SOURCE: Boling, Becky. “Tracking the Feminine Subject in Elena Garro's El Rastro.” In Continental, Latin-American, and Francophone Women Writers. Volume II. Selected Papers from the Wichita State University Conference on Foreign Literature, 1986-1987, edited by Ginette Adamson and Eunice Myers, pp. 7-14. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990.

[In the following essay, Boling argues that Garro's play El Rastro introduces woman as the equally alienated figure in Mexican history, serving as a counterpoint to Octavio Paz's notion of the male mestizo figure.]

Al repudiar a la Malinche-Eva mexicana, según la representa José Clemente Orozco en su mural …—el mexicano rompe sus ligas con el pasado, reniega de su origen y se adentra sólo en la vida histórica.

(Paz 78)

The Mexican sons have broken with their mothers. They exist alone and in isolation, abjuring their past. Thus, in El laberinto de la soledad, Octavio Paz describes the basis for a peculiarly Mexican brand of alienation (67-80). However, in this psychological and historical examination of the Mexican character, what is missing? What role does woman have in the drama of the Conquest and subsequently in Mexican culture? In Paz's essay, the woman is either the Chingada, the violated mother, or la Malinche, the Mexican Eve (72-80). The startling absence is that of the female companion, the fellow sufferer, the alienated woman. Paz continually chains the events of his narrative to the solitary figure of the Mexican, whom he identifies as the mestizo. Elena Garro, in her dramatic portrayal of the mestizo culture, employs many of the same myths and metaphors as Paz does. However, unlike Paz, she also incorporates the woman as more than simply a sign of the mestizo's (i.e. man's) solitude, as more than either a manifestation of that which has been lost—the mother as umbilical cord to the universe—or an instrument of disaffection—the Eve, the disrupter. El rastro, a one-act play written in 1957, serves as correction to Paz's privileging of the male as the exclusive subject, indeed, the quintessential alienated hero, within Mexican history and culture.

Garro's play, El rastro revolves around a campesino, Adrián Barajas, who murders his wife. The woman is not the central figure, nor is she granted a large role in the discourse of the play. She appears only toward the end when, after a brief scene with her husband, she is murdered. Adrián, on the other hand, controls the discourse which is, in turn, complicated by an ongoing commentary by two other male actors. These two actors are externalizations of the desires, torments, and sins that lead Adrián to murder. In spite of the apparent interest in the male character, the play ultimately critiques the male's position as subject, since it is predicated on the subordination and exclusion of the female. In French theories of the feminine, there has been much discussion of the impossibility of the woman to express herself as subject in the language of the dominant culture, since this has always been appropriated by the masculine and used to contain the feminine (Jones 99-101). As Luce Irigaray argues, “any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine’” (38). This appropriation leads to the objectivization of the female, “for he [man] can sustain himself only by bouncing back off some objectiveness, some objective” (39). What we discern in Garro's play are the strategies that arise from a largely male appropriation of the concept of alienation, a concept that negates much of the significance of the roles Mexican society assigns the female. However, the refusal of the female in the play to be silenced and dismissed by the male constitutes a challenge to the primacy of the masculine ego. Therefore, the silences within this dominant discourse are the traces by which we discern the feminine. Ironically, it is the focus on the male protagonist that prepares us to attribute primacy to the “absent” figure of the wife. Her delayed appearance only strengthens her position in the play.

Garro constructs the play on two levels, the socio-historical and the mythic, which allows her to approach the masculine ego through its consecrated ideologies and myths. Underlying the hypnotic world of the play is the psychosocial problem of machismo. It is the same world Octavio Paz analyzes in his essay: the world of the orphan, victim of the clash between two cultures; that is, a culturally and historically specific reality. Evelyn Stevens in her study of machismo and marianismo finds the machista behavior patterns to be strongest in those “areas where the cultures of two or more great continents have mingled” (58). Although Eric Wolf in Sons of the Shaking Earth speaks specifically of the seventeenth-century mestizo, the traits he delineates seem to persist in Garro's timeless depiction of rural Mexico. The mestizo, unlike the Indian, seeks power as a personal attribute, assumes masks, and dissimulates in order to manipulate and survive in a world where he has no given position. Wolf defines him as:

propertyless and alienated … estranged from society. Wishing to escape reality, he has learned to “drown the pain of living” in alcohol or gambling, creating for himself an unreal world with unreal stakes. Despising life, he has learned to substitute the dream for unfriendly reality. He may rise suddenly on a crest of fantasy into a dream world of personal dominance, only to fall back into a trough of self-denigration, filled with feelings of misfortune and suffering.

(240)

Adrián Barajas describes himself as “el Rey de Espadas” and his name, Barajas, deck of cards, suggests “an unreal world with unreal stakes,” given to games of chance and reliance on fate (252). The drunken Adrián wavers between extreme machista boasting and severe self-denigration. “¡Yo soy el león encumbrado!” (252) becomes “¡Yo soy Adrián Barajas, el de la ingrata suerte!” (255). In short, much of Wolf's description applies to Garro's protagonist.

However, the play is not a sociological study of the macho; it is a hallucinatory vision of his particular mentality. Adrián Barajas, the mestizo, is defined by the social and political disintegration of the indigenous state and the partial assimilation of European culture in its stead. His world is just one step away from the world of the pre-Columbian tribes, but as Garro describes him, he is “un huérfano … más solo que el pecado” (253). His Indian gods have vanished. Indeed his cosmos is peopled by hybrid or composite deities, borrowed like his own identity, from Christian and nahuatl sources. His mother, Teófila Vargas, is both Virgin Mary—“la que nunca se revolcó junto a ningún hombre” (257)—and one of the star-goddesses of the ancestral religion. The nahuatl root “teotl,” found in such proper names as Teotihuacan (“lugar donde nacieron los dioses”), Centeotl (“dios del maíz”), and Cihuateteo (“mujeres diosas”), identifies Adrián's mother, Teófila, with an indigenous past and marks her as archetypal (Caso 65, 79). It is this existence on the edge between two universes that best justifies the mestizo's uncomfortable accommodation to his world.

Living between two systems of belief, the Indian and the European, Adrián images his plight according to those beliefs. Both the Christian and nahuatl traditions afford him a way to represent his isolation and an excuse to consider his alienation as ontological. His precarious position in the universe is figuratively called the rastro or slaughter-house. It is purgatory, a place where Adrián must choose—“la noche es cobija para entregarse o salirse del pecado” (255)—and his presence is a form of expiation, “alma en pena rondando la huizachera” (252). The two shadow figures (Hombres I and II) that accompany Adrián allude to an idyllic place which we cannot identify as exclusively earthly. Indeed, the metaphoric language in which this place is described links it to the paradise of Christian mythology. Again and again the paradigm of the fall from grace occurs: “[Adrián] ahogado en el licor de sus pesares, buscando la escalera que perdió para llegar al campo verde y a la renombrada gloria del hombre” (253). Even the name of the character, Adrián or Adán, suggests the Biblical Genesis as a complementary text. First, Adrián, who often imagines himself as a bird, believes he has already fallen: “Si así te encumbras más fuerte fue la caída” (252). He has been exiled from paradise, el Cerro de Almoloya, where he first met temptation, his wife, Delfina Ibáñez. Delfina, like the Indian gods, is dualistic in nature: she is Eve and the snake (259). The woman is more than instrument of evil, she is evil itself: “¡Adiós los días en los que no sabía que conocer mujer era irse por la boca del murciélago!” (257). This conflation of roles suggests Adrián's fear of the feminine, for it is Delfina's pregnancy that strips him of his wings and condemns him to the rastro where he suffers exile, desolation, and orfandad. And in this mythic reenactment, marked by both nahuatl and Christian traditions, the world of the feminine is accused once again of conspiring against the masculine.

