SOURCE: Schmidt, Cynthia A. “A Satiric Perspective on the Experience of Exile in the Short Fiction of Cristina Peri Rossi.” Americas Review 18, nos. 3–4 (fall–winter 1990): 218–26.

[In the following essay, Schmidt explores Peri Rossi's satiric treatment of exile in “La tarde del dinosaurio” and “La influencia de Edgar Allan Poe en la poesía de Raimuno Arias.”]

Cristina Peri Rossi's work was already well-known in her native Uruguay when she went into exile in Spain in 1972. Her years in exile have been highly productive. In addition to literary translations and journalistic writing, she has published four volumes of poetry, five collections of short stories and two novels. If we were to single out a common thematic thread unifying her works before and after exile, it could be her criticism of oppressive social structures. CPR explains the sense of continuity in her writings: “Escribo contra la realidad. Empecé a hacerlo porque la realidad que veía a mi alrededor—en mi casa, primero; luego en mi país—no me gustaba. Y sigo escribiendo, me parece, por la misma razón … En este sentido, poco importa cuál sea la realidad geográfica.”¹

Exile, a reality which CPR has been forced to experience, is a frequent target of her satiric vision of social ills. Two highly imaginative short stories, “La tarde del dinosaurio” and “La influencia de Edgar Allan Poe en la poesía de Raimundo Arias” focus on the psychological trauma and social margination of the Uruguayans who were ideologically opposed to the military coup of 1973. The former is about exile within the limits of the country, while the latter tells a tale of extraterritorial exile. Imagination, fantasy, a keen sense of the absurd, irony and humor all come into play in CPR's vision of a reality which is other than the desired. In these stories, as in all of CPR's fiction, allegory serves as a structuring principle, linking the singular case to its abstract, universal meaning.

Both stories recount the events from the perspective of a child, and in both cases the loser of the local “war” is the child's father, represented as a worn-out small-time intellectual. No one escapes the critical vision—both the victors and the defeated are demystified. Far from attempting to detail a sweeping portrait of the Southern Cone diáspora, Peri Rossi's families are at once a microcosm of Uruguayan society and human society. Social catastrophe is interpreted in individual terms—defeat in politics is equated to loss in love, and loss of social esteem is reflected in the lucid uncompromising scrutiny of a young son or daughter.

“La tarde del dinosaurio” encompasses multiple levels of reading. On the literal level it is the story of a child of divorce who lives with his remarried mother and stepfather. The child feels sympathy for his real father, a social misfit, and resents his adoptive father, a highly successful businessman. Within this reading, the child's recurring nightmares of a huge brontosaurus can be interpreted as the result of the anguish and confusion caused by his family situation. On an allegorical level, the story depicts the fissures within Uruguayan society created by repressive military rule. The broken and re-formed family represents Uruguay after the coup of 1973. The natural father and the adoptive father are metaphors for the state, the mother embodies Uruguayan civil society and the child is at once the innocent victim of the fractured country and its future. Within the double articulation of the allegory, the regional situation is a reflection of Peri Rossi's vision of the human condition, permeated with millenary fears brought on by our own irrationality. My analysis will focus on how the story blends historical fact and free imagination to depict the alienating effect of social upheaval in Uruguay.

The narrator provides a brief historical allusion to account for the contrasting lifestyle of his two fathers: “ellos habían tenido … una guerra pequeña, no de las grandes guerras internacionales, … una guerra dentro de los límites del país, pero guerra al fin” (84)². This reference undoubtedly corresponds to the period immediately before the coup when the Tupamaros assassinated several government officials, and President Bordaberry responded by declaring “internal war.”³ The narrator tells us the results of the war: “De la guerra había surgido un sentimiento de seguridad para unos y un sentimiento de inseguridad para otros” (84).

The boy's real father, to whom he refers as Father no. 1, is one of those who suffered adverse effects from the internal war. Father no. 1's situation and personal characteristics seem to parallel the liberal faction of the constitutional government in exile. The son's observation: “Le era muy difícil no preocuparse por todos los hombres y mujeres que encontraba en su camino” (98) hints at the socialist concept of a welfare-oriented polity. Father no. 1 lives in a state of internal exile. The child's description of him reveals both the causes and effect of his failure. Besides having lost the custody of his child, he is nearly indigent, and the reader is first introduced to him in terms of lack: “—¿No tendrás un cigarrillo para darme?—le había pedido su padre, el primero, el que no tenía oficina, ni casa en la ciudad, ni otra casa en el mar o en la montaña, ni auto propio, ni tenía televisor ni nevera ni mocasines de piel ni cigarrillos ni nada” (82).

