[In the following essay, Ainsa considers the transformation in Luisa Valenzuela's work from individual to collective fear and discusses her attempt to overcome fear through writing.]

Child psychiatrists utilize a test called "The Land of Fear," developed on a principle using short phrases and drawings, which allows them to measure anxiety in children. The test is arranged into four categories: aggression, insecurity, abandonment, and death. The symbols that embody this "land of fear" are of a cosmic nature (natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods, and volcanic eruptions) and represent a terrifying bestiary (dragons, monsters, wolves, and other malevolent animals) as well as violent or wicked beings (hangmen, devils, witches, torturers, skeletons, ghosts, and apparitions). The landscape of this realm is made up of dismal forests, cemeteries, impenetrable castles, dark dungeons, and a vast arsenal of instruments of torture. Coffins and masks are objects of daily life. Children have no difficulty in identifying with this "land," where, beyond their personal anguish, they recognize the symbols and images that represent what is regarded as the iconography of traditional fear.

This childhood land of fear may be, nevertheless, the faint reflection or dramatic foreboding of a real country where individual fear has turned into collective panic. A land shrouded in secretive silence, with latent and deep-seated fears, wrapped in complicit cowardices, one directed by parodie autocrats and ruled by a system that is legitimized by its own terror, founded with torturers capable of falling in love with their victims or of crying over their victims' bodies,¹ and with homes that are transformed into prisons—a land, sadly, where the borders of anxiety and anguish dissipate into an uncertain urban landscape that could well be Buenos Aires or New York.

This subtle transition from individual fear (forged from archetypal childhood fears, vacillating, ambiguously, between fear and cowardice) to collective terror, lived out like a nightmare, perhaps best sums up the allegory of fear which serves as the theme and leitmotiv of Luisa Valenzuela's work. It is to this inquiry, the exploration of this "land of fear"—as literarily evident as it is skillfully and ironically invoked—that the following pages are dedicated.

FROM NATURAL FEAR TO "IMAGINATIVE" FEAR. Fear , One must recall, is one of the fundamental human emotions. Omni-present and subtle, its varied expressions have spanned centuries, manifesting themselves as much in the fear of the unknown as in reactions to danger, as much in individual visions as in collective fear (if not panic). Every civilization is the product of "a protracted struggle against fear" (G. Ferrero), since fear is born with man in the darkest ages of his history. In any case, fear "is in us" (George Delpierre), for "all men are afraid" (Jean-Paul Sartre). Nevertheless, if fright or anxiety can be diffuse, fear is always determined by some cause and obeys and reflects a concrete and immediate situation. Fear has a precise object which confers its specificity and identifies a situation that must be confronted. Fear is manifest in those "moments of greatest awe" ("momentos de màximo asombro"), surprise, or coincidence, that "sudden fear" ("de golpe se asusta" [AP, 12]), that "sheer cowardice" ("cobardàa pura"), or that sensation by which "Pedro's legs shake because it's too much of a coincidence" (ST, 5; "a Pedro le tiemblan las piernas por demasiada coincidencia"), to which Valenzuela alludes in her short stories.

One is always "afraid of something." When one is afraid, one believes one knows what one is afraid of and acts according to that cause, generally, concealing it out of so much shame at confessing that one is afraid. It is not unusual, therefore, that there should be as many fears as there are objects of fear, including the fear of being afraid. Nevertheless, thanks to this objectification, one can externalize danger, identifying it so that one may better fend against it, whether by submission, flight, or direct confrontation. In this regard, Valenzuela suggests:

Huir no siempre es cobardàa, a veces se requiere un gran coraje para apoyar un pie después del otro e ir hacia adelante. Nadie huye de espaldas como debiera huirse, por lo tanto nadie sabe lo que es la retirada, el innoble placer del retroceso, disparar hacia atràs en el tiempo para no tener que enfrentar lo que se ignora. (GE, 37)

(Fleeing is not always cowardly; at times it requires great courage to put one foot before the other and go forward. No one flees with one's back turned, as one should flee; therefore no one knows what retreat is, that ignoble pleasure of withdrawing, leaping back in time to keep from having to face what is unknown.)

