimental novel, it presents as a convoluted, warped, and fictionalized
version of her dissertation, which mixes, blends, and confuses history and
fiction as it presents an array of narrative voices and echoes within the
text. The third, La Castañeda, is a rewriting in Spanish of her doctoral
dissertation and could be considered a series of hybrid fictional-historical
essays that reads as an academic historical essay fused with elements of
fiction, poetry, and chronicle.
According to Benjamin, a translation “may be achieved, above
all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than
sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence
is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade”
(“Task” 79). For Rivera Garza, the process of translation enables her texts
to break away from the barriers of the sentence since they change from
English to Spanish, from a dissertation appropriate for academic history to
fiction, and then back to a hybrid fictional-historical analysis. For Benjamin,
“[a] real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not
block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its
own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully” (79). In Rivera

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


Julio Enriquez-Ornelas

Garza’s triptych of texts, the binary notion of “translation” and “original”


is problematic because the original text—the academic dissertation—is
wrought in a language that is not her first, and her novel in a sense translates
her own work and eliminates the second person. This ongoing process of
change and transformation may appear confusing, but it enables thematic
patterns to emerge. Benjamin claims, “[t]ranslation does not find itself in
the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded
ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where
the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work
in the alien one” (76). Expanding this metaphor even further, from the
beginning Rivera Garza’s dissertation was conceived as a translation and
never as an original. Consequently, the very origins of her work stem from
the perspective of an outsider gazing at the wooded ridge trying to catch a
glimpse of the language forest, searching for the single spot where the echo
can begin its reverberation.
Yet the echo, when it comes, is uniquely of Rivera Garza’s very own
words. As a result, no anchor stabilizes for Nadie me verá llorar; it emerges
out of instability. Translation, therefore, provides a way to understand the
writing of history. It is a parallel to White’s idea that the historian uses
imagination to fill in the gaps of history, and, from that moment on, history
follows a narrative structure, fictionalizing it. As a result, Rivera Garza’s
body of work emphasizes that no history is ever reified or absolute.
In Rivera Garza’s novel, the echo of history and of translation that
persists across the iterations of language, gender, and history is the voice
of pained bodies. As Benjamin suggests, “In the same way a translation,
instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in
detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the
original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language,
just as fragments are part of a vessel” (“Task” 78). From its inception, Nadie
me verá llorar totters and destabilizes notions of an absolute truth set in
place by political, medical, or religious institutions. By examining the ever-
changing relationship between “original” and “translation,” the transmittable
residues of Rivera Garza’s work—suffering bodies—become apparent.
In her doctoral dissertation, Rivera Garza makes it clear that the
pained bodies of the prostitute, the indigenous poor, and the insane are
the main objects of her exploration of the Porfirian era of modernization
(1876–1910) and beyond. She achieves this by shedding light upon many

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


The Language of Pained Bodies | 80

of the forgotten or ignored documents, letters, photographs, and medical


records found in Mexico’s Hospital Morelos and its insane asylum, La
Castañeda. In her book of hybrid fictional-historical essays, La Castañeda,
she explicitly sets forth an idea that could be considered the main framework
behind her larger trio of texts. She writes,

The function of the collage is to sustain as many versions as


possible at once, and place them very close to each other, so
close to one another as to create contrast, astonishment, joy;
that is to say, knowledge produced by the unannounced
epiphany, one that is composed or fabricated by the layout
and architecture of the text. (my trans.)
La función del collage es sostener tantas versiones como sea
posible, colocándolas tan cerca una de la otra como para
provocar el contraste, el asombro, el gozo; es decir, el
conocimiento producido por la epifanía no enunciada
sino compuesta o fabricada por el mero tendido del texto,
su arquitectura. (260)

In this same text, Rivera Garza considers Benjamin’s advice:

