The Rhetoric of the Repressed in «Black Novel (with Argentines)» by Luisa Valenzuela

Ksenija Bilbija

In one of his five lectures at Clark University in 1910, Sigmund Freud underlined the fact that the «theory of repression is the pillar upon which the edifice of psychoanalysis rests» (939). In his reading of Freud, Jacques Derrida emphasizes the non-verbal quality of repression and demonstrates how it is different from forgetting. He defines it as a process where «that which represents a force in the form of the writing interior to speech and essential to it has been contained outside speech» (Derrida 196-7). Consequently, the inscribed material resides in the unconscious realms of the body. If the process of repression is successful, it remains forever undisturbed. However, this «written trace», to borrow one of Derrida's expressions, remains outside the unconscious. If triggered, the trace can unexpectedly be colored with visible ink and appear legible, or partially decipherable to an individual's consciousness. This action has been named the return of the repressed and it can follow the same path already traced down by the process of repression or it can form new chains of substitution. Among the laws that govern the unconscious, condensation and displacement are the two to which psychoanalysts have dedicated special attention. According to Lacan they are comparable in their functioning to the laws of language, metaphor and metonymy.

So, what we have so far is the image of a psyche as a writing machine that is at the same time a memory machine, a computer of a sort that accepts the inscription of signs and then writes another layer over and over and over, offering to the potentially interested reader only what has been consciously saved. When the reader fails to save, the trace remains in the machine, but inaccessible to the reader. Only a malfunction or an authorized specialist can, if possible, recall the unsaved layer. In any case, the return of the repressed (but not that which is deleted) is mostly violent and fragmented. The literary mind's ink can only fill some of the traces and that makes the reading process quite complicated. Following this metaphor, the body becomes the writing and the memory machine in search of the ideal and engaged reader.

Although the deciphering of all the memories (all the inscriptions), or even one complete and perfect memory (an entire chain of happenings surrounding one key event), could be part of the search for ultimate completeness and wholeness (knowing the whole truth), it also presupposes the desire to control and for rigid authority that does not help the process of decipherment. Jorge Luis Borges has demonstrated to the readers of his literary body through the metaphor of Funes the Memorious that the total recall, the perfect memory, the retention of all the chains of events and events that lead to those events, and hours and minutes that contain them, can be deadly¹. In that sense, Borges' famous epistemological fable about the man who could never forget anything and who consequently could not use the word «dog» twice because the dog at fourteen minutes past three o'clock, when seen from one angle, is not the same as the dog one minute later, when seen from another angle. A man who failed to perceive similarities and who saw the world through the eyes of difference, is an elegy of repression.

Although an ironic mind could, at this point, pose the question -«To repress or not to repress?»- one should not forget that repression is mostly an involuntary but nevertheless a defense mechanism whose main purpose is to protect the individual in the present moment². The reading of repressed material, such as images and ideas, which according to Freud are delegates of instincts, is comparable to the activity of deciphering the signs that are «not bound to any particular sensory quality» (Laplanche and Pontalis 200). This little distinction, these voiceless, tactless, odorless signs make up the fabric that is to be unwoven and then woven again in the process of intellect's decipherment.

As the individual's body is affected by the processes of repression and memory evocation, so is the discursive and literary body produced by those individuals. This literary body is imagined to belong to the nation through an intricate, one might say textual, web of relations to society at large. The actual process of narrating the social body -and authoritarian regimes unwillingly create a resisting one- is geared towards depicting the conflict within the larger context of historical struggle.

Luisa Valenzuela's title, Black Novel (with Argentines) explicitly invokes the community of Argentine readers/protagonists. Her own nation becomes a character in the detective story, a narrative spice necessary to animate the tired routines of generic repetition. Argentines are placed simultaneously into the roles of protagonists and readers, detectives, perpetrators and victims. The task of the reader, the same engaged, ideal reader that I invoked earlier, is to decipher and reconstruct. The full recollection of the past is a delusive endeavor since a story of the past has to be made meaningful in the present. The social fabric, especially the repressed one, is powerful and frightening, and ultimately, larger than the reader. The historical events which ruined the imagined harmony of Argentines in March of 1976 and dominated the nation through the beginning of the next decade (1983) are coded as the crime which silently underlies the generic conventions of Valenzuela's Black Novel (with Argentines). The reader, along with the character of this detective novel, do not question «Who dunnit?», but «why did the crime take the place?»³.

From the opening pages of the novel, the roles of the reader and character are blurred. The forces of metafictional layering are operating through the entire reading process. What at first glance appears to be the main fictional frame -Argentine novelists Roberta and Agustín in search of the reason why Agustín murdered theater performer Edwina in New York City- fluctuates to another frame of reference. This other frame is the play that both writers are constantly discussing in order to dissolve and work through their writer's block. There are at least three frames: Argentina during the years of military dictatorship (1976-1983), the Argentines in exile who are haunted by the atrocities of the «dirty» civil war, and the fictions they are constructing as citizens conscious of their nation. All those referential frames dialectically interfere in Valenzuela's text, as genre and nation identifications that are transgressed. It is not a detective novel in the tradition of the writings of Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane. Nor is it only national in scope, populated exclusively by Argentines, but a cosmopolitan mix. Her text, the one that the ideal reader on this side of reality has in her hands, calls for doubts, dialogue and active participation. It is also a showcase of the psychological mechanism of repression, along with the blind spots that the process of artistic translation from the realm of the «real» to the «work of art» presupposes. Valenzuela's text calls attention to itself, to its raw form and creative process without falling into a trap of the automatic glorification of the oppressed, such as would appear to be Argentines in exile. Beyond transcription, her text embarks on a more difficult mission, and that is the search of the psychological mechanisms that allow for the return of the repressed, the identification with the aggressor and a reaction formation. In that sense Black Novel (with Argentines) is a writing/memory machine with all its design flaws and advantages. Where consciousness would imply a logical reaction to an event, this writing machine searches for what was there before the verbal, before concepts came into being and desires were instincts. It writes that which eludes verbal expression. And in this realm, in the space of the preconscious, we no longer can determine with precision what is the signifier and what is the signified because there exists neither the stability of meaning nor the established correspondences. The code is unknown to the conscious mind.

«Don't worry», says Roberta at the beginning of the novel to Agustín, «...write with the body. It's the only thing that can provide a glimmer of truth»⁴ (16, 11)⁵. As he wonders about the meaning of this pronouncement, she admits that she is not sure about it either, but, unlike him, she can feel it: «The secret is res, non verba. Restore, renew, re-create. See what I mean? Words lead you by the nose. They practically pull you along, often make you stumble» (16, 11)⁶. By provoking the chain of signifiers, the body as writing machine also becomes a reading apparatus as the process of writing assumes the act of reading as well. The writing machine can attempt to recodify the archives of the preconscious, possibly snatching fragments from the unconscious and making them legible to the conscious mind. In this particular quote that illustrates Roberta's definition of the writing process, all the words chosen are marked by the prefix re, which denotes repetition. It refers to making conscious attempts in order to access what has already been inscribed in the body by establishing the meaning. It means working through the repressed and learning about the present through the past. It means understanding the process of metaphorization by which the body turns into the site of socio-historical movements. Although the Latin proverbial authority appears to lead in a quite opposite direction, towards deeds and not simple verbosity, it actually underlies the urge for compromise with the socio-historical context of, what the novel defines in its opening as «so-called reality» or «la llamada realidad» (9, 3). So, how to bridge the gap between the «so-called reality» and its manifestation, also called fiction? Between Argentina during the Dirty War and Black Novel (with) Argentines?