This includes the idea of getting used to living with fear, a protective device that Bella, the protagonist of "Cuarta versióon" (Eng. "Fourth Version"), assumes when "slowly she forgot the dangers" (OW, 46; "poco a poco fue olvidando los peligros" [CA, 48]), or that Chiquita, the protagonist of "De noche soy tu caballo" (Eng. "I'm Your Horse at Night"), adopts in choosing to drown herself in happiness, "trying to keep calm" ("tratando de no inquietarse"). Theirs is a daily fear that turns to indifference in cities like New York.

Este cool neoyorquino, de dànde le habrà crecido a ella. Qué contagiosas son las ciudades, se comenta, heme aquà ahora asumiendo esta informaciàn como si tal cosa, con aire indiferente, tragàndome mi horror, mi espanto. (CA, 71-72)

(Where did she get her New York cool? Cities are so contagious, she thinks. Here I am now, taking in all this information without batting an eyelash, looking indifferent, swallowing the horror, the shock. [OW, 67])

Such is a fear that can, moreover, arouse itself or "nourish itself," as Valenzuela explains in Donde viven las àguilas (1983; Eng. "Up Among the Eagles").

… voy como al descuido alimentando mi miedo, algo callado y propio. Ellos me ven pasar con el palo sobre los hombros y los dos baldes que cuelgan del palo, acarreando agua, y me gustaràa saber que nada sospechan de mi miedo. Es un miedo doble faz, bifronte, pero nada hermano de aquel que me impidío bajar una vez que hube escalado la montaàa. Este no es un miedo simple, éste refleja otros miedos y se vuelve voraz. (DV, 21)

(… almost nonchalantly nourishing my fear. They watch me go by carrying water, the pole across my shoulders and the two pails dangling from it, and I would like to think they do not suspect my fear. This fear has two faces, not at all like the one that kept me from returning after I had climbed the mountain. No, this is not a simple fear; it reflects others, and becomes voracious. [C, 225])

In all cases, fear of the dark, fear of great depths, fear of heights, fear of great speeds or of instability, childhood fears whose recurrence is triggered by any fright with which they are associated (fear of being alone, of getting lost, nighttime fears), and the inevitable fear of death are accepted as natural fears. All render deep primordial emotions that are layered in the depths of humankind through generations, for they are collective ancient fabulations that are particularly open to superstitious or magical interpretations. All are vital feelings and emotions that are linked to intense, imaginary situations: the fear of being violated, the fear of punishment, the fear or anxious desire of a violent act. The acute and profound fear of death, the fear of something (dying) that no one can avoid—as J. C. Barker² reminds us—since no one escapes death, although this mysterious experience that is "so special, uniquely inexplicable, this fear of something that will never be known," can never be related to others (Paul Tillich). This Valenzuela herself notes in describing that "day-to-day part of me that fears suffering and death, the part that is astonished—the part, perhaps, that is alive out of cowardice" ("parte cotidiana de mà misma que teme al sufrimiento y a la muerte. La parte que se asombra, quizá la que más vive por cobarde" [GE, 37]), since fear can also disguise itself as "prudence": "It wasn't that I was afraid; I was just being prudent, as they say: threatening cliffs, beyond imagination—impossible even to consider returning" (C, 221; "No fue miedo, fue prudencia como dice la gente: precisamente demasiado hoscos nunca imaginados, imposibles de enfrentar en un descenso" [DV, 19]).

If in some cases objective dangers can justify fear, it is the process of the subjectivization of risk that brings about a transformation of the nature of such dangers and alters their intensity, according to the degree of the anxiety or emotivity of the subject. It is this subtle passage from fear in darkness to fear of darkness—of which Jean Delumeau³ speaks—that marks a qualitative difference between animal fear in facing danger and man's capacity "to imagine," to dream fear. As Bachelard has emphasized, "The dream can be more intense than experience," whereby the dreamer becomes trapped in the deception of his own dream and of the ghosts he creates. That same imagination which lies at the root of creative, artistic, and scientific activity intensifies, exaggerates, and favors what Victor Hugo poetically summarized thus: "Voici le moment ou flottent dans l'aire / tous ces bruits confus que l'ombre exagere" ("Here the moment in which floats through the air / all the confused noises exaggerated by shadows").

Fear qualitatively produced, thanks to its imaginative complement, is a fear one lives much like "a situation," a condition that extends from an initial suggestion to a slower development and, subsequently, more important duration, carrying with it not only the emotional, physiological reaction from the initial sudden fear but also giving shape to real mental representations by precipitating the heightened stimulation of the imagination. More-over, because the imagination dreads the void, it invents what it does not know, even though it might lose itself in the consequences of its representations. These are the "demands of the mysterious" and of the enigmatic, as Roger Caillois would have it, that create the exaggeration which fear and the supernatural invite.