[T]he function of the collage is a strategy to compose a


page of high contrast resulting in knowledge not as the
explanation of the object being studied, but as the redemption
of it. (my trans.)
[E]l collage como estrategia para componer una página de
alto contraste cuyo resultado es el conocimiento no
como explicación del “objeto de estudio” sino como redención
del mismo. (259)

In La Castañeda, she is not attempting to tell the untold story of the


oppressed, or their “real” or “true” story. Rather, she intends to present their
life experiences as they came to be articulated and told by doctors and
patients. She appropriates their language and incorporates her imagination
to present all of this in an incoherent form, functioning as the ventriloquist
of these historical documents. She manipulates these documents and images
to her liking by juxtaposing them. In doing so, she re-writes fin de siècle

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


Julio Enriquez-Ornelas

Mexico and questions binary notions of power enacted through discourses


of psychiatry and science set to control the bodies of the indigenous poor--
prostitutes, in particular.
In many ways, Nadie me verá llorar retells the story of the fallen
woman, but engraved within the macabre and beautiful prose lies the tale of
the two mothers of Mexico, Our Lady of Guadalupe and la Malinche. These
mothers are jointly represented through the protagonist, Matilda Burgos,
who, as a young country girl, is almost virginal like Our Lady of Guadalupe,
but when relocated to the urban environment assumes a likeness to la
Malinche. Through this representation, Rivera Garza writes a novel that
questions some of Mexico’s most foundational myths. At the same time, her
novel is in a one-way dialogue with some of the best-known literary figures
of fin de siècle Mexico: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Federico Gamboa. She
appropriates these authors’ texts in order to circumvent them. These two
writers were among the first in Mexico to fictionalize the cautionary tale of
the young girl who, after becoming a prostitute in the city, is corrupted and
eventually destroyed. In Gutiérrez Nájera’s serial novel Por donde se sube al
cielo (1884), the main character, Magda, is a Parisian actress who becomes
a prostitute. Gamboa’s now classic Mexican novel Santa (1903) paints a
vivid image of the legendary titular prostitute. In their narratives, Gutiérrez
Nájera and Gamboa present dogmatic and misogynistic visions of women;
since Magda and Santa do not exemplify the Porfirian ideal of “the good
woman,” they come to be considered “bad women.” Both of these novels
turned to French naturalism for inspiration, paying homage to Émile Zola’s
Nana (1880). Rivera Garza, on the other hand, uses her novel to parody
many of the French naturalist themes and tropes that Gutiérrez Nájera and
Gamboa present in their fiction. In her text, for example, the dichotomy of
“decent” and “indecent” women is singularly manifested in Matilda.
Gutiérrez Nájera and Gamboa’s novels narrate how the Mexican
government and Porfirian society controlled morality and the bodies of
the prostitute through governmental institutions, such as the Agencia de
Sanidad, which ensured that all the women who were prostitutes registered
and underwent routine health visits. In these fin de siècle texts, both home
and brothel are spaces of confinement for these characters. Rivera Garza,
however, introduces a third space of confinement: the insane asylum, La
Castañeda. Here, she illustrates how for the narrator, Matilda becomes the
vessel to question homogeneous gender behaviors circumscribed by the