This father is a journalist. One day he decides to show his articles to his son, but he has to look in drawers of unmatched socks and other unlikely places to gather them together. The articles run a gamut of topics from growing roses to sailing to instructions for preparing a delicious rice pudding. The narrator reflects: “Se ve que su padre era un tipo muy capaz. De escribir cualquier cosa” (85). In reality, he had never planted roses, he was afraid to sail and he hated rice. Despite the shortcomings he recognizes in Father no. 1, the child feels genuine sympathy for this tender and inept fellow: “Era más amable y más suave, vivía dando explicaciones de todo. A él le parecía que las explicaciones las usaba para sí mismo, porque le debía resultar muy complicado vivir” (84). Although kind-hearted and well-meaning, Father no. 1 is too weak, too reflective, and too beaten-down by life's problems to try to take control. He prefers to make peace. Thus, Father no. 1 echoes the bankrupt liberal faction which proved itself incapable of overcoming Uruguay's economic crisis and lost the capacity to articulate an alternative political response.⁴ Although it produced convincing rhetoric, it could not systematize a program and put its words into action.

Father no. 2, his mother's second husband and a winner of the war, represents the military dictatorship. He is depicted as if he were part of the Junta de Comandantes, the self-proclaimed builders of the nation: “Tenía una oficina toda para él. Parece que no se trataba de un empleado cualquiera, sino de un patrón algo así. Daba órdenes por un dictáfono y le mostraba la oficina como si toda fuera suya, como si él mismo, con gran esfuerzo, hubiera colocado piedra sobre piedra, ladrillo sobre ladrillo …” (82). The most salient characteristic of Father no. 2 is his authoritarianism: “daba órdenes con la aparente seguridad de que sus órdenes respondían íntimamente a los deseos ajenos” (85).

Peri Rossi's satiric picture of the military regime's vision of the future finds its symbol in “la máquina.” Father no. 2 insists his son accompany him to the office to admire “el último modelo de calculadora que hemos adquirido” (89), which the father proclaims to be “símbolo del futuro, símbolo de la unidad familiar, símbolo de esfuerzo y del genio del hombre” (94). When the father exhorts the child to think up an appropriate name for the machine, the boy reflects on its meaning: “la máquina parecía … un soldado que sólo cumplía órdenes, sin discutir, sin pensar, … un soldado exento de reflexión, pero adoctrinado, programado, útil para servir y para callar. Obediencia.” Obediencia thus encapsulates Peri Rossi's vision of the regimes' plan for its citizenry. The machine represents its impersonal and alienating rule as well as the sterile and unimaginative future to be created in a country where intellectuals were considered subversives, and the most talented and creative people were censored, imprisoned, tortured and exiled.

Although he has two fathers, the boy continues to have only one mother. The mother resembles Uruguayan civil society, weak and subordinated to a paternalistic state. His mother married young, and later found she was married to “un loco.” The way the child refers to her seems to disclose an attitude between resentment and resigned disgust: “su madre. O sea la esposa de su padre, que ya no era su esposa, aunque seguía siendo su madre. ¿Por qué uno no podía divorciarse de las madres, como había hecho su padre?” (83). Even though he disapproves of her fickle behavior he cannot disown his mother, just as one cannot disown the people of one's country. She is the average Uruguayan who initially supported the Left's demands for a restructuring of the economy to later reject them in favor of middle-class security. Turning against the liberal factions and succumbing to the military's gradual take-over, this sector acquiesced to the erosion and destruction of the constitutional government.

The boy is the country's youth who must grow up under the dictatorship and will inherit its legacy. He embodies the tension of living in a country divided by a civil war: he retains a feeling of loyalty to his real father, but he must live with and obey his adoptive father, the man his mother married. The boy's haunting oneiric vision—his recurring dream of a dinosaur emerging from the waters—is a pervasive and enigmatic symbol. When the monster first appears, the boy is afraid of it, but it gradually becomes familiar: “Se acostumbró a verlo aparecer, a nombrarlo, a caminar con él por las calles, a tenerlo por compañero y amigo. … Dino, monstruo ingenuo, y familiar” (99–100). The boy is aware that one day the dream creature will burst into his waking life and carry out the terrible threat of his dreams. When this happens, he realizes he must mediate between the dinosaur and the other people: “Su tarea consistía en detenerlo. Apaciguarlo. Domesticarlo. Evitar la destrucción. … También debía impedir que alguien lo matara al descubrirlo” (110).

The story draws to a close as the child witnesses the portentous emergence of the huge brontosaurus from the sea. It walks like a baby trying out its first steps in a fragile, watery territory. It looks toward the house and calls out “¡Papá!” In this final cry for help, for recognition or of warning, we realize the child has fused with his oneiric vision. This dinosaur is a paradoxical creature: he is baby-like but prehistoric, fearful yet familiar. He opposes Father no. 2's vision of the future as a supercomputer—the irruption of this irrational nightmare was not calculated in Father no. 2's meticulous plans for obedience, order and progress.

