SOURCE: Borinsky, Alicia. “Closing the Book—Dogspeech: José Donoso.” In Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical Dream in Contemporary Latin American Fiction, pp. 118-31. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

[In this chapter from her full-length study of several contemporary Latin American writers, Borinsky takes a deconstructive approach to several works by Donoso, with particular reference to images of dogs as representations of omniscient hopelessness.]

FEAR AND STORY-TELLING

García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera offers its French-speaking parrot as a way of parodying the continuation of francophilia with the pleasures of literature. In José Donoso's A House in the Country¹ we also encounter the use of French to allude to the puzzles of literary convention, this time in the form of a game called “La marquesa salió a las cinco” played by some characters in the novel; the game's title is a translation of Paul Valéry's much-quoted attack on the novelistic genre.² Since A House in the Country is not sparing in its use of direct French titles, phrases, and even whole songs, the choice of Spanish for Valéry's phrase rather than its quotation in the original produces an effect of parodical displacement.

A House in the Country focuses on some cousins left by their parents with a group of servants in their wealthy mansion which is surrounded by lands occupied by impoverished natives. In the course of the novel the reader is apprised of the children's anxiety that their parents will not come back from their trip and of the parents' ensuing revulsion toward the situation they face on their return. During the uncertain time between departure and return, the children play “La marquesa salió a las cinco,” face diverse dangers, and engage in transgressive sexual practices. The servants rebel only to be kept in place. The carefully fenced mansion is violated as suspicions of cannibalism among natives and other characters contribute to the delineation of a society shaped by greed and brutality. A House in the Country is a polytonal work, featuring a straightforward realistic style, a highly allusive and florid mode reminiscent of the turn-of-the century Spanish American “modernistas,”³ and a playful—at times erudite—use of quotations and foreign terms. The preliminary farewell to the parents initiates the reader into the intricate architecture of the mansion, whose layers hiding gold and family secrets yield, as well, a patchwork of Spanish discursive styles that implicitly constitute another journey, this time into literary tradition.

What are the secrets unveiled during these simultaneous journeys? One concerns the contents of the house library, a room filled with richly bound volumes, which is off limits to the children and in which Adriano Gomara, the unfortunate father of one of the cousins, is being held prisoner by the rest of the family. Arabela, the keeper of the room, is a cousin thought by all to possess an unusual degree of information. When cousin Wenceslao, a boy whose mother enjoys dressing him up as a girl, is told by Arabela that the library contains nothing but empty bindings made to order by their grandfather for the sake of appearances, he ponders in shock the source of Arabela's knowledge because he realizes that it could not be traced to her studying in the library, as he had originally thought.

How does she know so much? The answer in his head took the form of a stampede of other immediate questions: but is it true that she knows so much? Or do I only think so because I know so little myself, and do the grown-ups only think so when they go to consult her because it suits their purposes that she should?

(p. 17)

The narrator reassures us that the grown-ups had known all along that only bindings filled the four-story salon called “the library” and that the interdiction denying the children access to that room (issued on the pretext of protecting their eyesight from stress and their minds from being misguided) was, in fact, another exercise of the parents' persistent wish to domesticate their offspring by having them follow orders.

Arabela's knowledge becomes linked to books, only to underscore the point that the alleged source of her information is sheer make-believe. Once the hypothesis of her familiarity with the library's authors and languages is dismissed, she becomes all the more puzzling to Wenceslao and the reader because Arabela is made to embody a knowledge around reading, but without any source in reading. Her wisdom stems in large measure from her recognition that nothing can be found in that library. Arabela is superior to her cousins because she is unaffected by the authority of the contents of library shelves. She is also familiar with the pain of Adriano Gomara, whose screams are heard when he is not drugged or asleep. Made indifferent to Adriano's pain because of the frequency of his protests and cynical about what might be learned from reading books, Arabela laughs at Wenceslao's bewilderment. In this early scene of the novel, Wenceslao's emotion in finding his father and his realization that the library is fake are presented in counterpoint to Arabela's allowing the question about how she attains knowledge to be addressed. Is her knowledge a hypothesis—as Wenceslao thinks—needed by both children and grown-ups? Or is it something firmer, grounded untransferably in Arabela?