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


The Language of Pained Bodies | 82

government. Consequently, this novel rereads these two canonical Mexican


writers and questions the discourse of psychiatry new to late nineteenth-
century Mexico. In doing so, Rivera Garza’s historical novel is a translation
of the past in order to express, incarnate, and represent pained bodies.
From the very beginning of the narrative it is clear that narrator
Joaquín Buitrago, photographer and heroin addict, is obsessed with Matilda,
the onetime prostitute and now patient at La Castañeda. Nadie me verá
llorar begins with Joaquín staring at a photograph of Matilda. He believes he
first met her at the brothel La Modernidad, its name an embedded critique
of Porfirian modernization projects that encouraged foreign investment
in Mexico and often served to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
According to literary critic Glen S. Close, “[t]he name of the photographer
in the novel, Joaquín Buitrago, was suggested by the initials with which an
unknown artist signed a series of antique pornographic portraits recovered
by Ana Vargas and published in La casa de citas en el barrio galante” (606).
This seems, then, to be one of the historical documents rewritten in Rivera
Garza’s novel. For Close, Joaquín’s obsession with Matilda and her pained
body is inscribed in his last name: Buitrago. He explains, “The fictional
surname ‘Buitrago’ carries the obvious connotations of vulture (buitre)
and swallower of light (trago) and thus marks the character’s vocation for
morbid visual consumption” (607).
Thus Nadie me verá llorar makes it clear that for Joaquín a need
to consume visually existed long before Matilda, since “[p]ain obsessed
him” (20). The very first time Joaquín encountered this shocking state was
when “[i]n the darkness, [he] discovered pain. It was not a word, not even
a sensation; it was an image: the face of a woman in rigor mortis” (19).
From the beginning of the novel, the trigger that caused this obsession was
a woman in pain, and when Joaquín saw her,

He knelt beside her and, without thinking, passed his hands


over her hair wet with rain and blood. Then he sat down
beside her, on the asphalt. He stared at her. Her lips were
bruised and bloody from a beating and her arms and legs
were bent at tortured angles. He tried to pray but no prayer
came to his mind. The world was, as he had imagined, a
merciless place, without reprieve. The woman’s face
imprinted itself on his memory. That was his first

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


Julio Enriquez-Ornelas

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:

HYGIENE LESSONS BY MARCOS BURGOS


1.Wash your hands before and after eating, before and after
using the toilet, before and after sleeping.
2. Remain constantly occupied in order to preserve mental
hygiene. Idleness is the root of all evil. . . .
5. Avoid using cosmetics and perfumes. Cosmetics harm the
skin and perfumes cause neurasthenia and other nervous
disorders. . . .
8. [The sentence that Matilda will never forget:] Decent
women bathe every day before six o’clock in the morning,
always. (106–107)

The image of the “decent woman” in Rivera Garza’s text is a subversive

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


The Language of Pained Bodies | 84

parody of nineteenth-century novels. Knowingly, she recreates those


narratives of the past to redeem them in the present by bestowing on them
new meanings; in particular, she presents an alternative perspective on and
representation of women. While it first appears as though her novel follows
nineteenth-century formulas in which a “decent woman” was contrasted
with an “indecent woman,” in Garza’s version, rather than juxtaposing two
characters to emphasize that one’s condition is superior to the other’s, she
emphasizes both conditions in a single character. Thus Matilda represents
both the decent woman who follows her uncle’s rules and also the indecent
woman who becomes a prostitute in the brothel, ironically named La
Modernidad.
This shift occurs after the character Cástulo appears in Matilda’s
life and quickly erases any notion that one can be a “good citizen” with good
manners. This young man is a revolutionary who, after running away from
the law, accidentally enters Marcos’s house late one night. After she meets
Cástulo, Matilda begins to change. She leaves her uncle’s house, only to
work first in tobacco factories, then as a prostitute—and she finally spends
the last years of her life in the insane asylum after refusing to provide a
sexual favor to an agente de sanidad.
Another instance of Rivera Garza’s critique of the accepted
narratives established during Mexico’s fin de siècle is when doctors Marcos
Burgos and Julio Guerrero offer solutions to prevent the “devolution” of
Mexico. For both of these men, stalled processes of social evolution stem
from a lack of hygiene in the nation. For them, propelling Mexico into
a prosperous future means implementing strong and strict notions of
cleanliness. Marcos and Julio believe it is important to educate all sectors of
society in how to be clean. According to the narrator, Marcos and Julio also
read in the newspaper a different resolution for this same problem:

Journalist and poet Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera had other


solutions in mind. “It is preferable,” he wrote, “to see the
corrupt succumb than to allow the good, the fit, to die.
Criminals may be sick, but those who have contagious
illnesses should be isolated. Those who may procreate sick
children should be denied the pleasures of marriage
and fatherhood or motherhood. Let us not put our lives in
danger or support the extermination of the human race

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


Julio Enriquez-Ornelas

simply in order to protect the weak and the dangerous.”