THE SWEET FRIEND FEAR. Luisa Valenzuela plays with both recourses. An "imaginative" fear is "objectively" established in her portrayal of such cities as Buenos Aires in "Aquà pasan cosas raras" (1975; Eng. "Strange Things Happen Here," 1979) and Realidad nacional desde la cama (1990; Eng. Bedside Manners, 1994) or New York, "the city that offered me all that is other: the perception of shallow fears" ("la que me dio todo lo otro: la percepciàn de los miedos a flor de piel"), in El gato eficaz (1972) and in Novela negra con argentinos (1990; Eng. Black Novel [with Argentines], 1992).

In Buenos Aires, where so many "strange things are happening," to be afraid can presuppose that one cannot know "if something is true or a lie" and that one can feel surrounded by "some sort of trap or by "dark motives." Just as seemingly "out of place" is the kind of fear one suspects is "imaginary," inasmuch as Buenos Aires cannot permit itself—cannot permit one—the luxury of a "conscious hallucination," although one might add that "we who have known him for some time can be sure his fear has nothing to do with the imaginative" (OD, 19; "nosotros que venimos tratando desde hace un rato podemos asegurar que su miedo nada tiene de imaginativo" [DV, 65]). On the contrary, fear in New York "is a sweet friend fear that's good for the gut, a fear that subsumes me by forcing a trembling from within—a fear that I miss, I need" ("es un dulce miedo amigo bueno para las tripas, miedo cercàndome a mà misma forzàndose a temblar para adentro. Miedo que echo de menos, que me falta" [GE, 15]).

Nevertheless, if fear generally has an object and a cause, anxiety is, on the contrary, a feeling of undefined insecurity, a permanent uneasiness that confuses behavior. Weariness without apparent cause, a feeling of failure, and an inability to react give rise to this vaguely defined fear, although ironically, the censor who tries to "spare" Mariana of "anxieties" in the short story "Los censores" (DV, 89; Eng. "The Censors") succumbs to his own pre-occupation.

Beyond anxiety lies anguish. Anguish is born from one's perspective and from the anticipation of danger, even when such danger is unknown. In this latent predisposition of the individual, the threat feels indefinite, uncontrollable, like an empty form anticipating its contents. The indefinite wait in the face of an indeterminate danger condemns one to an exhausting yet painful, disorienting state of individual behavior, a permanent feeling of drowning. Therefore, when Bella tells herself in "Cuarta versión" (Eng. "Fourth Version"), "But suffering is never quite placated: when the lovers are together, it runs down other paths and can only be expressed when they are able to freeze it in anecdote" [OW, 47; "La angustia no se aplaca nunca: estàn juntos y la angustia corre por otros canales que sàlo logran verbalizar cuando consiguen congelarlos en anécdotas" [CA, 48]), she is in truth seeking to define her state of anguish, to give it form in order better to control it, like "a bridge stretching between two alien and cruel worlds of pain" (OW, 49; "un puente lanzado entre dos angustias ajenas y atenaceantes" [CD, 51]). Bella objectifies this "condition itself of a temporal and finite existence" ("condiciàn misma de una existencia temporal y finita")—referring to Heidegger—and seeks to transcend it by extending a path "to cross over the horror and reach that salvation called asylum" (OW, 49; "para atravesar y llegar a esa salvaciàn llamada asilo" [CA, 51]) and take action to avert fear.

The restlessness and the underlying fear that exist deep inside all human beings, to which Bella could not be an exception in the particular moment of history she lives, are "distracted"⁴ with a specific goal: to help others escape by seeking refuge in a foreign embassy. The anguish is made specific: "The ones outside are desperate to get in; it's a matter of life and death" (OW, 50; "Los que estàn fuera desesperadamente necesitan entrar, cuestiàn de vida o muerte" [CA, 52]).

All fear, including the fear of natural phenomena—even if these are catastrophic, like earthquakes, fires, and floods—exhausts itself, or rather, is exhausted in the duration of the unexpected emotion that gives rise to fear and leaves no other trace than at the moment of initial stimulus (increased heart-beat, cold sweats, and "goose bumps"—all of which stereotypically typify fear).