If in Love in the Time of Cholera Fermina's superior intuition generated the energy needed to put the book aside and engage in “life,” Arabela's strength in A House in the Country lies in a different domain.⁴ She laughs. Her laughter against the sentimentality attendant in Wenceslao's reunion with his father and the shock of her revelation about the library destroys the possibility of investing them with anything but detachment. Arabela's laughter empties this part of the novel of the feelings she derides. Thus although she implies (like Fermina) that the realm of books is to be left for something else, her pursuit of that other realm has the vertiginous nature of destructive humor rather than the safer, canonized trappings of love associated with Fermina.

Cruel laughter superimposed onto a basic and unredeemable fear, not love, is the grounding reality presented by A House in the Country as the “other” of literature capable of telling us about the emptiness of the bindings in the library. Is Arabela's message right? Are there not books in the library? Or, in other words, how different are the occurrences that make up the novel from those encountered in reading literature?

The game “La marquesa salió a las cinco,” played without explicit reference to the original French, is a key to some of the answers provided by the novel. Organized by a cousin named Juvenal, whose imprecations to the rest of the children are reminiscent of the Roman satirist,⁵ the children change roles and engage in a form of play-acting that soon causes them to blur the distinction between the game's make-believe and that other layer perceived in the novel as their reality: a reality forceful enough to generate a baby born of one of the couplings between cousins even though, according to the temporal frame of the novel, such an event would have been impossible. In opposition to Valéry's disparaging dictum about the genre of the novel, fiction unravels without recourse to pedestrian commonsensical statements. The upsetting of time generated by “La marquesa salió a las cinco” within the novel is a forceful denial of the implications of “La marquise est sortie à cinq heures.”

Love in the Time of Cholera's Dr. Urbino died trying to catch a parrot that he had tried to teach French; his last words, “ca y est,” are to be completed—the reader intuits—by his playful executioner in a combination of verbal obedience and creole triumph at having gotten rid of the cumbersome teacher, ca y est. In shifting “La marquise est sortie à cinq heures” to the active game of “La marquesa salió a las cinco,” A House in the Country grounds literature in the humor of displacement. There may not be books in that library and, indeed, there is contempt for those who would flow toward them in search of a wisdom better found elsewhere. The entanglements and occurrences among characters are suggested as the best realization of what is merely hinted at in books.

The relationship between literature and life is doubly registered in A House in the Country. On the one hand, the children's game creates a level of fiction within fiction with limits blurred by the hypothesis of the birth of a “real” baby, echoing the expected birth in Donoso's novel The Obscene Bird of Night.⁶ On the other hand, a narrator with a will to control and intervene in the creation of the plot frames this layer with his comments and even a casual encounter in the street with one of the family members portrayed in the book who refuses his account as fanciful and boring. The story we read has not been well told, he says. The effect, as in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, is to make us think that we should reread the whole novel with a critical eye. Yet whereas in García Márquez we would effectively void the history of the family through the hypothetical reinterpretation triggered by the rereading, in A House in the Country the perspective of the Ventura family member encountered in the street produces a different effect. His view dims both the horror and the wealth housed in the mansion. Without its sharp edges, the story turns, as if in a moment of “La marquesa salió a las cinco,” into an insipid narrative—Valéry's and, of course, Donoso's refused alternative. Fear becomes paradoxically recognized as essential to the interest in the characters and the pleasure of the reception of their story.

AS SEEN BY A HUNGRY DOG

Is A House in the Country to be understood, then, as the rather bland but effective reinstatement of a narrator capable of undermining Valéry's condescension to novelistic efforts? Donoso's book offers a larger enclosure in this regard, one that renders the frictions between art and life in a different and more eloquent register.

Tapestries and paintings abound in the tale. Unlike books they hold clues to the interpretation of events to come and are regarded as important elements in the visual and interpretative matrix of the reading. Such is the case, for example, of the wall-hanging “L'embarquement pour Cythère”⁷ that is described as the parents are planning their departure. If a painting or tapestry anticipates and in so doing participates in shaping an event, can it not be said that this visual object exercises control over the events outside its representation? One of the servants, Juan Pérez, undertakes the task of restoring a tapestry hanging in the mansion. As he is portrayed performing the work, it becomes immediately apparent that the fresco trompe l'oeil has the capacity to perceive. It is no mere adornment:

This eye, muttered Juan Pérez—dipping his brush in sea-green glitter and dotting the pupil of the greyhound, which stood peering into the ballroom through a door he had pawed open—will be my eye. It will take in everything: when I am not around, it will be here to spy on them.

(p. 227)

In restoring the trompe l'oeil, Juan Pérez renders a version of it that upsets the social order that distributes roles in the represented scene. The greyhound is neither a domestic pet nor a well-trained hunting dog; furthermore, Juan Pérez himself refuses to be the courtier in the picture and, instead, makes himself one with the dog's eye:

But he wished to make it quite clear that he wasn't that courtier, he was this famished greyhound whose black ribs he was now accentuating with shadows. Everything he restored with his brush seemed to turn into a hallucinated freak. His henchmen, dangling on scaffolds and pulleys at various heights over the face of the fresco, were busy imperceptibly transforming the frolicsome goddesses into harpies, the rosy clouds into thunderheads. This dog would see with a detail as sharp as its hunger everything Juan Pérez couldn't see for himself, what with his nose stuck inches from the wall, surrounded by paint pots, his back to the room.

(pp. 227-28)

Juan Pérez is the dog's eye; the dog's eye is Juan Pérez, but the dog sees more than Juan Pérez does in spite of being a product of his restoration. The dog stands guard in the fresco and redeems Juan Pérez of his subservient role in the family. Its frightening and famished stare forever keeps score.

The dog's hungry stare seems to move the brush restoring the fresco, turning the participants in the scene into hallucinated freaks. What have they seen to look that way? It is not what they see but the manner in which they are stared at. With no more room for frolicking framed by harmonious relationships of power and subservience, the dog has uncovered the capacity underlying the scene. The dog watches hungrily, framing what it perceives with the tendentiousness of its hatred; its gaze transforms. At war with its object of attention, it imposes a paralyzing watch. It is not attacking anybody, though; it is, most important, setting a tone for the scene and uncovering the nature of its elements.

Arabela spoke to the emptiness of the library and laughed off Adriano Gomara's pain. The dog—beyond words—is to complete the lessons of her humor, taking them one step further toward the representation of the social order of the house in the key of a famished stare. Not books but a fresco trompe l'oeil tells us, again, that what matters is something other, more weighty, than whatever is found in bound volumes. Do we dare call it “life”? The half-alive characters who mingle with the inhabitants of the fresco do not assert a stark opposition between art and life. On the contrary, they posit a deeper understanding of art that would permeate our interpretation of life.

We encounter a dog that has become silent narrator and reweaver of the tale in Donoso's La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria.⁸ This short novel starts out as a playful, early twentieth-century erotic tale. A young woman brought up in strict convent fashion is married and loses her husband soon afterward. Her widowhood is an initiation into intense and transgressive sexual pleasures. The atmosphere in which Blanca, the young woman who becomes the Marquise of Loria, lives is one of detailed luxury. The decor of her house is described at length, recalling the fascination of turn-of-the-century modernistas for the literary rendition of ornamental objects.

The harmony of the marquise's world is upset by an amorous relationship with a man who has a dog named Luna—“moon” in Spanish. Blanca's link to the dog is strong and unquestionable; a physical bond is forged from the beginning, so that when we read of Blanca's reaction upon encountering the dog in her house, we are not surprised:

As she opened the door of her darkened bedroom she felt that her heart leaped in shock, leaving her breathless: there were those two eyes like two moons swimming in that infinite warm, dark, and aromatic space. She perceived a new horizon of potent primitive and essential smells. She did not turn on the lights. The eyes approached her slowly in the dark until she saw the bottom of the hollow pupils, the other side of those eyes whose iridescence came out in drops of saliva from the growling dog. With a growl suddenly become louder Luna launched itself over her, throwing her onto the floor on top of the shards of crystal, slapping her with its rough legs, taking her clothes off again with its hot body, biting her as though it were about to swallow up her satined body, her perfect breasts. …

There they were, those two limpid eyes, like two blank continents, like two sheets of paper without any writing.

(pp. 162-63)

Blanca is released by the dog, we are told, when “it realizes that she was dissolving herself in the first spasm of the night.” The implication is that Blanca felt a voluptuous pleasure in having been ravished. The next morning Blanca looks at her battered body and, after hearing the sounds of the dog next door and seeing it later outside her window, decides not to tell anyone what happened. She breaks up with one of her suitors because “she suffered such boredom when she saw his black imploring eyes which lacked the essential” (p. 168) and devotes herself to a secret life of acknowledging her relationship with Luna.

Blanca (white) is the epither for Luna (moon). The bond between Luna and Blanca acquires the necessity of a noun and its epithet. Luna's destruction of Blanca's modernista context and its slide into shards and ruins is hyperbolized in Blanca's end. She disappears mysteriously after taking a ride with a man with whom she has sex. Accused of killing her, he defends himself from the charges by saying that she had been taken away by a huge animal, in the middle of the night. Although the man is incarcerated, accused of a crime of passion, the reader—sharing the secret about the bond joining Blanca and Luna—knows that his being put away does not solve the puzzle of the violence that swallowed up Blanca.

After seeing and being stared at by the emptiness at the bottom of Luna's eyes, Blanca cannot but have her ornamental context dismantled. She gives herself away to be ravished by the dog's hungry, revealing eyes. La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria goes one step beyond in the articulation of the consequences of the dog's watch. Whereas the greyhound restored by Juan Pérez is merely keeping guard, Luna becomes the privileged dismantler of useless ornament, the supreme ravisher, capable of revealing to Blanca the pain at the core of the pleasure precipitating her into their bond. Blanca and Luna, adjective and noun, also suggest a threat to the reader being watched every night by the white moon, “la blanca luna.”

A BEAUTIFUL FACE, GREAT CLOTHES

Blanca's ornamental world, her furniture, clothes, and accessories, are destroyed by the emptiness of the dog's fury. The uncertainty about the “true” existence of the dog renders the impact of its destructive energy in a most disturbing form. The hypothesis of its existence being lodged within Blanca, rather than in an external form, incorporates the threat as an inescapable realization of the emptiness of the self. Blanca, white, is just an adjective for Luna, moon—the uncontrollable dark hole driving her into pleasure and final obliteration. As an epithet inextricably attached to her noun, the truth for Blanca is the realization of her annihilation.

The traces left by Blanca are “a silver brooch of her cloche, one French shoe, and her golden Patek Philippe” (p. 194). The fragments of objects she has bought are retrieved as the only signs of her hypothetical uniqueness. Blanca's manufacturing of her persona through the acquisition of things is part of a sustained figuration of the self in contemporary society elucidated in Donoso's works. One of the novellas in the volume Tres novelitas burguesas⁹ (three novellas of the middle class)—translated into English as Sacred Families in a rendition that conveys the sarcasm of the original title but forgoes its emphasis on compulsive consumption—offers one of the most intense figurations of the disturbing nature of fashion in our society.

“Chatanooga Choochoo” introduces us to the lives of a group of well-to-do characters, frequent consumers of culture and objects. Among them is Sylvia, a model with a “perfect face” whose features have to be literally drawn for every photo opportunity. What was an intimation of emptiness for Blanca is a celebration of possibilities and profit for Sylvia:

The feeling that Sylvia—that woman-adjective, woman decoration, that collapsible, foldable woman who represented all comforts of modern life and lacked everything, even individuality and togetherness—had magical powers and was therefore powerful, must have dominated my sleep. I could only remember fragments of my dreams, not capture them whole, and I woke up fearing Sylvia. The first thing I felt on opening my eyes was an uncontrollable urge to see her again. What face was she wearing today? What dress did she have on, she who depended so much on clothes? A scarf knotted a certain way could change her whole appearance, not just physically, but inside, as a person. … I desired her … I definitely wanted to continue my “affair” with her; but more urgent than that, or perhaps what gave strength and shape to that urgency, was the need to erase her face with vanishing cream and throw myself into the delight of painting her and making her up again.