Both Marcos and Julio Guerrero read “Today’s Plato,”
Gutiérrez Nájera’s column in El Universal, with mis-
trust. (112–113)

For this fictionalized version of Gutiérrez Nájera, the solution to Mexican


modernization stems from the social Darwinist philosophies of Porfirian
positivism, which emphasized the notion of the “survival of the fittest.”
Clearly, Rivera Garza’s Gutiérrez Nájera believes the weak should be left
to die and the government should not protect them or those who are
dangerous. Instead, citizens like him are convinced that prostitutes and the
insane should not procreate, and they agree that the sick should be isolated.
Although Marcos and Julio do not trust this perspective and conclude
that cleanliness alone is a reasonable solution, these three figures agree,
overall, that Mexico has a social problem. Taken together, the three men
echo popular scientific discourses in Mexico associated with evolution and
progress.
Gutiérrez Nájera is not the only writer parodied in Rivera Garza’s
text. She also takes up Gamboa’s Santa. In Rivera Garza’s novel, when
Matilda becomes a prostitute she changes her name to “La Diablesa.” The
following is a clear example of intertextual relationship between Nadie me
verá llorar and Santa: “In late 1907, when Matilda made prostitution her
profession, only the most scatterbrained or outright stupid, like Santa,
bothered to register or expose themselves to the humiliation of the medical
examination” (145). In Mexico City, areas of tolerance were designated for
brothels, drinking, and gambling. It is important to point out that, during
this time, prostitution had been legalized to protect men from illnesses.
For prostitutes, this meant registering and undergoing routine health visits
with the Inspección de Sanidad. As the passage reveals, Matilda is not like
Santa because she neither registers with the Sanity Inspection nor allows
these officers to submit her to a physical exam. As a result, Matilda is
classified as a medically unexamined (insometida) prostitute. In contrast,
Gamboa’s novel offers a long and detailed description of the procedure
to process and register a prostitute. For Santa this meant inspection by “a
group of Sanitation Agents, the bottom rung on the city’s administrative
ladder devoted to the regulation of prostitution. Society had entrusted
them with the direct supervision of the professionals themselves, ensuring

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


The Language of Pained Bodies | 86

their compliance with a list of requirements supposedly intended to


safeguard the health of the community’s male citizens” (Gamboa 106).
This inspection occurs moments before Santa is taken to Hospital Morelos
and soon after dies of a disease, which appears to be syphilis. In contrast
to Gamboa’s representation of the prostitute, in both Rivera Garza’s
dissertation and Nadie me verá llorar, the prostitute is not characterized as
a submissive or passive woman. In her dissertation, Rivera Garza discusses
the mistreatment of Santa and a prostitute named Ana Álvarez—the “real”
La Diablesa—a woman who continued to live for twenty years after the
Porfirian era of modernization. She utilizes Álvarez’s language from old
medical records to (re)create La Diablesa in her body of work. As her
dissertation states, “[i]n the letter, explicitly manifested her will to continue
with her old way of life, which, in comparison with the situation she had to
cope with at home, represented a better choice. At the end of this document
. . . she had the nerve to sign both her name and nickname. Ana Álvarez was
indeed the Queen Devil, la Diablesa” (129). This act of defiance highlights
an important juxtaposition between La Diablesa, an actual citizen, and
Santa, a fictional character.
Rivera Garza affirms this in her dissertation, noting the following
about both of these women: “Santa was a fictional character created by
a man in 1903. La Diablesa was a creation of herself somewhere around
1930” (130). For Garza, the most compelling aspect of both women is how
they represent distinct incarnations of the figure of the prostitute in Mexico.
Later, in Nadie me verá llorar, she appropriates aspects of Ana Álvarez’s
experience and fictionalizes her by creating a character who is identified
by Ana Álvarez’s nickname, La Diablesa. In doing so, she incorporates the
voice of a woman who lived during the modernization regime in Mexico.
In Nadie me verá llorar, the lived experience of La Diablesa is placed in a
fictional world to ridicule Santa and present a different experience. As a
character, La Diablesa provides a voice for women who preferred to be
listed in the registry as prostitutes, which they saw as better than being
housewives.
Santa’s journey as a prostitute in Mexico City is very different
from that of the fictional La Diablesa, since the same institution does not
oppress her character. The historical La Diablesa, Ana Álvarez, like Santa,
preferred to be a prostitute than a housewife, since it provided a sense of
freedom, even though it meant selling her body. At one point in Nadie me