The term reality is derived precisely from res, meaning «thing» and it denotes the essence of that which is a thing. Verba, on the other hand, is the sine qua non literary, fictional device. Fiction comes from Latin fingere and it means to feign indicating the imitation of reality. By imitating and by re-creating reality, writers re-produce the effect that they have experienced, transforming reality for their reader. In that sense, they are deriving another reality, often distinguished by the adjective «fictional».

Without the mediation of a character, Valenzuela has defined writing with the body in an autobiographical essay as «Writing that lasts in the memory of the pores» (Escribir con el cuerpo 35)⁷. Through a series of reminiscences in the first person present tense, she transports the reader to one morning in the year 1976⁸. She is leaving the Mexican Embassy after listening to confessions of those who took refuge there. While going home, she senses that she is being followed. Yet, the streets appear to be empty. The fear stored in the pores of her body is preserved in the writing of that walk. The insight into herself that Valenzuela carries through, is not placed in the vacuum of the past. It has been clearly contextualized to the year that marked the beginning of the military dictatorship. The overlapping of the individual and the collective creates the cultural memory stored in her body. «I think that they are following me, that they can kidnap me at any moment, and I feel exulting, overflowing with life and unexplainable force that may be related to accessing a certain type of knowledge» (Escribir con el cuerpo 35)⁹. The feeling and the awareness of the feeling is still hard to match with available verbal concepts. According to Valenzuela, that is the quest of a true writer: words that are free and able to go far beyond the will of the writer. And that, besides being socially engaged, means constantly usurping the unconscious, the repressed. The effects of collective, as well as individual repression.

But what if there is no-body to do the writing, to decodify and read? What if the materiality of the body has been relinquished and all that remains is some-body else's memory of its previous existence? Habeas corpus, literally, «has body» is a judicial term, that in spite of its clear denotation of the body that is required to be present, during the Dirty War came to signify an absent one. So, while in the symbolic order, the bodies existed, the referent did not. The empty space that some 30,000 «disappeared» bodies generated, created the porous social body. Upon it were tattooed fear, complicity, despair, terror and guilt. For example minister of foreign relations during the Dirty War, Admiral César A. Guzzetti, described this wounded social body as:

The diagnosis of a diseased body is followed by the prescription: to make disappear, to eliminate the anti-bodies. In other words, the minister depicts the nation as not being attacked by a foreign invader, a germ, but by itself. In a cancer-like metaphor of the body, the nation is destroying itself by creating anti-bodies. While the surgeon's solution would usually be to extract the diseased part, the minister does not want to invoke discursively the image of such a drastic intervention. The distinction here is much more subtle: the anti-bodies are to be «disappeared», and the body that would remain would not be fragmented nor appear maimed. It would be a new, healthy and unified body. Thus, the violence is justified and the whole(some)ness of the body preserved.

The body of Argentina became the locus of repression and the bodies of the victims were erased. Their death was denied along with their entire life. The verbal refusal to acknowledge their existence, the denial of words on the part of the government, constituted the victims' identity of the disappeared. The prescription meant complete erasure.

Valenzuela's narrative decodes the invisible inscription tattooed on the psycho-social body of her nation. «Argentina is the body of the crime» (Graziano 170), read one of the graffitis sprayed on the city morgue. Black Novel (with Argentines) is the result of her reconstruction of that crime. The body, in that sense, becomes the agency of its (novelistic) discourse.

Agustín Palant, a writer with a fellowship in New York, one day buys a gun in order to feel safe. He goes to the parts of the city that he always has been afraid of and feels empowered by the presence of the loaded weapon in his pocket. Around Tompkins Square a stranger hands him a theater ticket. During the play, he concentrates on the marginal action, a woman making a soup, and pays hardly any attention to the principal narrative where a male character is walking back and forth carrying a typewriter. After the play, as the audience is invited to try the soup, he engages in a conversation with the actress and walks her home. Later on, she invites him with «her open smile» to the bedroom, and:

Agustín Palant kills the woman he met only a few hours earlier. The rest of the novel is the search for the clue: why did he do it? The understanding of the act that is instantly exiled from the conscious mind requires revisiting the past. Since time travel is, at the end of the twentieth century, only a metaphor, the only instrument humans have at their disposal is mental reconstruction. This however, is impeded by the workings of repression mechanisms.

According to the psychoanalytic view, the reservoir of the repressed seems to be mirroring our personal (computer) memories arranged according to size, date or theme. Although not as clear as our computer screen display, the individual memories, once filtered through consciousness and language, appear to be accessible in batches related to us by chronological order, links in chains of associations and degree of accessibility to consciousness¹¹. The term memory-trace was used quite often by Freud in order to explain the inscription of the events upon the memory and their shifts between the various typographies of the mind.

By repeating the violent act performed against the body of his nation, Agustín acts out the repressed. In Lacanian terms he therefore rememorates, relives «unconsciously each instant of [his] history in the present» (Ragland-Sullivan 111). Since the unconscious is not populated by words but «things» devoid of their quota of effect (cathexis), it is actually impossible to translate the repressed into linguistic concepts in a transference situation (Ragland-Sullivan 115). This Lacanian refutation of Freud also explains Agustín's «failure» to spell out -to Roberta and himself- the violent act he committed. Consequently, we never find out «why» he killed Edwina. The signifying/interpreting process that his body performs, and we read in the body of Valenzuela's text as a reflection of the Argentine social body, is structured as a chain of metaphors and metonymies that obey the mechanisms of condensation and displacement. I will read Black Novel (with) Argentines through the prism of the revised repression theory and show how these particular mechanisms operate within its textual body.

Agustín Palant seems to be an agent of the sick social body -Argentina- during the Dirty War. Although the novelistic text is quite clear about the fact that the dictatorship had ended during Palant's residence in New York and that he could go back to his country, he rejects that idea. After committing senseless murder he embarks on a mission for clues that would explain his own actions.

The narrative of Black Novel (with Argentines) which is to a certain extent the result of his mission, fluctuates between several different points of view and verbal tenses. Its opening is told in a condensed, matter-of-fact style, quite typical of the hard-boiled detective novel:

An emotionally detached, objective, at times repetitive, omniscient narrator is presenting a situation. Through his cold, camera-like gaze scanning the space, he embodies the reader's desire to visually recreate the crime scene and become part of the verbal reality. However, this mimetic narrator's position is soon usurped by an analytic one, who provides information about the interior state of the protagonist. «These notions, perceptions, keep spinning through his mind as he furtively descends the stairs»¹³ (9, 4). The analytic narrator overrides the previous, mimetic perspective and shakes the reader out of the comfortable, safe, voyeuristic position. This fluctuation occurs in synchronicity with the uncertainty that the reader experiences in terms of fictional and mimetic representation. Doubts such as «does Agustín really kill Edwina or is he watching the play about it -after all, he was given the ticket for the performance?» are never meant to be resolved. The authority over the meaning lies completely in the (ideal and pluralistic) reader's hands. The unstable, untrustworthy and ambiguous narrating instance sharply contradicts the nature and intent of every authoritarian discourse. In this case, it is clearly used in order to undermine the monologic inscription of the military regime on the Argentine social body and replace the image of a passive, corpse-like body.

Another reason for the reader's uncertainty about the text lies in the fact that the borders between different realities within Black Novel (with Argentines) are never clearly established. The title of the text informs us that we are reading a novel. More specifically, that we are reading a special kind of a novel, a detective novel with a twist in the nationality of protagonists who, unlike the Western canon informs, are Argentines. Within that narrative frame, there is one play being performed and another play being written. The narrators are not clearly distinguished and they shift roles and from frame to frame. Is Agustín a protagonist, a writer or a spectator of a play?

The theatrical opening of the novel, the precise description of the setting, the instructions to the protagonists in terms of their physical and mental representation, and even the reference that «there is no audience», all intensify the dramatic dimension of the performance that the reader is encountering. Furthermore, Agustín's victim is an actress. In the course of the novel, Roberta often talks about her process of understanding the crime with Agustín as «writing of the play». To her lover Bill, she says that she may even be acting in it. The space in which the old ballet master is dying of AIDS surrounded by his disciples is a former theater. But, all this said, the theater that is emerging in Valenzuela's writing is not a conventional one. What both Roberta and Agustín fail to produce is a script (even if we take the text called Black Novel (with Argentines) as the result of their writing the text is clearly a novel and not a play), a device of a traditional theater, an authoritative text requiring obedience by the actors. The idea of life as the Calderonian theater -«El gran teatro del mundo»- as a setting in which the citizens (actors) are living their existences according to the previously composed script (rigid societal laws) is thus taken into consideration and then abandoned as too prescriptive. In psychoanalytic terms, the act of creating a play without the script could lead to the retrieval of the repressed. It is retracing the memory of the body by surpassing the words, pulling out the quota of affect and allowing it to burst in all its force.

The openness of the Spanish term género to both the meaning of gender and genre allows Valenzuela's narrative discourse to articulate a very specific linguistic production of the defense mechanism fundamental to the development of every individual's sexual identity, symptomatically called reaction-formation¹⁴. In terms of the economy of the repressed, discussed earlier, reaction-formation would be an opposing force, a countercathexis of a conscious sphere and consequently, diametrically opposed to the repressed wish. According to Freud, reaction-formations: «take on a symptomatic value when they display a rigid, forced or compulsive aspect, when they happen to fail in their purpose or when -occasionally- they lead directly to the result opposite to the one consciously intended» (Laplanche and Pontalis 377).

In the novel, the oppressive apparatus of the military state enforces repression in the same way, with the ambivalent position of «disappearing» the nation while pretending to save it. Like the forces of the ego, which depend on the codification of the irrational, Valenzuela's text gives an account of repressed violence while omitting its direct mimetic representation. Its occasional narrative seeping through precisely demonstrates the workings of the repression mechanism. For example, after killing Edwina, Agustín leaves her apartment in a frenzy, but conscious enough not to take the elevator. Nevertheless, his body seems to be out of his control and he falls down the stairs. He also feels an urge to vomit and that makes him take the elevator even though he is aware that someone might see him. He reasons that:

The fear and mere invocation of an authority through the phrase «accusatory finger» leads to another bodily image, that of the severed finger that belonged to the body of tortured victims during the dictatorship. And yet, right after the suppressed has surfaced to the conscious realm, it is catapulted back again, because memories should not be allowed to erupt. Along with the series of metonymic shifts, the narrative voice continues to hopscotch from one position to another, always reminding us of the dangers of absolute authority and rigidity.

The evocation of the repressed memories of the Dirty War is a reflection of the operations of the defense mechanism of displacement. It is the indirect representation of the content of the unconscious. The previous example shows how associative paths are established in order to mask the idea's emphasis. The displacement, clearly the result of the mind's censorship, also manifests itself in Agustín's falsification regarding the victim's gender. He tells Roberta that he killed a man and only much later, after a slip of the tongue, does she realize that a woman has been murdered. In that way the «real» victim disappears in the precipices of Agustín's mind. One should not forget that the perpetrator actually swallows the victim's picture when he finds it in the newspaper. Thus, an imaginary victim is created, having more of a symbolic value. This metonymic displacement of the body points clearly to the traumatic signifier -innocent victim- that first gets invented as the male victim and later as androgynous Vic. Towards the end of the novel, the body gains its final identity by belonging to a fellow compatriot Roberta:

Why Roberta? Could it be that she is the only other member of the same nation to which Agustín belongs, the nation in which the citizens are forced to endure the burden of memory of the once alive, now disappeared human bodies?

An even more striking example of metonymic displacement appears in the conversation between the dominatrix Ava Taurel and Roberta. Ava is explaining the meaning of her work which consists of questioning the limits of the human acceptance of pleasure through pain in a sado-masochist parlor.

Visually, the Spanish text reflects the displacement of the being by its one component, ear, by fracturing the sentence and leaving the white, silent space of the page evident. The body of the text breaks up along with the character's body in its intent to resonate the confusion of the mind that tries to comprehend the difference between the willing submission to torture and the torture imposed by the power structure. (I will return to this in my discussion of metaphoric substitution.)

The flawless communication between the ear and the mouth (that at times turns into the ear), is a textbook example of metonymy. But flaws appear when a question is posed by the mouth about the ear's desires. It is at this moment that Roberta realizes that she cannot articulate her desires. On the one hand, her body has been displaced by her ear; on the other, she is playing a game of «figuring out Agustín's motive» by dressing up, coloring her hair, cutting it short, changing her name, in short, changing her identity. She wants to write with her body, but the discursive system she has mastered can not fully translate the language of her body.

The key to her confusion may be in the metonymic contiguity expressed in the relations between several bodies in the novel¹⁸. Discursive beginning is marked by the murder of a female body. The murder happened at the moment of metaphoric substitution of the phallic power with the gun power (I will return to this point later in my discussion of the metaphor). Although two characters are actively involved in the deciphering of Agustín's memory traces, there is a third character who becomes part of the metonymic displacement: Bill. The bodies of Agustín, Bill and Roberta are connected not only through sexual relationships (Bill and Roberta, Agustín and Roberta) and the sense of marginalization from the mainstream (foreigners, members of a minority), but they also exchange clothing and appearances (Roberta shortens her hair and name into androgynous Bobby and assumes, in terms of the patriarchal code, a more active, masculine role, while Agustín becomes Magoo, wears her garments, stays in her home, at times locked, assuming a more passive, feminine role)¹⁹.

Nevertheless, this intended contiguity and exchange of gender and nation, fear and pleasure, leads nowhere as far as helping any of the characters answer the question posed in the beginning: Why does Agustín kill Edwina? And we should never forget that behind the series of displacements lies Edwina's body which has also suffered metonymic depositions: in the story that Agustín tells to Roberta, she is depicted as a male, and eventually her identity of Victim is shortened to the catchy Vic. Valenzuela's text brilliantly manages to show us, through her discursive body, how the victim's body is progressively degraded through the workings of the networks of minds. Edwina disappears from the novel. The actress who had parents, first and last name, is transformed into a meaningless Vic, stripped not only of her identity, but also of her earlier status as a victim!

Closely connected to metonymic displacement is metaphoric substitution. The relationship between the metaphor and metonymy is so close that their definitions are at times confused. The Greek etymology of metaphor conveys its basic function: transportation. It transports the meaning of one sign to another through condensation, substitution and selection. It can be defined as a trope where two signs are compared but only the second term of comparison is explicit. The basis of their comparison is similarity. But, the one that is not invoked is the one that actually has all the evocative power and represents the symptom in psychoanalytic terms. This definition could be the same one used for describing the repressed material where its condensed, selected images/memories surface in the conscious. By discerning a metaphor, we are actually searching for its missing other.

In terms of Valenzuela's text, it is the substitution between the revolver and the male sexual organ that imposes itself as the most relevant example of the metaphoric mechanisms as well as of the reaction-formation. Manifesting itself in «abrupt outbursts» (Laplanche and Pontalis 378), reaction-formation is evidenced in Agustín's inability to explain the unexpected switch performed by his body at the moment of Edwina's killing. Although the reader is led to believe that on a conscious level he wants to have sex with the actress, he kills her with the object lying in his pocket, thus establishing the connection between his weapon (desire) as a male and that of an armed aggressor. One should also not disregard his sense of empowerment at the moment of purchasing the weapon along with the immediate sense of inferiority created as male bystanders «looked at him contemptuously»²⁰ (20, 15). Patriarchal hierarchy, so important for the authoritarianism of the military regime, has been involved. And when this «empowered» male encounters a woman who first cooks a tasty soup, incarnating thus the feminine stereotype, he is truly disappointed when, off stage, this heroine proves to be a seductive female who openly expresses her sexual desire²¹. She is a traitor to the patriarchal ideal so perfectly expressed on stage. It is at that moment that he substitutes the weapon of his maleness with a gun, a real penis with a symbolic phallus.

In my distinction between the penis and the phallus, I am following Jane Gallop's (and Lacan's) somewhat ironically simplified definition in which «the penis is what men have and women do not; the phallus is the attribute of power which neither men nor women have» (127). This would also explain Roberta's transformation and subsequent masculinization (androgyny) when she finds Agustín's gun and hides it. It is interesting to notice that the mere knowledge of where the gun is (in her medicine cabinet!) empowers Roberta in her pursuit of learning to write with the body which is both female and Argentine.

Parallel to Roberta's and Agustín's gender substitution vis-à-vis the possession of the symbolic phallus, is the apparent reversal of the power relations in Ava Taurel's sado-masochistic chamber. As I have stated earlier, its function in the novel is to recall the practices of the torture rooms in the detention centers during the Dirty War. While in Argentina, the citizens were tortured mostly by men, here, in Valenzuela's discursive world, the therapeutic torturers are women. It is the men, on the other hand, who visit Ava's chamber in order to release tension at the hands of female dominatrixes. And yet, the crucial difference remains: while in the Argentine authoritarian system during the 1976-1983 dictatorship all the decisions and actions depended on the Junta's side, Ava's dominatrixes perform only according to the previously established agreement. And although it may seem that the power relations are reversed, it is only an illusion: the men who need Ava's help can pay well. Those who need her services are the ones who still remain in power keeping the hierarchical patriarchal power structure intact.

The worlds of political and sexual violence are contiguous, metonymically displacing each other through the narrative construction of the novel. Metaphoric substitution is also at work here. The invocation and the emphasis on Agustín's existential angst regarding why he killed if he was an innocent writer, brings us back to the real quest for what is going on in the absent part of the metaphor. What resists verbalization and stays in the repressed zones of the memory? Could it be that the unsaid is reminding the reader that perpetrators (torturers, murderers and alike) often do not have to have a reason or a motive to kill? In terms of the Argentine nation whose body Agustín metaphorically represents, the quest and painful introspection awaits the nation whose citizens share the guilt and responsibility for their past. In Agustín's words to Roberta, Argentina «is branded. And so are we» (78, 78).

They could return and try to be respectable porteños, but that would not lead to reconciliation. The fear that the rigid authority has branded on the body of the nation is transcribed upon the bodies of exiles who can not understand that inscription. The painful trace of the signifier upon their bodies is visible only to them, but its meaning is incomprehensible because the signified has been repressed and the referent disappeared and muted. The solution for the characters of Valenzuela's novel is not going back but searching oneself and recognizing the guilt. «I killed her», finally utters Agustín. Although the acknowledgment comes from «that haze of amnesia where not remembering constitutes an intense unity of memory that condenses at the very moment hand thrusts into pocket and draws out revolver»²² (190, 202), this confession is what will allow him to continue his human existence.

The symptomatic appearance of AIDS as a metaphor in Valenzuela's text is a sign of what awaits the body whose anti-bodies have disappeared. The image of the ballet master dying of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome echoes the infamous prescription for a cure of the national body by Admiral César A. Guzzetti. If the destruction of anti-bodies leads to the disappearance of immunity and final disappearance of the whole body, then the words of this symptomatic representative of brute military power equate his own position with that of the most deadly disease known to humans. The unchecked power of the state is like a disease which destroys the intricate fabric of the nation, leading to repression, silence and inability to find the reason for aggression. Deciphering our own bodies, that incredibly complex writing machine, proves to be an excruciatingly painful process, but it is the one that turns us into thinking historical subjects.

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