(pp. 46-47)

Dancing with her friend Magdalena to the tune of “Chattanooga Choochoo” at a party, Sylvia suggests a disconcerting twinhood. She who can be made up to look like anybody could also be at the bottom of everybody. Huidobro's eloquent celebration of the permanent nostalgia inflicted by the intense love for a woman, “Todas las mujeres se te parecen / ahora que no te pareces a ninguna”¹⁰ (All women resemble you / now that you don't resemble anyone), is repeated in a darkly humorous mode. The narrator's attraction to Sylvia draws him to the void, suggests to him the possibility of an ultimate empowerment: being able to efface and make up a new face for her.

Vanishing cream and makeup are to be understood both in their literal meanings and as objects of consumption. Sylvia is the supreme cosmetic product in the novel, ideally faceless and manageable and, because of it, a promise of perfect beauty with each new product. Magdalena, the narrator's wife, has a face of her own but needs to fight its wish to come out from under the makeup, so that she can be the face on the magazine covers like Sylvia. In a scene referred to by the narrator as a “surrogate of lovemaking” (p. 50), he makes up Magdalena.

Making up Magdalena is rendered as a kind of initiation of the narrator into something that is simultaneously new and necessary; he does it naturally as if he were meant for the role. The exercise also brings back to him scenes from his childhood, important recollections that shaped his sense of who he was. The narrator is not involved in a mindless game; he has invested himself totally in an experience with the revelatory powers of love:

It was a game, masquerade and mask … and I thought about my childhood, when in summer homes in the hills we would invent costumes, stick our heads inside transparent silk stockings that preserved our individual features while disguising them; on them we would paint other faces, the bad man's grim scowl, the princess's white, chaste face, the witch's mean beak, the old hag's wrinkles, the patriarch's moustache and beard—but always with our features preserved under the false, transparent skin of the silk stockings. Thus with Magdalena now, who wasn't Magdalena but a mutation of the Sylvia mask, and these in turn were every possible variation of the mythological faces that appeared in fashion magazines which in turn were infinite variations of a mask created by some makeup artist in collaboration with a manufacturer.

(p. 51)

Magdalena is able to approach Sylvia's look as though she were covering her face with a silk stocking. One snag and her own features might upset the perfection of the makeup. Attaining Sylvia's look is the opposite of copying from an original deemed to be more authentic, grounded more deeply into existence than its imitation. Magdalena does not have the blank-page face of Sylvia. Had she been faceless like her she would have been able to possess any face she wanted.

Magdalena being made up by her husband is a parody of the transforming powers of love. His pleasure in achieving the appearance he wants her to have suggests that the identification with fragments of representation provided by advertising and art is all we have for articulating the terms of our desire. But “Chatanooga Choochoo” does not present us an ideal couple with the compliant wife ready to follow, in a world of high consumption, the whims of her husband. The voluptuousness of the narrator's sexual encounter with Sylvia conveys the desperation of his will to dominate women. Sylvia, her head shaped like an egg, does not have a face when she is not wearing makeup; she cannot speak because she is mouthless. This state generates great tenderness in the narrator, who sees her as an ideal woman. When he feels like it, he follows her to the bathroom and cuts out a mouth for her in lipstick with the same ease with which he had made up Magdalena. It is as though he were perfecting a kind of lovemaking, delving further into implications of a privileged coupling. The first thing Sylvia does after the narrator creates a mouth on her face is sing “Chattanooga Choochoo.” Then she kisses him:

Abruptly she fell silent and, coming closer, she put her newly cut out mouth on mine and kissed me. Unable to resist the impulse, I took her in my arms and that kiss—which undoubtedly she had given me to test the effectiveness of her mouth in all its functions—made me experience the ultimate satisfaction of kissing and perhaps even of loving a woman who is not complete: the power of civilized man, who does not cut out tongues or put out chastity belts—primitive procedures—but who knows how to compel a woman's submission by removing or putting on her mouth, taking her apart by removing her arms, her hair in the form of a wig, her eyes in the form of false eyelashes, eyebrows, blue shadow on the lids, removing, by means of some curious mechanism, her sex itself, so she can only use it when he needs her, so that her entire being depends on a man's will—singing or not singing “Chattanooga Choochoo.”

(p. 27)

Bioy Casares's Asleep in the Sun¹¹ renders a phantasy in its nightmarish resolution by having the man who institutionalizes his wife so that her soul may be transplanted for a dog's become the victim of exchanges he naively thought were under his control. His notion of ideal love is not to be realized in spite of the “scientific” means attempted to bring it into existence. Similarly, the will for total control in “Chatanooga Choochoo” makes a victim of the one who wants to exercise it. Sylvia and Magdalena watch the narrator and Ramon, Sylvia's husband, dressed in identical suits sing and move to the beat of “Chattanooga Choochoo” for them. The transformations affecting Sylvia and Magdalena are infectious; the men are also subjected to the submissive powers represented by the song. It is a minor song and the elements causing the submission are not part of a sinister culture of sexual dominance. They are, instead, the everyday gestures, perceptions, objects, and sounds that mold men and women.

Swept away by the monster Luna, Blanca in La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria embodies desire as a self-destructive conundrum; her watch as blanca luna—white moon—over the characters in “Chatanooga Choochoo” uncovers the possibility of a more sinister and unavoidable emptiness with the same power as Luna's, this time embodied in the faceless stare of the lover in our dreams.

A GREYHOUND, A YELLOW DOG, AND DESPAIR

Donoso's La desesperanza¹² (Hopelessness), translated into English as Curfew, was published in 1986 and, unlike his other works, deals explicitly with a political situation. Two characters, Mañungo and Judit, are stranded in the streets of Santiago de Chile after the curfew established by the military regime. If found out, their lives would be in jeopardy. The novel describes the events of that night in a straightforward manner, emphasizing the cruelty of the political conditions endured by the country at large.

Dogs are again a key to the understanding of what is at stake in the narrative. As Mañungo and Judit look for shelter in the deserted streets, Judit sees a group of rough male dogs in pursuit of a delicate looking small female dog. They run after her, succeeding at points in cornering her with the visible desire to violate her. The peril faced by the female dog is told from a perspective that, in humanizing her, makes her situation applicable to the one experienced by Judit. As in Cortázar's “Press Clippings” the scene of nocturnal violence acquires a claustrophobic generality.

At a corner, they saw the pack of dogs on the opposite side of the street. The enormous, maddened dog, and underneath him, between his paws, with her fur sticking to her nakedness, the little white bitch waited, licking her chops, while the beast satisfied his trivial impulse. The other dogs formed a querulous and expectant circle around the male, who could not seem to mount the bitch to his satisfaction. As soon as she saw the little white dog, Judit pulled away from Mañungo, crossed the street oblivious of who might see or hear her, and shouted scat, leave her alone, pardon her. But the dogs were unwilling to leave the bitch, whose eyes seemed even more deeply shadowed and decadent, her face more concentrated and pale, accepting that all dogs wanted to possess her. […] Mañungo, just outside the circle, shouted to Judit to get away, to let the disgusting dogs do what they wanted. The dogs jumped around Judit, tearing her sleeves, her skirt, her blouse, staining her with their saliva, with their semen, with their blood, ready to rape her.

(p. 181)

Mañungo is outside the circle made by the dogs, echoing the position he has in Chilean political life because he has just arrived from Paris. Judit, inside the circle, suffers the dog's threat from within, as though her own destiny were intertwined with the fate of the pursuit.

The small female dog, having decided to submit to the pack's attack, is playing a survival game. She is the acquiescent victim in a dark apprenticeship imposed by the rule of force. But Judit interferes with her decision, she stands in the circle in an attempt to defend her. Suddenly Judit, who is holding a pistol, decides to use it.

She aimed at the dogs. There were so many. All the same. All of them deserved to die, undifferentiated males sticking to her and sullying her. In the middle of the pack was the little white bitch, poised as if all this were taking place in a salon, revealing the effect of this fury unleashed by her situation only in her melancholy smile, as if she knew that while she couldn't escape her destiny, she could at least play. Judit did not reach the bitch because the dogs were biting her streaming legs. She was a yard away from her. Between them the seething mob heaved. It seemed that the little white dog was not upset, because from between the paws of the tan dog in the center of the infernal circle, tender, clean, tired, she smiled at Judit, her accomplice, her savior, her sister, who aimed the pistol and shot her in the head. The body twitched and the bitch fell dead.