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


Julio Enriquez-Ornelas

verá llorar, the narrator murmurs, “Women must be reinvented” (24). In


many ways, Rivera Garza’s dissertation and novel achieve this reinvention
by questioning homogeneous representations of the figure of the prostitute,
first in history and later in literature. For critic Carlos Fuentes,

Matilda, who has not read Lambroso or Zola, breaks away


from the determinism and confinement by means of
rebellion. Rebellion of prostitutes. That is, proof of
Matilda’s insanity is the rebellion against her pre-
determined destiny. (my trans.)
Matilda, que no ha leído a Lambroso ni a Zola, rompe
el determinismo y el encierro mediante la rebelión. Rebelión
de las meretrices. O sea, prueba de la locura de Matilda
rebelde contra su destino predeterminado. (252).

Matilda does not become a housewife or a prostitute like Santa or Nana.


Yet like these characters, at the end of her tale, she dies. In an interview,
Rivera Garza was once asked about the disease that killed Matilda. She
responded that she is not a doctor or a psychiatrist and therefore is not
capable of providing a biological explanation for Matilda’s death. She does
explain the following, however:

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).

By shedding light on the story of pained bodies in Mexico, Rivera Garza


sheds light on everybody’s stories. Thus her novel questions history,
along with the new discourse of psychiatry in late-nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century Mexico, and illuminates what has been forgotten.
In this novel, the relationship between forgotten histories of the
Mexican people and official government histories parallels the relationship
of Joaquín and Matilda: “Both were forever on the wet, messy banks of

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


The Language of Pained Bodies | 88

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,

Walter Benjamin stated: “The tradition of the oppressed


teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is
not the exception but the rule.” Could it be indeed that
processes of state formation are nothing more than a
continuous and convoluted “state of emergency”? (28)

When her novel marginalizes master narratives of Mexican history through


rendering the Revolution as only tangential to Matilda’s and Joaquín’s
lives, Rivera Garza demonstrates that such lives are in a continual state of
emergency.
An examination of Rivera Garza’s tripartite body of work as a
series of historical translations, then, illuminates certain transmittable
residues. The transgression of her fiction and historical research lies in her
ability to address and recreate everyday human conditions based on objects
from the past, such as those found in old medical archives as well as in
fiction. Her work recovers forgotten experiences and re-presents them to
readers who, perhaps approaching her texts with the presumption they
will uncover hidden gems from the past, find instead a buried mirror that
forcefully presents a brutal and violent reflection of Mexico’s present. It is

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


Julio Enriquez-Ornelas

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,

Men have always sought affinity with the defeated Trojans


and not with the victorious Greeks. Perhaps it is because there
is a dignity in defeat that hardly corresponds to the victory.
(my trans.)
Los hombres siempre han buscado la afinidad con los
troyanos derrotados y no con los griegos victoriosos. Quizá
sea porque hay una dignidad en la derrota que a duras
penas corresponde a la victoria. (Dolerse 30)

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

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


The Language of Pained Bodies | 90

historian and the novelist is to re-imagine the superimposed imaginings of


nineteenth-century writers, patients, and doctors. For her, texts are bodies,
and she acts as a forensic surgeon who, when confronted by these textual
bodies, reads them carefully, makes them speak, interrogates them about
the past trapped within them, remixes them, and recontextualizes them by
recycling, copying, and excavating them. For her, this textual forensics is a
political act. In an interview, she once stated,