Whatever the case may be, in the face of threats, of danger (real or imaginary), man externalizes antagonistic feelings: he believes he can confront the threat and defend himself by turning his fear to anger and aggression; or he avoids confronting it and gives in to its dictates, or simply flees from its presence, an indispensable reflex that can save him from death. Herein lies a great deal of ambiguity comprising the signs of fear. "I would have liked to have stayed in order to clarify things, to demonstrate to him my good intentions" ("Hubiera querido quedarme para aclarar las cosas, para demostrarle mis buenas intenciones"), confesses the assaulted protagonist of Valenzuela's "Julia C," "but the blood that began to run down my arm and the blood I read in his eyes forced me to flee" ("pero la sangre que empezà a correr por mi brazo y la sangre que adiviné en sus ojos me obligaron a huir" [H])

As the philosophers say without irony, there is a time to resist and a time to give in. Beyond the fear in the heart of man, in his soul, wherein he exercises the fullness of his powers and produces affective changes and physiological disturbances, there is a fear that establishes itself in collective space. When fear ceases to be individual and gives free rein to its suggestive nature, it becomes epidemic; it expands and penetrates the social collective body in its entirety and provokes vertigo in the group or in an entire people, inasmuch as "everything is degraded under the influence of fear" ("todo se degrada bajo la influencia del miedo").⁵

Luisa Valenzuela's narrative is centered on the "tiempos de miedo" (times of fear), as she sums up:

Bella sobre la cama acariciando una sensaciàn inesperada: el miedo. Algo que va a olvidar muy pronto y va a entrever nuevamente y va a dejar sumergir como las distintas ondas de una serpiente marina. Un tiempo de miedo arqueado sobre la superficie consciente, un tiempo de miedo subacuàtico. (CA, 13)

(Bella is lying on her bed entertaining an unexpected feeling: fear. A feeling she'll forget quite soon and then sense and allow to sink under again, like the curves of a sea-snake. A time of fear arching up from a conscious surface, a time of subaquatic fear. [OW, 12])

It is these violent times of which Hegel spoke, where "the fury of destruction" sets in, and in which a ringing door-bell unleashes panic in the night: "Sonaron tres timbrazos cortos y uno largo. Era la seàal, y me levanté con disgusto y con un poco de miedo: podàan ser ellos o no ser, podràa tratarse de una trampa, a estas malditas horas de la noche" (CA, 105; "The doorbell rang: three short rings and one long one. That was the signal, and I got up, annoyed and a little frightened; it could be them, and then again, maybe not; at these ungodly hours of the night it could be a trap" [OW, 97]).

FEAR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF POWER. It is Well known, but also good to recall, that one of the sources of fear is insecurity. The signs that affect contemporary man's need for security lead to the consideration of all marginal or unorthodox behavior as potentially dangerous and terrifying, if not criminal. "Seditious" and "subversive" are appellations in whose name have been justified all kinds of repressive excesses and the acceptance of norms and procedures practiced with impunity to guarantee the "stability" of society. "Her judgments are awfully subversive. Do you think she may be involved in some seditious group?" (OW, 48; "Es tan subversiva en sus juicios, ¿no pertenecerà a algàn grupo sedicioso?" [CA, 50]), it is inquisitorially asked with regard to Bella. With a premonition of what was to come in Argentina's reality, an element of augury that characterizes much of her work, Valenzuela had, by 1967, published a collection of short stories entitled Los heréticos (The Heretics) in which, on the one hand, situations that invite transgression abound, yet on the other there is fear induced by insecurity.

All theoreticians of power and those who have examined violence as theory and practice know that power legitimizes itself in the exercise of violence that systematizes the omnipresent State, grinding down with subtle perversity the daily life of citizens who are subject to its laws. The State reclaims for itself such tools of physical violence as the police, the army, and prisons to justify instituted order. In the delegating of individual violence to a repressive administrative system, the basic feelings of security of "one-dimensional man," who is threatened by aggression and reigning tension, are upheld. A great deal of what is modern is built upon the underlying violence of productive industrial and bureaucratic systems that squelch all individual expression.

Violence thus legitimized rationally controls the contemporary world, avoiding excesses and any possible "collective upsurge" by "freezing" the spontaneous and occasional expressions of violence. Individual acts of traditional violence that have always existed are supplanted by "constants," "coordinates," "structures," and true "systems" of violence. If in the past fear was the explainable, direct reflection of all violent acts, present-day violence, devised as a system, as the diffuse expression of technocratic power, engenders a fear that is also diffuse—that is, a "network of fears" and not a fear identified by a specific cause. This idea is expressed by the narrator of Cola de lagartija (1983; Eng. The Lizard's Tail, 1983).

Esta red de miedos, este diseào tan geométrico también yo voy tejiendo sin querer, sin darme cuenta, pero no logro comprenderlo… una telaraàa que me atrapa… algo tejido por montones de araàas negras, agazapadas a la espera de su presa, extensàsima, kilométrica red y nosotros las presas y también las araàas. (CL, 217)

(This net of fears, this geometric pattern, I go on weaving it too without knowing why, without understanding it.… [a spiderweb] woven by clusters of black spiders, crouching in wait for their prey, a broad, mile-wide web with us as the prey, and the spiders too. [LT, 198])

In this novel Valenzuela writes a kind of double allegory on the obsessive, egocentric empire of José López Rega, the influential welfare minister of Isabel Perón's government. On the one hand, Valenzuela yields the word to López Rega, whose story she intended to relate "inside and out, living it and telling it, justifying it and/or modifying it" (LT, 105; "por dentro y por fuera, viviéndola y narràndola, justificándola y/o modificándola" [CL, 105]). This version is written in the imperious first-person narrative of the Sorcerer, who retraces his autobiography, proudly juxtaposed to Scripture. Master of the power machine of language, the narrator permits himself the "incomparable luxury" of "turning dreams into reality, passing from word to deed with complete impunity" ("hacer realidad los sueàos o pasar del dicho al hecho"). A power that within the Argentine historical reality of the 1970s was synonymous with violence, López Rega re-sorts to pathological means in its exercise with divine and maleficent skills, practices which earned him the nickname "El Brujo" (The Sorcerer). Thus he predicted that in his country there would be "un río de sangre" ("a river of blood"), an image the reader takes to be a certainty, given the historical perspective with which he inevitably reads the novel, for so much blood has been shed in Argentina since 1976. The narrative point of view of "The Sorcerer," however, is not the only one in the novel. Valenzuela writes, in parallel fashion, another biography, one which is also narrated in the first person and with which she "deconstructs" the first discourse, exploding it through its own means of exaggeration, though admitting that "he [The Sorcerer] will always have an advantage over me, for he's not only more knowing but also more inventive" (LT; "él siempre me llevarà ventaja porque no sàlo sabe màs sino que inventa mejor" [CL, 166]). This other biography is the deconstruction of "a hegemonic male discourse," as Lucàa Guerra Cunningham⁶ has pointed out, the sharp refutation of the indiscriminate praise of fantasy. Megalomania and exaggerated willfulness derive from the dramatic union of fantasy and the exercise of unlimited power. The dialectic of violence and fear, which are inextricably linked, are its inevitable result. The sinister process that López Rega inaugurated in Argentina is the best proof of this. If fear is lived individually, tortured or not by self-blame, it is violence that usually establishes fear as a collective phenomenon, where "the shame of being afraid" turns to complicitous silence, as suggested in the short story "El don de la palabra" (Eng. "The Gift of Words"), inasmuch as, "when the Leader speaks, the silence in the trenches is tomblike, to the point that fear of the coming of the rainy season is postponed until the next silence" (ST, 24; "cuando el Làder habla del silencio sepulcral dentro de los socavones, al punto de que el temor por la llegada de las lluvias queda postergado hasta nuevo silencio" [AP, 31]).

This subtle transition from externalized fear to surreptitious fear is described by Valenzuela in her brief work Aquà pasan cosas raras (1975; Eng. Strange Things Happen Here, 1979). The setting is a city where "legendary calm has been disrupted" ("se habàa roto la legendaria calma"), shattered by "the dark forces of violence" ("las oscuras fuerzas de la violencia"), where "everything had gone more underground, become secretive, and terrifying because we were falling down the slide of mutedness" ("todo se habàa vuelto màs subterràneo, solapado y aterrador porque àbamos cayendo en el tobogán del silenciamiento" [AP, 6]). Although the author has returned voluntarily to Buenos Aires, and "to return means seeing oneself as forced to try to understand" ("volver significa verse forzada a tratar de entender" [AP, 6]), she must keep quiet, because "at times, when everything is clear, all sorts of questions can be asked, but in moments like this the mere fact of still being alive condenses everything that is askable and diminishes its value" (ST, 9; "en épocas de claridad pueden hacerse todo tipo de preguntas, pero en momentos como éste el solo hecho de seguir vivo ya condensa todo lo preguntable y lo desvirtúa" [AP, 13]). Silence can mean also the appearance of ignorance or forgetfulness, a way of "not wanting to know."

RECUPERATION OF MEMORY FOR OVERCOMING FEAR. Walter Benjamin, in a kind of "philosophical theology of remembering" made of evocation and memory as proposed in "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Toward a Critique of Violence"), affirms that humanity will survive only if it permanently expands the breadth of its memories and gives it a privileged place among "the discards of history." Pleading "in support of a suppressed past," he recoups those discards which belong solely to a modernity that has confused the values of progress and humanity. Benjamin laments that progress has become an end in itself, a progress achieved at any expense and which has forgotten that humanity should be its sole end. In the development of that notion of progress attained through efficiency and calculation, the discards are many, flung onto the trash heap of history and its continuum. A "culture of remembering" should vindicate its place in memory as a way of reaffirming that "we have not been given hope except by the hopeless."

Within the generalization of "forgetful ideologies," in the "lite" culture of the contemporary world that touts forgetfulness as a healthy measure, in this scurrying on "to something else" when someone succumbs to defeat, an exegete of Benjamin's work, Manuel Fraijó, asks with concern if it is possible nowadays for a voice to rise up, "a voice that would pack so much pain and evoke with dignity those who are sacrificed with no dignity whatso-ever," as the author of Discursos interrumpidos {Interrupted Discourses) did with such exemplary intensity.

Therefore, more than combating fear with forgetfulness, one must learn to "stop forgetting," must know how to recoup and assume memory itself, must know history in order better to combat violence. A good example is provided by Valenzuela's short story "Cambio de armas" (Eng. "Other Weapons").

In principle, the space within one's home, far from street violence, offers security. The troubled characters Mario and Pedro said as much to themselves in Aquà pasan cosas raras: "Finally they open the door of the apartment without fear, and go to bed without fear, without money, and without illusions." (ST, 12; "Por fin abren la puerta del apartamento sin miedo, sin plata y sin ilusiones" [AP, 17]). Within the four walls of one's own home it is easy to believe that one is protected from the collective fear that one breathes in the streets, where "so many strange things are happening." Laura makes the same claim in "Cambio de armas," as she faces the door and the latches of the apartment in which she lives in isolation and repeats the phrase to herself with "some sense of security" ("cierta seguridad"), but also with "somewhat of a chill" ("un cierto escalofrào") when she confirms that on the other side of the door are two guards. Are they protecting her or are they keeping her under surveillance? Little by little she suspects that the "multiple locks" on her door do not protect her but instead isolate her. Her house is not a refuge but a prison.

Laura cannot be afraid, however, for she has no memory. She lives in an "absolute present" from which all memory has been erased. Forgetfulness prevents her from turning a diffuse anguish into a fear with its own cause and object. Nevertheless, although lacking the desire to recover her memory, with difficulty she starts reconstructing fragments of memory in the reflections of mirrors: "It's an inexplicable multiplication, a multiplication of herself in the mirrors and a multiplication of mirrors—the most disconcerting" (OW, 113-14; "Se trata de una multiplicaciàn inexplicable, multiplicación de ella misma en los espejos y multiplicación de espejos—la más desconcertante" [CA, 122]). In her quick glance before the mirror, in that looking at herself and "failing to recognize herself," in her attempt "to sail all the seas in search of one and the same thing, which certainly does not mean seeing yourself in reflections" (OW, 4; "navegar todas las aguas en busca de una misma cosa que no significa en absoluto encontrarse en los reflejos" [CA, 4]), scenes are superimposed, scenes in which she is humiliated through sadomasochistic possession where the rituals of torture are unmistakable. Mirrors that reflect her image from the ceiling, forcing her to look at herself as she surrenders to the vulgar insults showered upon her while an experienced, moist tongue licks her body. Mirrors that probably extend through the peephole through which "die guard dogs" ("los perros guardianes") watch her avidly when Roque "dives into her again furiously" ("la penetra con saña"). Around the repeated insult bitch a "thick web of stares" ("la densa telaraàa de miradas") is woven.

An ambiguous violence whose causes are unknown rules in this home/prison. In this alliance of pain and pleasure, Laura goes about discovering the signs that memory requires to restore the fragmented conscience of an identity that cannot recognize itself in mirrors beyond the moment in which it exists. Moreover, in integrating its fragments, in recognizing in the husband who keeps her locked up the torturer who beat and raped her in the past, she surmises the possible space of her freedom that had been suffocated by the submission to fear.

¿Qué será lo prohibido (reprimido)? ¿Dànde terminará el miedo y empezará la necesidad de saber o viceversa? El conocimiento del secreto se paga con la muerte, ¿qué será ese algo tan oculto, esa carga de profundidad tan honda que mejor sería ni sospechar que existe? (CA, 134)

(What is being forbidden? Where does fear end, where does the need to know begin, or viceversa? The price of knowing the secret is death; what is hiding, what is that depth-charge waiting so deep down that it would be better not to even suspect it existed? [OW, 125])

… she says to herself, sensing that such freedom can only be conquered by rebelling against the order that represses freedom. She suspects it, when, on top of the waves of horror of "an indefinite, milder form of terror" (OW, 129), she discovers that "mese sudden rebellious bouts" ("estos accesos de rebeldàa") "are closely related to another feeling called fear" ("una estrecha relaciàn con el otro sentimiento llamado miedo").

The power, the courage, to rise up against fear, emerges from the knowledge and the recovery of memory: "She suspects—although she doesn't want to question it too much—that something that shouldn't be known is about to be revealed. For a long time, she's feared the existence of those secrets, so deeply entrenched that they no longer belong to her; they're altogether inaccessible" (OW, 131; "Ella sospecha—sin querer formulárselo demasiado—que algo està por saberse y no deberàa saberse. Hace tiempo que teme la existencia de esos secretos tan profundamente arraigados que ya ni le pertenecen de puro inaccesibles" [CA, 140]). Only the final "revelation" will provide her the impetus to be free. Laura affirms, however, "I don't want to know anything. Leave me alone" (OW, 132; "No quiero saber nada, déjame [sic]" [CA, 142]), for which she is reproached: "Nothing can be perfect if you stay out there, on the other side of things, if you refuse to know.… So listen to me, and maybe you'll pop out of your sweet little dream" (OW, 133-34; "Nada puede ser perfecto si te quedas del otro lado de las cosas, si te negás a saber.… Asà que escuchame, a ver si salàs un poco de tu lindo sueào [sic]" [CA, 143]). To come out of a dream, to know how to grab hold of the past, is nothing more than to consummate an initial act that had been thwarted: to pick up a revolver, raise it, and aim it between the shoulders of one who had given her so much pleasure as he gave her reasons for hating him. Fear has been defeated, thanks to regained memory.

What can one do, however, so that memory does not disappear with life itself? How can one make it "stick" and last, so that it becomes a testimony that is transmitted and remembered years later? There is only one answer, and it seems clear: in order to last, memories must be fixed in the written word. The text is memory's best keeper. Hence the importance of writing as a gesture for eliminating fear, as a weapon to exorcise fears and anxieties.

Valenzuela suspects as much when she posits the question, and she responds: "They were finally free to feel at ease, with Madame off visiting her parents' homeland.… Now that they're finally together, the flow of their narration runs dry. Can only times of suffering be recorded?" (OW, 46-47; "Porque libres estaban para encontrarse, pero totalmente amordazados en materia narrativa.… Ahora que por fin estàn juntos de la libertad de narrar se les agota. ¿Sàlo podràn escribirse los tiempos de angustia?" [CA, 48]). However, "suffering is never quite placated: when the lovers are together, it runs down other paths and can only be ex-pressed when they are able to freeze it in anecdote" (OW, 47; "la angustia no se aplaca nunca: estàn juntos y la angustia corre por otros canales que sàlo logran verbalizar cuando consiguen congelarlos en anécdotas" [CA, 48]).

Valenzuela herself confirms this when she declares, "I knew then that the only way for me to take over my reality—in the minimal space allotted us—was through writing" (ST; "Supe entonces que la ànica manera de apropiarse de mi realidad—en el mànimo espacio que nos es concedido—era a través de la escritura" [AP]).