Explaining her use of nightmarish landscape, Peri Rossi provides important clues for the meaning of this symbol: “[S]omething I have felt most of my life [is] hallucination, the paranoiac hallucination of persecution is a way of interpreting and understanding the world. … For me literature is a vision, a creation of symbols to interpret and understand reality. This reality is nightmarish not only … because, for instance in Argentina thirty thousand people have disappeared and one out of five Uruguayans have suffered cruel torture and persecution, but also because when it is not the military, the totalitarian regime in power, who persecute us, there often remain our internal phantoms, our own hallucinations.”⁵

With the insight afforded by this statement, we can see Dino as an oneiric representation of paranoia of persecution at both a personal and political level. The prehistoric dinosaur represents the repressed horror at the torture and abuse of the regime which had accumulated gradually behind the boy's submissive daytime facade. The dinosaur is the revelation of the future, suggesting an apocalypse when the youth rise up against the absurd and alienating structures of the military dictatorship.

“La influencia de Edgar Allan Poe en la poesía de Raimundo Arias” deals with the trials of extraterritorial exile. The story is centered around a father and his young daughter who go into exile after the father is accused of professing “la fe marxista-leninista.” The mother had left them previously to join the guerillas. These characters do not correspond to specific political entities as in “La tarde” but rather represent the plight of exile in general.

The story develops through constant shifts between the two spaces created by the experience of exile: the “here and now” as opposed to the “over there and then.” The “here and now” is a European country, unnamed, but obviously Spain. The father returns home after a hard day trying to sell jabones-maravilla in the streets of a bustling city. His daughter, Alicia, informs him that they have no money. Continuing what seems to be a daily ritual for the pair, the father studies his address book and admits there is no one they can ask for money. The story ends as Alicia, dressed as a Charrúa Indian, goes out the door to beg for money in the streets. This story line is constantly interrupted with extended flashbacks relating the experiences of the father and daughter in their country of origin, their ocean voyage and their arrival.

The “over there and then” is their non-European country where there was a revolution. Paradoxically, an element of differentiation between the country of origin and the country of refuge, according to Alicia, is their common language: “Ella comió … pan con mantequilla y mermelada de melocotón, que era como en este país llamaban a los duraznos. … las frutillas eran fresas, en el país donde habían decidido ir, por hablar el mismo idioma.” (51)

The characters' displacement results in disorientation, humiliation and loss of identity. The humiliation of the father is a leitmotif of the story. Life seems to be nothing but a series of indignities for him, in his own country as well as in the country of refuge, and in his relations with both his wife and his pre-adolescent daughter. In Europe, the humiliation begins at the moment of disembarkment: “nadie les recibió, mas bien fueron mal-recibidos” (48). The narrator provides an endless list of all the documents they were required to present. An absurd situation is created when the Spanish functionary insists the presence of the mother is necessary in order for the girl to enter the country: “—Deberá venir la madre a confirmar que la niña es fruto del matrimonio con usted—… Usted puede ser un delincuente, un raptor, un violador de menores, y esta niña, su rehén” (49–50). They decide to perform a blood test to verify his paternity. Here we see a literal translation of the figurative expression as the Spanish authorities extract blood from the father-daughter couple: “un cuarto de litro de sangre más de lo necesario, como se hacía con los extranjeros, porque eran extranjeros” (50). In exile, the father suffers daily humiliation to survive as he fights his way down the jammed sidewalks, peddling soap.

The indignity he suffers in exile is a variation of that which he experienced in his own country. Through the contrast between the father, a literary critic and would-be novelist, and his revolutionary wife, Peri Rossi satirizes the perceived superfluousness of the academic at a time of political upheaval. The title of the story is a paper the father is writing. He runs into his wife's sister, a screen for a clandestine revolutionary group, in a grocery store. He is attracted to her and would have liked to show her his paper, but he tells himself “ella no tenía tiempo para esas cosas.” As if to confirm the father's imagined belittlement in the eyes of his sister-in-law, the reader is given access to her thoughts: “Ella pensó que era una lástima que él fuera un intelectual pequeño-burgués, tal como le había dicho su hermana antes de abandonarlo” (46). He was working on a novel about the revolution at the time his wife joined the guerilla.

Heaped upon his feelings of disparagement as an intellectual, is his sexual emasculation. To cover up when his wife goes underground, they say she went to Czechoslovakia with another man; thus he meekly assumes the public image of a man betrayed by his wife. We note the reversal between the traditional male and female roles—when she becomes a warrior, he must become the caregiver for their daughter. It seems he is ill-equipped for violent tasks: when they are taking his blood for the paternity test in Spain, he faints as he always does when he sees blood. At this moment he recalls his wife's admonition: “Así no se puede hacer la revolución” (50).

Finally, he must endure disapproval from his young daughter. He is expulsed from the country for having written “artículos que eran verdaderos panegíricos a la turba guerrillera que pretendía socavar la patria y el prestigio de las instituciones nacionales. Muy dignamente asió a su hija de la mano—no soy objeto, para que me lleves en brazos, dijo ella—” (47). Precisely in the moment when he wanted desperately to summon up all his self-respect, he is forced to face insubordination from a child. The reader does not fail to see the irony of the dangerous subversive intentions the government attributes to a man who is seen as a useless intellectual by his wife and sister-in-law. At the moment of disembarkment, Alicia observes that no one has come to meet them, to which the father replies, “Bien sabes que no soy un jugador de fútbol.” Alicia looks at her father's skinny legs in his only pair of pants, “y reflexionó que como hija no había tenido demasiado suerte” (47–48).

With the repatriation comes a loss of identity. On one hand, the father and daughter feel isolated from and misunderstood by the Europeans, and, on the other, their presence in Europe makes them aware of their lack of knowledge regarding their own cultural heritage. As Alicia dons her Indian costume, the father and daughter realize how little they know about their country's original inhabitants because they were destroyed by the Spaniards and reelaborated by Hollywood. Alicia's disguise is a creative and cynical solution to their economic problems. In order to survive in this hostile land, she exploits the Europeans' ignorance regarding Latin America, projecting a false image of an indigenous population which bears correspondence to neither the reality of her country nor her own cultural identity.

The transition between the home land and the country of refuge—the sea voyage—creates a third space, both in the surface of the narrative and in psychic dimensions. This passage is characterized by loss, symbolized by the loss of time as they sail from west to east. Alicia is incensed by the fact that they have stolen four hours from her. She imagines traffickers in stolen time: “Pensó en barcos … que atravesaban el mar con su carga secreta de tiempo … robado … a involuntarios emigrados, como su padre y ella” (53). Her image creates a metaphor for the exiles' divestment of their inalienable rights. “—Putaquelosparió a los barcos—” Alicia cries out. This emotional outburst expresses her feeling of impotence in the face of cosmic injustice. Her father does not know how to comfort her about the lost time, nor has he any consolation for the even greater injustices of which he has been victim: “le habían robado mucho más de cuatro horas, y no había podido hacer casi nada para cambiar el orden de las cosas” (52).

In the new country, Alicia becomes her father's parent. She assumes control and treats him like a child, and he, in turn, behaves childishly and is submissive to her. The role reversal symbolizes the overwhelming psychological effects of exile. So debilitating is the exile, and so incapable is the father of reconciling himself to it and facing up to the continual humiliation that he experiences infantile regression. The shock of violent times and sudden change has had the opposite effect on Alicia, causing her to mature overnight.

The father attributes his daughter's resilience and ingenuity to the idea that her generation is a new breed: “Esta era otra raza, provista de una singular resistencia … habían asimilado las enseñanzas de íntimas, oscurísimas derrotas … Concebidas en noches amargas” (58–59). However, since Peri Rossi's vision of a disharmonious and fractured world allows for no heroes, Alicia's final words serve to demystify this elevated vision of the country's youth: “—Estoy segura de que lo que piensas acerca de nuestra generación es completamente falso” (59).

In these stories, CPR uses free imagination to dramatize the dehumanizing effects of civil war, the implantation of an authoritarian regime and exile. In addition to her criticism of the practices of the military regime, CPR implicates the reasons why liberal intellectuals—persons like herself—failed to prevent the military take-over and had to go into exile. The self-mockery we glimpse behind the satirization of tired, impotent journalists and literary critics allows no room for self-indulgent pity. The unrelenting and unforgiving child observer will accept no justification or rationalization for this failure. CPR's intuitive creatures, surely first cousins to the child who cried out, “The emperor has no clothes on,” do not hesitate to expose the perversity and falsehood which surrounds them. Their creative and unexpected self-transformations serve to both defy and parody the alienating structures of which they are victims. While the ominous dinosaur is a paranoiac response to life under the dictatorship, Alicia's Indian disguise calls attention to the humiliation and incomprehension which the Latin American exiles must endure in Europe.

Notes

1. Interview with Ana Basualdo, “Cristina Peri Rossi: Apocalipsis y paraíso,” El Viejo topo 56 (1981): 48.

2. Cristina Peri Rossi, La tarde del dinosauro (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1985). Page numbers following all quotations from the stories correspond to this edition.

3. Martin Weinstein, Uruguay. Democracy at the Crossroads (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988): 41.

4. Ibid, 47–49

5. Psiche Hughes, “Interview with Cristina Peri Rossi,” Unheard Words. Mineke Schipper, ed. (New York: Allison & Busby, 1984): 267–68.