However, this analogy to the archetype of the fall arises from Adrián's own ramblings; it is his drunken way of exonerating himself from sin by condemning the woman. What was the sin? Adrián, like Adam, was led from God by the temptations of the woman. At this point in the play, Christian imagery gives way to the indigenous. The betrayal is not against God, the father, but rather against God, the mother, Teófila. Underlying this betrayal again is the sociological paradigm of machista culture that Garro continually suggests. Adrián's abusive treatment of Delfina is an extreme consequence of machismo. But there is also Adrián's idolization of the mother, a consequence of marianismo. Stevens traces this view of motherhood to the worship of the Virgin Mary: “marianismo pictures its subjects as semi-divine, morally superior and spiritually stronger than men” (62). This, however, is no less a mutilation of the woman, for she is either subordinated to the male or reified to the point of disappearing totally into an archetype.

The fact is that western culture tends to separate a woman's maternal function from any sense of her sexuality. The inability to consider maternity and sexuality simultaneously as part of the same person may be due to the fact that the sexual act in the male is distanced from paternity. These two roles for a man are distinct since the gestation and birth processes are alien to his own body; whereas in a woman's case, sex, pregnancy, and birth are all expressions of the body, the female body (Sichtermann 56-57). In marianismo, these various functions are again divorced and the image is purified of any sexual contact. Of course, what in essence has happened is that woman's physical nature has been circumscribed and controlled metaphorically by these reductive processes. This is the process that Adrián's mother, Teófila, has undergone. She becomes “la que nunca revolcó junto a ningún hombre” (257). Adrián alternately directs his prayers to “la Divina Providencia” and to his mother; and these two figures come to be identified as the same, both victims of Delfina Ibáñez (269).

On the other hand, Delfina is the pregnant lover. Her pregnancy is a visible, unavoidable sign of Adrián's prowess and Delfina's sexuality. Delfina has usurped the mother's role in Adrián's life and her presence signifies, by metaphoric displacement, the death of the mother just as the unborn child usurps Adrián's place as child to his mother.

Adrián's murder of Delfina and the unborn child, then, becomes more than the crime of a drunken mestizo trapped in a social quagmire. It constitutes an indictment, by revelation, of the narcissistic solitude of the Mexican mestizo, as explicated by Octavio Paz, for it proves that its very foundation rests on the destruction of the feminine. Rather than privileging Adrián Barajas's existential anguish, thus elevating the character to the level of tragic hero, Garro accuses him of the egotism of the disaffected. The Hombre I dispels the illusion that Adrián has been singled out: “Aquí, en el rastro estamos todos muchacho, sin nadie que nos regale una mirada, solos y cobijados por la noche sola, agujereada por los coyotes que la caminan” (254). Garro shifts the perspective from Adrián to his wife, who also experiences solitude. Delfina, too, has left behind a land that she was part of: “Allí estábamos contentos, allí criábamos palomas y comíamos muy en paz, antes de que llegaras tú con tus palabras y ofrendas” (264). Nevertheless, Adrián does not recognize Delfina's alienation; nor does he accept her offer of companionship, implicit in her questions: “¿Y qué vas a hacer? ¿Solo, perdido en esos caminos solos, sin nadie que te guarde compañía?” (262). In other words, Delfina rejects Adrián's ontological view of alienation. His anguish is only a simulacrum of the fate that he has chosen for her: “recuerda que mis pasos no conocen el lugar a donde tú quieres mandarme, sola, a oscuras, … penando en parajes que no he visto” (264). Indeed, Delfina has experienced the same alienation, the same cultural and familial dislocation, as Adrián and must also face the rastro, slaughter-house existence, and ultimately death at her husband's hands.

Garro's depiction of Adrián's despair as that of man isolated and desterrado, is ironic when we come face to face with his wife. Unlike Adrián, Delfina represents a world of communion, not isolation, as can be seen in the staging of her appearance. The props surrounding Delfina serve on the mimetic level to represent the essentials of a jacal. In addition, as the stage directions indicate, the jacal and the pose of the actress signify on a symbolic level:

Aparece Delfina Ibáñez, como una aparición luminosa: inmóvil, sentada en el suelo del jacal, con los pliegues de su falda lila abiertos como un abanico desplegado. … Un quinqué encendido y las brasas de la lumbre la iluminan.

(260-261)

Her proximity to the fire that warms, cooks, and gives light, her immobility as if she were part of the structure, and the connotations of openness, all associate her with hearth and home. There is also a strong sense of earth as opposed to Adrián's obsession with escape, flight: “yo soy un pájaro de alas de oro y ninguna hembra me ha de agarrar” (261). Given that in western culture, women, like Delfina, have served to link men to society (through marriage contracts and parenthood) and to history (through the generations), Adrián's narcissistic alienation, like Octavio Paz's insistence on solitude as a national trait, ignores or devalues the role of women.

Indeed it is not Adrián's existential fate, nor his destiny, that leads him to murder, but rather his narcissistic aggrandizement and drunkenness that precipitate the crime. Only after murdering his wife can he truly be “más solo que el pecado.” Of course the world Adrián identifies with is the world of men, the existential cosmos in which the YO is the central figure, and Delfina only impedes his entrance into that realm. She is the rock that weighs Adrián's wings so that he cannot fly. As Teófila becomes associated with the heavens, “Madre del cielo,” Delfina is associated with the earth, and for Adrián, the earth is the rastro, an accursed place. It bears repeating that the play revolves around the hallucinatory vision of Adrián. By means of the two men who accompany him, we discern the demons that spur him on. Only after the crime is it apparent that Adrián's true adversary is himself, externalized on the stage by the two men. Hombre II torments Adrián: “¿Y las alas? … ¿Que sólo te quedan pies para tropezarte entre las piedras y para que te lleven a donde no quieres ir?” (269). Delfina's murder has not freed Adrián; it has only made his alienation complete.

Adrián's death at the hands of Hombres I and II, i.e. his own internal demons is after all, a form of suicide. However, it is also a foregone conclusion in the machista world the play constructs. In the world of the macho, man exists in solitude: continually in danger of becoming the chingado, he adopts the aggression of the chingón (Paz 71-73). The two men are fragments of Adrián's own view of masculinity. They encourage Adrián's violence and lead him to his own death. Therefore Adrián's suicide is not a sign of his freedom, but rather his subjugation to an ethos of which he is barely conscious. Garro, through Hombres I and II, externalizes the machista ethos and accuses the macho of creating his own solitude.

Although I would not like to fall into the trap of essentialism, it must be agreed that in the world of rural Mexico, the focus of this play, the world of the feminine is that of the family and community. In Garro's play, the extreme egotism of machismo enters into an ironic dialogue with the world of the feminine. Against the mutilation that abstraction performs on reality, Delfina offers the simplicity of life. Delfina does not recognize Adrián's existential alienation; for her, true alienation can only exist in the final separation from life, which is death. Whereas Adrián in his self-deception seeks his own destruction, Delfina chooses life: “No es vergüenza mendigar un domingo. … Al rato llega el domingo y en el mercado podré comprar cilantro y oír a los ciegos cantando los corridos de los fusilados” (264).

Although Octavio Paz's essay, El laberinto de la soledad, deals with the Mexican as a national type, his concept of solitude is appropriated for the masculine. Elena Garro's play, like Paz's essay, defines alienation against cultural and historical factors that inform Mexican society. However, Garro posits the question of the role of women's lives and concerns in the historical, cultural, and social context of Mexican society. She is not satisfied with the abstract and archetypal visions of the feminine that la Chingada, la Virgen de Guadalupe, and la Malinche offer. Nor is she content to let the exemplary Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz speak for all women. After all, Sor Juana escaped the world that Delfina represents. Instead, in El rastro, Garro stages the murder of the wife. She has a name, an identity, an existence. She, too, lives in the rastro and has a voice.

Bibliography

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