I believe we writers behave with respect to these textual


corpses like forensics: we read them carefully, “prepare”
them to make them speak, interrogate them about the past
trapped in their bodies, remix and recontextualize them
through recycling, copying, and digging. This is what
gives a political sense to textual practices that, like copy-
paste, digital technology has made so easy to use. (My trans.)
Creo que los escritores nos comportamos respecto a esos
cadáveres textuales como los forenses: los leemos con
cuidado, los “preparamos” para hacerlos hablar, los
interrogamos sobre el pasado que ha quedado atrapado
en sus cuerpos, los remezclamos y los recontextualizamos
a través del reciclaje y la copia y la excavación. Esto es lo
que le da un sentido político a las prácticas textuales que,
como el copy-paste, la tecnología digital ha vuelto tan fácil
de usar. (Sí hay tal lugar)

From Rivera Garza’s political act, readers can compose a new history for
themselves—one illuminated by the language of pained bodies.

Works Cited

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


Julio Enriquez-Ornelas

Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935).” The


Arcades Project, Harvard UP, 2002, pp.14–26.

———. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, Schocken, 1968, pp.


69–82.

———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations, Schocken,


1968, pp. 253–64.

Close, Glen S. “Corpse Photography in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante


and Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar.” Bulletin of Spanish
Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin
America, vol. 91, no. 4, 2014, pp. 596–616. www.tandfonline.com/doi/
abs/10.1080/14753820.2014.886904?journalCode=cbhs20.

Fehir, Caitlin. “No One Will See Me Cry: Cristina Rivera-Garza.”


Belletrista: Celebrating Women Writers from around the World, no. 5, 2010.
www.belletrista.com/2010/issue5/anth_2.php.

Fuentes, Carlos. “El Crack.” La gran novela latinoamericana, Madrid,


Alfaguara, 2011, pp. 245–56.

Gamboa, Federico. Santa: A Novel of Mexico City. Translated and edited by


John Charles Chasteen, U of North Carolina P, 2010.

Krauze, Enrique. Mexico, Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico,


1810–1996. Harper Collins, 1997.

Price, Brian L. “Cristina Rivera Garza en las orillas de la historia.” Cristina


Rivera Garza: Ningún crítico cuenta esto, edited by Oswaldo Estrada,
Ediciones Eon, 2010, pp.111–33.

Rivera Garza, Cristina. La Castañeda: Narrativas dolientes desde el


Manicomio General, México, 1910–1930. Barcelona, Tusquets Editores,
2010.
———. Dolerse:Ttextos desde un país herido. Oaxaca, Sur+, 2011.

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1


The Language of Pained Bodies | 92

———. “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.

———. Interview by Emily Hind. Entrevistas con quince autoras mexicanas,


Madrid, Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2003, pp. 185–97.

———. “The Masters of the Streets: Bodies, Power, and Modernity in


Mexico, 1867–1930.” PhD dissertation, U of Houston, 1995.

———. No One Will See Me Cry: A Novel. Translated by Andrew Hurley,


Curbstone, 2003.

Roberts-Camps, Traci. “Cristina Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar (1999):


Abjection, National Progress, and the Female Body.” Gendered Self-
Consciousness in Mexican and Chicana Women Writers: The Female Body as
an Instrument of Political Resistance, Edwin Mellen Press, 2008, pp. 55–96.

Silverstein, Stephen. “Ragpickers of Modernity: Cristina Rivera Garza’s


Nadie me verá llorar and Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of
History.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 47, no. 3, 2013, pp. 533–59.
muse.jhu.edu/article/529254/pdf. Accessed 19 June 2014.

White, Hayden. Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-


Century Europe. The John Hopkins U Press, 1973, pp. 1-42.

INTERETHNICITIES | SPRING 2017 | VOLUME 50 | NUMBER 1

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi