[In the following essay, Sommer examines Villaverde's narrative strategy whereby he deliberately limits readers' knowledge of the title character's racial background in Cecilia Valdés.]

Very early in Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882), the truth of the title character's racially obscure background becomes clear to the reader. Yet the narrator, for some reason, blocks and delays an explicit revelation. That reason is, in my reading, to dramatize a certain resistance or inability to assimilate the enlightening information that the novel's black informants can and do tell. Each time a pale protagonist turns a deaf ear to slaves' stories, the narrative suggests that not listening is an effort to keep the text of Cecilia's life conveniently blank, that is, white. The gesture is one of those defensive denials that end self-destructively. To defend the illusory privilege that comes with whiting out her history, Cecilia and other presumptively white characters must ignore the details that make her so compromisingly colorful, so available for the final tragedy of misfired affairs. And to protect the privilege of our expert reading, readers are also tempted to ignore colorful competitors for narrative competence. Rather than defer too soon to the authority of rival black narrators, it is far more flattering for readers to spar with the obscurely informed narrator, a figure for the white author, who frames the novel. Who suspects, at first, that Villaverde is framing our reading too?

1. READER AS VICTIM

My purpose as a student of Villaverde's brilliantly benighted narrator is to call attention to his purposefully incompetent performance, to notice that it stages the limits of knowledge wielded by whites in slavocratic Cuba. But the staging has been overlooked as the sociological content has been foregrounded. Nevertheless, Villaverde's racially defined narrative parameters are a pioneering example of textual markings that aim at a particular kind of readerly incompetence, markings that have been habitually overlooked. Until now Villaverde's admirers have not noticed his narrator's strategic self-demotion in deference to black informants, if the interpretive literature about his novel is any indication (see Alvarez García 32-40; Friol 178). Instead, readers have felt satisfied with their hermeneutic competence, as if this racially refracted narrative offered no enduring resistance to competent interpretation.

But postmodern readers “are growing wary of the hermeneutic circularity,” in George Steiner's words (After Babel 355). The old habits have a way of violating the messages moved from one social and cultural context to another, while interpreters are loathe to acknowledge the remainder lost in asymmetrical translation (let us say in the transaction between a Cuban slave and his master). The problems raised by presumptive, masterful understanding are both epistemological and ethical, problems that ring familiar now that postmodern skepticism has lowered the volume on masterly discourses to hear some competing, even incommensurate, voices.

Obviously, the kind of partial deafness, or readerly incompetence, I can advocate for today's self-critical reader is not the kind that Allan Bloom and others have lamented as a failure of education. Incompetence for me is a modest-making goal. It is the goal of respecting the distances and the refusals that some texts have been broadcasting to our still-deaf ears. Here my language feels the lack of a transitive verb derived from modesty. Perhaps chasten comes close, although the morality that chastity suggests may be more self-denying than attentive to limitations. Constrain is an available verb, but it carries a coercive rather than an ethical charge. Modesty's intransitive nature to date may be no surprise for those of us who inhabit carefree, or careless, languages of criticism and who can easily name the contrary movement: to approach, explore, interpret, freely associate, understand, empathize, assimilate.

It is a movement that some minority narrators decide to frustrate. One is Rigoberta Menchú in her testimonial narrative about the Maya Quiché struggle in Guatemala. Her 1983 account, ranging from daily ritual to military strategies, responds to the evidently friendly interrogations of a Venezuelan anthropologist. But Menchú's quincentennial experience with Spanish-speaking conquerors taught her not to share communal secrets with outsiders. And the anthropologist's respectful rendering of the testimony keeps the declarations of secrecy on the page, even though they remain unthematized in her interpretive introduction. Ill-prepared or unreliable, outsiders “cannot [and should not] know” too much.¹ After almost 400 pages, full of the most detailed information, the informant insists that secrets have been kept, secrets meant to cordon off the curious and controlling reader from the vulnerable objects of attention. Menchú will repeat, with Villaverde's contraband dealer in slaves, “Not everything is meant to be said.” But her discretion is more subtle than his, since it is very possible that she is hiding very little. Perhaps Menchú's audible silences and her wordy refusals to talk are calculated, not to cut short our curiosity, but to incite and then to frustrate it. Frustrated, we can feel the access closed off and wonder at our exclusion.

Even a conservative Mexican American like Richard Rodriguez, who chooses not to identify with an ethnically marked community of Chicanos, stops Anglos in their reading tracks too. For example, he gives deliberately empty information about his grandmother to say, in effect, that the linguistic (and ethnic) medium is the message, that translatable information is beside the point: “This message of intimacy could never be translated because it was not in the words she had used but passed through them” (31). To read, then, to make the very effort of approaching the autobiographical author, is to reveal one's unbridgeable distance from him. “You who read this act of contrition should know that by writing it I seek a kind of forgiveness—not yours. The forgiveness, rather, of those many persons whose absence from higher education permitted me to be classed a minority student. I wish that they would read this. I doubt they ever will” (153).

But perhaps the most subtle performance of differential distancing is Toni Morrison's orchestration of various readers in Beloved. “She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable. … Even with Paul D, who had shared some of it and to whom she could talk with at least a measure of calm, the hurt was always there” (58). Distinguishing levels of identification among Beloved's characters works to distinguish among readers too. The concentric, ever-weakening circles of experience-based understanding expand outside Morrison's novel to contemporary readers, those who share the historical burden of slavery, and at a farther remove, those who do not.² And while readers desire more and more information to piece together a story that is already painfully clear, the narration stops periodically and dramatically to confront a danger in that desire. It is an ethically and ethnically encoded danger that may have gone unperceived by those of us at a far and safe remove, the danger of historical narration itself as a reinscription of humiliation and loss:

[M]y greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I'd love more—so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping. … But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day. … Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new. …

“I didn't plan on telling you that.”

“I didn't plan on hearing it.” …

“Maybe. Maybe you can hear it. I just ain't sure I can say.”

(70-71)

Taking the lesson about reflective reticence about slavery and returning to consider Villaverde's nineteenth-century Cuba, we should remember here the case of the historical slave autobiographer Juan Francisco Manzano. On reflection he changed his mind about what to write for abolitionist Domingo del Monte. Manzano had agreed to record his memoirs for the man whose support could mean freedom for the author, but a second letter explained that candor about certain incidents would be impossible. One reason may have been the retaliation he feared in a still-slavocratic country; another, as Sylvia Molloy notes, was the developing control that came with the project of self-authorship (36-54). I want to speculate, though, that a third reason may have been skepticism about the possibility of sharing the pain specific to slavery. Typically, the narrative locates a threshold and stops: “but let's leave to silence the rest of this painful scene” (qtd. in Willis 208), pointing to the private parts of the narrative but refusing to show them to a voyeur. Remembering Manzano's precautions against required intimacy, or attending to them for the first time, we may begin to doubt a whole series of competent but embarrassingly easy readings we have performed, embarrassingly easy reading. What if other nineteenth-century (and earlier) texts have been performing their unavailability without our having noticed before? Privileged readers have never been (res)trained to stop at signs of resistance. Instead, we read protests of privacy as coquettish modesty calculated to incite conquest. Nevertheless, a small effort may remind many readers how Harriet Jacobs interrupts her otherwise intimate confessions of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) to stop her white readers from presuming to judge her. You “whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely!” (54).

These books resist the competent reader intentionally. By marking off an impassable distance between reader and text, and thereby raising questions of access or welcome, writers ranging from Jacobs and Manzano to Morrison, Rodriguez, and Menchú practice strategies to produce the kind of readerly incompetence that more reading will not overcome. At issue here is not the ultimate or universal impossibility of exhausting always-ambiguous literature through interpretation. Ambiguity, unlike the resistance that interests me here, has been for some time a consecrated theme for professional readers. It blunts interpretive efforts but allows us to offset frustrated mastery with a liberating license to continue endlessly. Nor do I mean resistance as the kind of ideally empty or even bored refusal to narrate, such as Flaubert apparently pioneered when he would stop a story to contemplate some diegetically insignificant detail (see Genette 183-202).

The issue is neither the final undecidability of interpretation nor novel pauses over what is or is not relevant to tell. It is, rather, the rhetoric of selective, socially differentiated, understanding. Announcing limited access is the point, rather than whether or not some information is really withheld. Resistance does not necessarily signal a genuine epistemological impasse; it is enough that the impasse is claimed in this ethico-esthetic strategy to position the reader within limits. The question, finally, is not what insiders can know as opposed to outsiders; it is how these positions are constructed as incommensurate or conflictive. And professional readers who may share some social space with a writer, enough to claim privileged understanding and explanatory powers, may miss, or hastily fill in, the constitutive gaps these texts would demarcate.

These are not the ethnically marked books that invite empathy but can turn out to be translations or imitations of the real thing, to which Henry Louis Gates refers in “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree.” His critique hovers around the always suspect claim of authenticity, since imitations are often indistinguishable from more presumptive fictions. Therefore, Gates concludes that “[n]o human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world” (30). But resistant texts do not seem to fret over the snare of transparent authenticity that can reveal visible inventions. They are determined to offer opacity, not to make it evaporate. Resistant texts thematize what is lost in translation. They hesitate to play musical chairs, a game of easy substitutions designed to eliminate all but one position. Hesitation does not mean that the music stops so that authenticity can sit down securely and leave us standing; it signals skepticism about the process of elimination. Villaverde, for example, carefully keeps several players in circulation, including the white narrator whose partial constructions motivate much of the novel's tragically truncated logic. Gates tracks the mistakes incurred by empathetic readings that inevitably, I think, fuse self with other and melt down differences. That simplifying fusion is what some texts foil.

If we learn to stop at obstinacy to interpretation, we may notice that it sometimes calculates a problem of division; it may discriminate between the authorial community (which will not read Menchú, is guiltily avoided by Rodriguez, and hardly the sole reader of Morrison) and the authorial audience of, perhaps predominantly, curious outsiders. Obstinacy targets those who would read in the presumptuous register of “If I were a …,” failing to assimilate lessons about how positionality helps to constitute knowledge. Yet the asymmetry of positions restricts travel from one to the other, despite the fantasies of mutuality that motivate some studies of multiculturalism, as if one's effort to understand an ethnically inflected text were somehow commensurate with the writer's decision to perform in an imperial language.³ Even for a novel like Tangi (1975), by the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, which “shows how a strategic refusal to accommodate the reader can stand at the very core of a work's meaning” (Dasenbrock 16), a competent reader assumes equivalence or reciprocity between writing and reception, an interchangeability that allows for precisely the kinds of ultimate identification between self and other that overrides differences. “At the tangi and in the novel Tangi, we are on Maori ground, and, for a change, we have to do the accommodating and the adapting. As we do so, we experience the kind of shifting and adapting a Tama undergoes every day in his life” (Dasenbrock 18). But “ideal” or target readers for resistant texts are hardly the writer's egalitarian counterparts; they are certainly not the coconspirators or allies who putatively share experiences and assumptions, as we have presumed in our critical vocabulary.⁴ They are marked precisely as strangers, incapable of—or undesirable for—conspiratorial intimacy. Discrimination here assumes that differences in social positionality exist and that they effect (or require, for safety's sake) different degrees of understanding. Written from clearly drawn positions on a chart where only the powerful center can mistake its specificity for universality, these “marginal” or “minority” texts draw boundaries around that arrogant space.

Thanks to Villaverde's staging we can prepare to locate our limited readings. Perhaps we will remember the moment when Adela Gamboa inflates her privileged security enough to confuse it with a general sense of security. It was in response to her slave María de Regla's anxiety about overstepping the limits of what could safely be said. “Your fear is unfounded,” says the empathetic and (therefore) irresponsible mistress, “But, my lady,” María protests, “you seem to forget that a slave always stands to lose when she suspects her masters” (240).⁵

There are texts that continue to protest, because they neither assume nor welcome comprehension by the reader who would assimilate them. It may surprise some well-meaning readers to find that particularists are not always accommodating, that assimilation rhymes more with cultural annihilation than with progressive Aufhebung. The ecumenical gestures to reduce otherness to sameness suggest that difference is a superable problem rather than a source of pride or simply the way we are in the world.⁶ Unyielding responses to the liberal embrace, the responses that I am tracking here, range from offering up a surrogate self whose absorption is no real loss, the “featherbed resistance” that Zora Neale Hurston described as the Negro's polite refusal, to striking the pose of an intransigent, unaccommodating self from the place “competent” readers have associated with the other. This pose may not need to construct a stable, coherent speaking subject whom readers, after all, could then presume to know and to represent. The purpose of what Gayatri Spivak and Diana Fuss, among others, have been calling “strategic essentialism” is to cast doubts on the outsider's capacity to know, without allowing incapacity to float into the comforting, unmanageable mists of ambiguity. It is to say that some texts decline the intimately possessive knowledge that passes for love.⁷

They refuse to flatter the so-called competent reader with touristic invitations to intimacy and produce instead what we can call the “Cordelia effect” that cripples authority by refusing to pander to it.⁸ Unlike so many opportune books (at least since the time of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega) that have parlayed the author's “exoticism” into classical norms—in a wager to confuse boundaries and win some space at the center—these uncooperative texts declare their intransigence. They locate traditionally privileged readers beyond an inviolable border. From there we can be “ideal,” paradoxically, to the extent that we are excluded.

2. CORNERED IN CUBA

Villaverde's narrator, as I said, might have prepared us for this paradox, if we had been noticing how coyly he excludes himself, how he stays in the blank spaces along the margins of his narrative. But readers have not noticed his purposeful self-exclusion, if the critical literature is an indication. Instead, they have been praising the novel's sociological information, its local color, and they have been celebrating their own capacity to garner it from the storyteller's spotty accounts.

How clever and well trained the traditional reader must feel, then, with Cecilia Valdés in hand! Who, besides the reader, realizes so much about her unidentified father and about her romance with Leonardo? Who else has figured out that the men in her life are already intimately related? Hardly anyone in the novel seems to know what is going on, not the mulatta or her white lover, and certainly not the benighted narrator. A first, far shorter, version of the story, published contemporaneously with clandestine abolitionist novels in 1839 (but inoffensive enough to appear in Cuba and then in Spain) had featured a predictably idealized heroine, an omniscient author who knew her worth, and little of the flair for provoking self-doubt that characterizes the four-part novel of 1882.⁹ In the developed and disheartening version, the narrator continually calls attention to his own social blinders by delaying information long after it is news to us. It is delayed a bit transparently and with a studied clumsiness that leaves the teller tellingly unenlightened. He calls attention to his stubborn ignorance while postponing the speech of blacks, the ideal informants here as they were in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's abolitionist novel Sab (1841). The difference is that our narrator is no freethinking Teresa who knew enough to listen to the slave Sab as soon as he offered to talk.¹⁰

Here, hundreds of pages pass before the slaves can tell about Cecilia, the daughter of a mulatta who goes mad when her white lover removes the shameful issue of their affair to an orphanage. His cruelty abates too late for the mother, but baby Cecilia is returned to her grandmother's house where she learns that any white husband is preferable to a black one, and to the street where she falls in mutual love with Leonardo Gamboa, the spoiled son of a Spanish slaver who—horrors!—happens to be her father too. Neither lover knows that their attachment is incestuous, nor that their conflicting expectations—erotic play for him, marriage for her—will clash violently. To underline the potential for perverse productivity that only frank (but enslaved) information could stop, Leonardo's youngest sister is described as Cecilia's double, so that if he and Adela “were not flesh and blood siblings, they would have been lovers” (57).

The other woman in Leonardo's life is Isabel Ilincheta, elegant, correct, a fitting counterpart to independent and candid Cecilia. Isabel seems in excess of standard good-girl heroines; in fact, she is more the hero, modeled perhaps after Villaverde's independentist wife.¹¹ It is Isabel who runs her father's business—growing coffee rather than the more labor-intensive sugar—and her womanly good looks do not interfere with a markedly virile appeal (174).

There is a schizophrenic destiny of desire here: Leonardo can profess love for both women, for his incestuous and finally narcissistic sibling substitute as well as for the ideal fiscal match of Isabel's coffee with his sugar, even boasting that many more women have room in his heart. The campaigns of amorous conquest, the intrigues and jealousies, the doubts that Isabel feels about joining a smug and privileged, if not brutal, slave-owning family are all set on a detailed backdrop of an inhuman system that denies human rights to blacks and makes monsters of their masters. The tragedy comes to a circular climax when Cecilia and her lover set up house together, have a baby girl, and separate, once bored Leonardo feels ready to marry Isabel. Cecilia complains about the betrayal to her desperate mulatto admirer, a tailor's apprentice by day and a musician by night, which makes him doubly promising as the purveyor of an autonomous Cuban style (see Holland). Perhaps the pattern traced here, fashioning a nation from competing colors and tastes, leads this stylist to cut away the traitor to Cuba's characteristic beauty. The mulatto's murderous race to the church ceremony—where Cecilia hoped the bride would die, not the groom—leaves the mistress as mad as her mother was. And it leaves her baby quite helplessly orphaned.

Long before that climax, though, the reader has been building toward it with the pleasure of interpretive control. No one but the reader, it seems, has figured out the nefarious finale from the first pages on. Years of privileged training in literary traditions, understandably, add up to a kind of entitlement to know a book, possibly with the possessive and reproductive intimacy of Adam who knew Eve. As teachers and students, we have until now welcomed intrigue as a coy, teasing invitation to test and hone our competence. We may pick up a book because we find it attractive—or because of a lead from a model reader, the real object of our murderous desire to replace her. Always we assume in our enlightened habits that the books need our attention, like so many wallflowers lined up on a shelf to be selected for a quick turn or an intimate tête-à-tête. If the book seems easy, if it allows possession without a struggle and cancels the promise of self-flattery for an expert reading, our hands may go limp at the covers. Easy come, easy go.

The more difficult the book the better. Difficulty is a challenge, in the apparently exhaustive categories that George Steiner describes (On Difficulty 47). It is an opportunity to struggle and to win, to overcome resistance, uncover the codes, to get on top of it, to put one's finger on the mechanisms that produce pleasure and pain, and then to call it ours.¹² We take up a book to conquer it and to feel grand, enriched by the appropriation and confident that our cunning is equal to the textual tease that had, after all, planned its own submission as the ultimate climax of reading. Books want to be understood, don't they, even when they are coy and evasive? Evasiveness and ambiguity are, as we know, familiar interpretive flags that readers erect on the books they leave behind. Feeling grand and guiltless, we proceed to the next conquest.¹³

“I am only interested in what does not belong to me. Law of Man. Law of the Cannibal” (38) is the gluttonous way Oswald de Andrade inflected this desire to conquer difference. Appropriation of the other is what our New World cultures feed on, according to the Brazilian modernist, as long as the other offers the spice of struggle. Cannibals reject the bland meat easily consumed in this digestion of Montaigne's essay. Europe, apparently, was also constituted by ingesting its others. And Andrade's point is, after all, that cannibalism is what makes us all human, or at least participants in an extended occidental culture nourished on novelty. Therefore, his provocations can stand in more clearly for other, more contrite, admissions of plunder.

How grand the competent reader must feel, as I said, holding Cecilia Valdés! How that reader must congratulate him- or herself for the good job of filling in the blanks and tying up the loose threads, now neatly knotted into a tight text that he or she can rest on, comfortable and confident in victory. But this rest will be disturbed, if the reader admits that he or she does not need it, confessing that the book was, in fact, too easy and that the minimal effort exerted never earned him or her the right to self-celebratory relaxation. In that state of disturbed inactivity a doubt may gnaw at the hastily tied knots, gnaw at them until the tight texture of a competent reading begins to loosen and fray into a web of worries.

Who, finally, conquered whom? Did the reader adeptly manipulate unprocessed information to blend together a smooth and satisfying story? Or was the story studiously and artfully uncooked in order to tempt the reader into gobbling so effortlessly that it was bound to produce indigestion? The problem is precisely the apparent lack of problems for the complacently competent reader. It is the facile competence that makes the conquest so ridiculously easy that the conqueror without contenders may find him- or herself at the butt of a textual joke. Competent readers compete with the narrator who knows himself to be incompetent. He makes a spectacle of his own ignorance because he knows, unlike us, how difficult it is to know anything. On the very first page, where a gentleman is hiding under a broad-brimmed hat behind the thick curtain of a carriage that stops at Cecilia's house, the narrator refuses to identify the obvious. About the gentleman, he says only that “all the precaution seemed superfluous, since there was not a living soul on the street” (1). The same could be said of the narrative's showy veil, with the difference that its precautions are useless, not because no one is watching, but because the veil is so transparent. Far from hiding anything, it constantly calls attention as a figure for the social blinders that the narrator locates around himself.

He theatricalizes the limits to his comprehension for more reasons than simply to create suspense. If this were just a mystery story, there would be no reason to postpone the delivery of information for so many pages after we have figured it out. The story hesitates and stutters its own admission of the privilege that gets in the way of knowing and telling. At points, the narrator even thematizes the trouble, as, for instance, when he comments on the punishment of a slave by his master: “It is difficult to explain, for those who have been neither one nor the other, and impossible to understand in all its force for those who have never lived in a slave country” (103). Then, the epigraph of chapter 6, part 3, reads, “About blacks … Oh! my tongue holds back / From forming the name of their misfortunes!” (210) The narrator underlines his own incompetence as he suggests ours too. And the insistence makes white, colorless incompetence a veritable thesis of the book, while it puts off more and more mechanically those who could tell. It suspends the story every time a character decides to white out the black marks that make up the writing here. Cecilia's grandmother, for example, is relieved by the interruption of an intimate moment with her ward.

Nothing more opportune could have happened than the interruption that came with the friend's visit. The old woman had said more than prudence allowed, and the young one was afraid to find out the intimate meaning of her grandmother's last words. What did she know? Why was her language so veiled? Did she have well-founded suspicions or was she just trying to intimidate her?

The truth is that, during the dispute, with their consciences alarmed and with some facts at hand, both of them had advanced onto a slippery terrain previously hidden from their sight. The first to step in would have to gather an enormous harvest of pain and remorse. For her part, Grandma Josefa didn't think the moment had come to let Cecilia in on the real facts of her life.

(139)

For related reasons, Don Cándido prefers not to say what he knows. He refuses to discuss either his personal past—despite his wife's persistent demands—or his political present as a contraband dealer in slaves. In response to Doña Rosa's curiosity, her husband is discreet, with a telling reluctance that repeats itself throughout the book as the origin of intrigue and misunderstandings. Discretion and double dealing will finally explode in disaster to make a point about who tells and who listens in this portrayal of Cuba. “Are you with me?” Cándido asks Rosa. “Not everything is meant to be said” (112).

This is a novel about impossible relationships, not because blacks and whites should not love one another—after all, they are mutually attractive and produce beautiful children—but because slavery makes it impossible. As Havana's frustrated mayor puts it, “In a country with slaves … morals tend … towards laxity and the strangest, most monstrous and perverse ideas reign” (279). Unlike the foundational fictions of other Latin American countries, where passion and patriotism together produced model citizens, romance and convenience do not coincide in Villaverde's Cuba (see Sommer, Foundational Fictions 126-31). It is not quite American, nor even a country yet (official independence would come in 1898). In short, Cuba was too closely bonded with aristocratic, hierarchical Europe. We know that Gamboa, Sr., married his wife for money and then looked elsewhere for love, and that Leonardo, admiring and even loving Isabel for her useful virtues, remains romantically irrational. He undercuts—or overextends—his affections because archaic privilege exceeds his individual bourgeois self. Father and son are seduced as much by the absolute power of their racial and sexual advantage as by their partners' charms. This is no modern and rational free market of feeling where unprotected desire could produce social growth,¹⁴ but a bastion of colonial custom where erotic protectionism nurtures desire in surplus of social need.

The novel, then, poses the problem of racial exploitation whose other face is self-annihilation. The marriage contract to reproduce the family within domestic confines is here as transparently fictional and as easily violated as was the 1817 agreement that England had wrested from Spain to stop importing slaves, a promise that should have forced the reproduction of a labor force at home. Beyond a metaphoric relationship between broken conjugal contracts and contraband slaves, we see that Havana's moralizing mayor senses a link of cause and effect between social dissolution and slavery. The brutality allowed by the prospect of new imports, and the unproductive privilege it fostered, he said, corroded society's most sacred values: “familial peace and harmony” (282). The family might not be quite so threatened by extramarital affairs, on which the men look with indulgence, were it not for the secrecy imposed by the conflicting code of bourgeois marriage contracts. It is secrecy that puts Leonardo at risk of incest. He will not be guilty with Adela because their relationship is clear; but Cecilia's parentage is an explosive secret, a debilitating blind spot where the rule of masters' privilege (double) crosses modern family ties. Both the narcissism and the secrecy point to the moral contradictions of a slave society that assumes it can be modern. Neither the sugar industrialists—whose irrational excesses produce slave rebellions, suicides, and English interventions—nor the interracial lovers can make a stratified society coincide with bourgeois pacts.

The tragedy is caused by the contraband dealings that hide the slipperiness of racial categories. Whites and mulattoes are either ignorant of their situation or they would like to ignore it in order to preserve even their most illusory privileges. By contrast, the black slaves, who stand to lose very little, are free to face up to the obvious. The others, having exhausted every possible avoidance strategy, eventually give the knowledgeable narrators a hearing. They know and tell, with admirable command, about the overlapping affairs of Cecilia's family and the consequently fading contrast between (supposedly adventurous) exogamy and (apparently redundant) incest.

But the deteriorating distinction between the familial and the foreign goes unattended too long, and the whites draw blanks so stubbornly that their blindness, after a while, is as evidently forced and unsatisfying as a slave's fate. There seems to be no textual motivation for stopping the story. The pretense of suspense, we see, is transparent. The black informants cannot be dismissed as unschooled or inarticulate; they speak such a superior register of Spanish that mastery of the language could itself have been a persuasive promise of social coherence. Minor characters of color do keep their linguistic distance, while those newcomers or social marginals who refuse to collaborate in standard spoken Cuban either give Villaverde the opportunity for innovative writing in local slang or stop the interaction through suicidal muteness. No one, for example, damns slavery louder than Cándido's recently imported field hand who literally preferred to swallow his tongue than learn to speak like a slave.

Dionisio, Cándido's cook, is an educated slave who knows how to read and write (104), and who prefers to fix his superiors in their own stew. At least as credible and as Cuban as his Spanish master, a coarse immigrant smuggler of slaves, Dionisio is a “black man of aristocratic mien, well-spoken and rational” (103). His worthy black wife, María de Regla, leaves her white listeners impressed by “the precision and clarity of her words … along with her crystalline pronunciation” (222). The problem, in a slave society that legitimates itself through color coded grades of intelligence, is precisely how well they speak and how much they know: “‘That black woman knows how to talk,’ said Cocco to Don Cándido as they left the (plantation) infirmary. ‘You have no idea how well,’ replied Don Cándido in a lowered voice. ‘That is the very source of her many misfortunes.’” (222). Given the opportunity, María de Regla promises the information requested about the suicidal silence of the captured field slave, and she delivers. The text repeats her preamble, “I will tell my master what has happened” (222), perhaps to insist that we are, finally, with a trustworthy teller. But other more personal information that she commands remains unrequested for a long time. Finally, at the end of part 3, chapter 8, she is allowed to connect the dots in what had remained a studiously spotty story. Adela Gamboa had let María into the ladies' bedroom during their visit to the sugar plantation, because the young mistress was determined to know why her former nurse was exiled from Havana to the fields. She and the others get more than she asked for. As the nurse who provided Adela Gamboa and Cecilia with a mother's milk, María de Regla also knows who fathered both, which explains her removal from the house in Havana to the pain-racked plantation. She was the one who failed to nurse the field slave whose tragic tongue made his forced silence felt; the one who now keeps the ladies of the house listening for hours about the sinister effects of slavery when black families are separated and sold off in pieces; the Hegelian slave whose storytelling power over the enchanted mistresses comes with the knowledge derived from the work only she was fit to do.

Although the ladies demand to be told, the intelligence is dismissed with an authoritarian gesture that dramatizes, again, the crisis of legitimacy when the authorities (and authors) resist knowing enough to be responsible. María de Regla fills pages with a long report that ties up the story lines left purposefully hanging by the general narrator. She tells about having been rented out to a doctor in order to nurse a baby girl whose origins were kept scrupulously secret, about a mother driven mad and a suspiciously discreet grandmother, about a gentleman hidden behind his cloak but nevertheless familiar:

“Who was the gentleman on the street corner?” Adela and Carmen asked together, as if with a single voice.

“I'm not really sure, my noble ladies,” stammered the old nurse. “I wouldn't dare vow that the doctor said: Don Cán …”

“Aha!” Carmen exclaimed. “If you're not sure who it was, that means at least you have someone in mind. What did you think his name was?”

“I don't think anything at all, mistress Carmita,” María de Regla answered, much disturbed. “I wouldn't even dare to say my own name at this point …”

“Your fear is unfounded,” Adela interceded.

“But, my lady, you seem to forget that a slave always stands to lose when she suspects her masters.”

“What! How can you?!” interrupted Carmen, visibly angered. … You act dumb when it suits you and then you think you know more than we do.”

(239-40)

The ideal reader here is not Carmen, who refuses to listen and rushes as incautiously to interpret as does any privileged reader; instead of acknowledging that María knows more than she, Carmen turns the comparison around. The ideal is the reader who stays quiet and listens, Isabel Ilincheta, the Gamboas’ guest as Leonardo's fiancée.

Once María's welcome assault on the ladies' bedroom frees the novel's narrative flow, the reader who identifies with Isabel may feel an uncomfortable twinge of self-doubt in retrospect. That uncertainty is not about the evidently incestuous mystery plot that María points out and that has begun to unravel from the very beginning of the novel. Any reader can enjoy the self-aggrandizing pleasures of getting the point long before the punch line. I mean the self-doubt or self-censure that the slave provokes in us readers when she authorizes some information that we may have resisted (just as Carmen resists it here) when it came earlier from a questionable source, the kind of man we have been taught to ignore, her husband Dionisio.

Earlier (in pt. 2, chap. 17) the lonely and bitter man, separated from his wife for 12 years, crashed a formal dance that was restricted to free “colored” artisans. There Cecilia rebuffed him. Enraged, Dionisio blurted out what we partially know and she suspects: that she and Leonardo may already be too intimately related to be lovers, that her nursemaid was banished to the sugar plantation where Gamboa, Sr., would be safe from the slave's knowledge. In short, because of this haughty and thoughtless mulatta who was about to consummate her own disaster, Dionisio and his wife were leading disastrously lonely and humiliating lives.

It is not the information that may make us uncomfortable, especially not when the same information is repeated later by a nonthreatening female slave in the conventionally sentimental (s)pace for reading novels. Discomfort comes rather from thinking back on the scene of refusing to know, Cecilia's refusal, that of her admiring companions and, also perhaps, of her readers. Villaverde sets the trap of racially restricted listening by keeping Dionisio anonymous for a while, as he remains an aging, too-black man dressed in ill-fitting finery and forcing himself on the Cuban Venus. Borrowing standards of good taste—as well as entire pages¹⁵—from his society articles for La Moda where, arguably, fashion news was meant to customize a particular national style (as in Juan Bautista Alberdi's Argentine journal of the same title), Villaverde's novel counts on certain assumptions of etiquette that would censure the aggressive outsider for inappropriately coveting the barely bronzed object of general desire. Surely the free men documented by invitation, and by the narrator's biographical references, are worthier of her attention.

Is not Cecilia's caution, perhaps even her disdain, understandable? Who was this easily aroused, unsolicited suitor? What possible significance could Dionisio's string of recriminations have for her? She worries about it, at least until the next dance. And María de Regla reminds the reader to worry too about why Dionisio, the source of information, the appropriate teller of the story, cannot be appropriately heard. If this pessimistic novel shares with Sab the distinction between slaves who know and masters who do not, Avellaneda's slave-holders seem innocently ignorant compared with Villaverde's dangerously disingenuous whites and almost-whites. To keep the danger in focus, Villaverde does not confuse his authorial self with an omniscient informant, as Avellaneda does. Her narrator and the slave protagonist share information so equally that the colored line between extradiegetic and interdiegetic voices blurs; it blurs enough that Sab signs his name to the end of her book. Villaverde plays at the same game, but perversely. His signature appears at the beginning, on the initial title page, through his own initials (and credentials?), C. V., which also begin to spell Cecilia Valdés.¹⁶

He is Cecilia, deluded like her, unwilling but obliged to divorce desire from destiny, more white than black, but as Leonardo Gamboa remarks about his own privileged color, it is definitely Cuban in its indefinite origins: “My mother really is a Creole, and I can't vouch for her purity of blood” (38). The confusion does not produce a new autochthonous archetype, as it does in Sab, but an impossibly precarious hierarchy in which the mulatta's desire to move up coincides tragically with her white lover's taste for slumming. Compared to the bold abolitionist pronouncements of Sab, the politics in Cecilia Valdés is insidiously subtle, because color coding is shown to be so culturally constituting that the lovers never really unlearn it. Instead one yearns for racial privilege while the other plays on it.

Conscious of his complicity with privileged compatriots, Villaverde's narrator mirrors their defensive deafness and blindness to a growing population of emboldened blacks on the brink of abolition. The whites simply refuse legitimate intercourse with them. And Villaverde's text keeps pointing to the white narrator's blanks drawn to preserve the colorfast fabric of slave society. Gesticulating at the limits of information, Villaverde apparently invites white readers to locate themselves consciously inside those limits, where they may develop a claustrophobic dread of blank walls and a desire to get beyond them.

Villaverde may also have been inviting a different kind of response, a more confrontational (and supplementary) mirror image, in addition to the repetition of the reader in the narrator. I am referring to less complicitous responses to privileged readers. These are responses that could have been inspired by Dionisio and María de Regla, narrators who win their legitimacy by mastering the logic of a persistently color coded society and by managing to exercise a citizen's right to voice difference. Their successors will slant Villaverde's flamboyant modesty into a mirror image of self-arrogated mastery that imposes modesty on privileged readers. Instead of Cecilia Valdés's theatricalization of the teller's ignorance (implicating the reader so that he deflates his sense of power), some books will empower the narrator at the reader's expense. They will refuse any conventional collusion between writer and reader, and flaunt an exclusive mastery meant to humble privileged outsiders, to tip the balance enough for negotiations to begin. The dramatic gesture, like Villaverde's, is an invitation to listen attentively.

Notes

1. For an extended discussion of Menchú, see Sommer, “No Secrets.”

2. Without entering the debate on whether or not experience is a reliable “ground” for theorizing, I should mention it in the current reevaluation of what one might call inescapable essentialism. A corollary, it seems to me, is necessarily the inescapable conditioning of experience. Modleski, for example, rejects Jonathan Culler's and Peggy Kamuf's suspicions of experience, especially Culler's pretense of imagining how a woman reads (133). Fuss points out that the project of poststructuralism has not been to make experience anathema, but rather to refuse “the hypostatisation of experience as the ground” of knowing (82).

3. See, e.g., Dasenbrock. On the one hand, he claims that foreign words or unfamiliar uses signal cultural differences “and that difference must be respected” (18); on the other hand, the differences are read as invitations to work at extracting meaning, to assimilate oneself into the other's culture, just as the other has had to work at negotiating mainstream English. For a critique of cultural studies' easy analogies, see Saldívar.

4. Rabinowitz reviews the generally accepted notion of authorial audience as one the writer can predict—not that all readers are ideal, but they are “deformed” in ways the author would know and share. They are “members of the same cultural community” (22, 26, 28).

5. Quotations from Cecilia Valdés are my translations from the 1979 edition.

6. For the collusion between the apparently opposite projects of universalizing (saming) and subordination of the “other” (othering), see Schor. Comparing Beauvoir's call for equality with men to Irigaray's celebration of female difference, Schor observes the limitations of both (45).

7. Spivak's work is associated with this idea, although Scholes suggests that John Locke came upon it some time ago. Locke apparently distinguished between real and nominal essences, the former being the Aristotelian irreducible and unchanging core of a thing, and the latter merely a linguistic convenience, a classificatory fiction (Scholes 208). For Spivak's formulation, see In Other Worlds ch. 12, where she does not dismiss essentialism; it is “a strategic use of positivistic essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (205). Allying with the subaltern is an “interventionist strategy” (207). For a more cautious consideration, “within a personalist culture” where essentialism can be smuggled in again to serve the powerful, see Spivak, “In a Word” 128-29. Fuss anticipates Spivak's position that it is one thing for the subaltern to use essentialism, another for the hegemonic group to use it (86).

8. In Steiner's pithy indictment, “Like murderous Cordelia, children know that silence can destroy another human being. Or like Kafka they remember that several have survived the songs of the Sirens, but none their silence” (After Babel 35).

9. For the differences between the two versions, see Alvarez García 28-29, 36-37; Friol 178.

10. See Sommer, Foundational Fictions ch. 4.

11. In 1855 Villaverde married Emilia Casanova, who forced their family to leave Cuba for New York, given her outspoken criticism of Spain. Later, he wrote Apuntes biográficos de Emilia Casanova de Villaverde (1874) about her continuing political work, courage, and intelligence (Alvarez García 14-15).

12. Harold Bloom would counter any denial of these pleasures by forcing an acknowledgment of a critical will to power (11).

13. Steiner provocatively acknowledges “the Augustinian tristitia that follows on the cognate acts of erotic and intellectual possession” (After Babel 298). But then he develops the theme of interesting translations as those that violate and exceed the originals.

14. The liberating possibilities of free markets in general are suggested when, for example, the slave María de Regla learns negotiations to everyone's advantage from a street vendor (267).

15. Villaverde states in a footnote that his account of a gala evening at the Philharmonic Society was taken from a weekly Havana publication of 1830 entitled La Moda (82). The novel as well as those articles was dedicated to Cuban women.

16. See Friol 200.

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