In other cases, when confronting a story that "can't be told because it's too real, too stifling" (OW, 3; "nunca puede ser narrada por demasiado real, asfixiante y agobiadora" [CA, 3]), the narrator doubts, reads, and rereads the multiple beginnings, wanting to reconstruct at all costs a story that she discards as impossible—a writing that is more responsibility than mission, inasmuch as "our sole mission, a responsibility more than a mission, is to undo the metaphor of power in order to understand it, to try to see how power is so insidious it enters into our lives and into the lives of those who have no voice" ("Nuestra ànica misiàn, responsabilidad màs que misiàn, es ir desarmando la metàfora del poder para entenderla, tratar de ver càmo el poder està tan insidioso, se mete en nuestras vidas y en las vidas de aquellos que no tienen voz").

Still, what appears to be a clear metaphor is really not so. If fear is exorcised by the written word and the text is capable of denouncing and undermining the discourse of power which makes it possible, one cannot forget that literature, for its part, "is a fear, a slow fear that secretly finds its way into the meticulous body of language, and from there it begins to speak" ("es un miedo, un lento miedo que se desplaza secretamente en el cuerpo meticuloso de la lengua y desde allà comienza a hablar)," as Juan Carlos Santaella points out in La literatura y el miedo (Literature and Fear). The recovery of images forever lost in memory needs fear to transform "stumbling language" ("atropellantes palabras") into a tense writing that includes at once "life and death," because "to write from fear, with fear, implies enacting an ethical condition of writing" ("escribir desde el miedo, con miedo, implica estatuir una condiciàn ética de la escritura").⁷

Thus, if literature requires fear, this is because it is not possible to write without fear, or because all memory is forever made up of those fragments that will not succumb to definitive silence. It is with this contradictory tension that we can complete this initial foray into Luisa Valenzuela's "land of fear." One thing of which we can be certain is that her work, written as the recovery of a memory that does not capitulate to forgetting, can no longer be silenced by any power.

¹ In the short story "Cambio de armas," which is analyzed later in this essay, a military torturer ends up marrying his victim, although he continues humiliating her. On the other hand, in Donde viven las àguilas it is declared: "Pozo seco de làgrimas se nos vuelve inhumano. Si hasta el torturador llora sobre el cuerpo atormentado de su victima. Le moja las heridas y el cuerpo en carne viva sufre el ardor salino de las lágrimas y la víctima sabe—a pesar de que sus ojos estàn vendados, si es que le han dejado ojos—que el torturador llora" (33).

² J. C. Barker, La peur et la mort, Paris, Stock, 1969.

³ Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident, Paris, Fayard, 1978.

⁴ Heidegger believes that man has a permanent essence of anguish that is consubstantial to his nature, except when he finds himself "distracted" among things.

⁵ George Delpierre, La peur et l'être, Toulouse, Privat, 1974, p. 55.

⁶Splintering Darkness: Latin American Women Writers in Search of Themselves, ed. Lucàa Guerra Cunningham, Pittsburgh, Latin American Literary Review Press, 1990, p. 11. See especially Sharon Magnarelli's essay "Framing Power in Luisa Valenzuela's Cola de lagartija {The Lizard's Tail) and Isabel Allende's Casa de los espàritus (House of the Spirits)," pp. 43-63.

⁷ Juan Carlos Santaella, La literatura y el miedo y otros ensayos, Caracas, Fundarte, 1990, pp. 7, 8.

Los heréticos. Buenos Aires. Paidós. 1967. References use the abbreviation H. Translations are by David Draper Clark.

El gato eficaz. Mexico City. Mortiz. 1972. References use the abbreviation GE. Translations are by David Draper Clark.

Aqui pasan cosas raras. Buenos Aires. La Flor. 1975. References use the abbreviation AP.

Strange Things Happen Here: Twenty-Six Stories and a Novel. Helen Lane, tr. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1979. References use the abbreviation ST.

Cambio de armas. Hanover, N.H. Ediciones del Norte. 1982. References use the abbreviation CA.

Other Weapons. Deborah Bonner, tr. Hanover, N.H. Ediciones del Norte. 1985. References use the abbreviation OW.

Donde viven las àguilas. Buenos Aires. Celtia. 1983. References use the abbreviation DV. Translations are by David Draper Clark.

Realidad nacional desde la cama. Buenos Aires. Grupo Editor Latinoamericano. 1993. References use the abbreviation RN.

The Censors: A Bilingual Selection of Stories. Willimantic, Ct. Curbstone. 1992. References use the abbreviation C