(pp. 181-82)

The result of Judit's intervention in the conflict is the destruction of the small female dog's strategy for survival. Judit's solidarity with her has effectively denied her life and shown to Judit the uncertainty governing any effort to overcome violence. This scene stands as the best rendition of what the original Spanish title of the novel conveys, a hopelessness so pervasive that every effort to stop aggression turns into its opposite. The compliant victim, having understood the message delivered by the drooling pack, had opted for expanding the powers of the pack even further; Judit by executing her turned her into an unwilling martyr to an unstated cause.

Did the dog die in dignity? Or was her acquiescence enough to make her a member of the attacking pack? Cortázar's Noemí (“Press Clippings”) and Puig's Molina (The Kiss of the Spider Woman) attempt to enter the realm in which all this may be explained; for Donoso certain games hold a key to the answer. They are not, as in Cortázar's Hopscotch, preexisting games reinscribed through writing but, as in “La marquesa salió a las cinco,” invented ones that serve to uncover as conventional what we think of as belonging to the nature of society.

The Obscene Bird of Night, a somber novel narrated by a character alternatively called Humberto Peñaloza or “El Mudito” (the mute), is the starting point for many of the figurations found in Donoso's later works. As in A House in the Country, a large architectural enclosure, this time a convent, serves as the theater for the occurrences in the novel. Masks and lovemaking are brought together, questioning the stability of the self, and a meditation about clothing and rags anticipates the poetics of self-destruction that shapes La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria, “Atomo verde número cinco,” as well as the novellas gathered in Cuatro para Delfina.¹³

A yellow female dog is mentioned in The Obscene Bird of Night as the witness of an unspeakable secret that joins a little girl, her father, and an old woman who is presented simultaneously as a nanny and a witch. The dog appears at key moments in the narrative as two characters make sexual contact but interrupt it, fearing the dog's gaze. The yellow dog, silent but capable of running away with a secret held by its stare, closes the novel when a group of toothless old women play a game called “la perra amarilla” (yellow bitch). Betting everything they have, these old women, portrayed as indistinguishable and hence anonymous, lose their dentures, the contents of their newspaper-wrapped packages, and, by implication, whatever may be understood as making up their lives.

The newspapers, which reproduce the events of the day, are also disseminated in the game thanks to the randomness of who wins and who loses. Every loss or win is illusory, though, because we are told that in the end the only winner is the yellow bitch, “la perra amarilla.” The dog says nothing as it runs away, obliterating history as represented by the old newspapers and erasing the individuality of the old women by taking everything from them. It is a total sweep; the dog is the supreme and uninvited player.

Should we make the dog say its message? Is there a moral that could make its way through the dog and represent us, our point of view? “La perra amarilla,” like the other dogs in Donoso's stories, is not there so that we may speak through her in a triumph of domestication. These dogs already exist beyond the ambiguity of Kafka's animal as quoted by Borges;¹⁴ they have won the staring battle and will not be vehicles for a message. On the contrary, as they stand in paralyzing guard they dare us to articulate their silence and learn the lesson they already hungrily know about us.

Notes

1. José Donoso, Casa de campo (Madrid: Seix Barral, 1978); trans. David Pritchard with Suzanne Jill Levine, A House in the Country (New York: Vintage Books, 1984). Page numbers correspond to the English translation; in some cases I have modified the translation for accuracy.

2. I am indebted to Michel Rybalka, from Washington University in St. Louis, for the information on the probable source for this Valéry quotation: it appears cited by Breton in the second Surrealist manifesto. See André Breton. “Second manifeste du surréalisme” (Paris: Sagittaire, 1929).

3. I refer to the school led by Ruben Darío. Donoso's novel takes up some of this modernista's favorite motifs and reinscribes them in a sinister key. See, for example, the treatment of gold in the chapter bearing that title (“El Oro”) (pp. 166-200). The continued references to power and the materiality of its objects in Donoso's fiction have led to more than one interpretation favoring analysis of ideologies. See, for example, Hugo Achúgar, Ideología y estructuras narrativas en José Donoso (Caracas: Centro de Estudios Rómulo Gallegos, 1979), and Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat, “El desclasamiento como ideología y forma en la narrativa de José Donoso,” in his El espacio de la crítica (Madrid: Orígenes, 1989).

4. Arabela's knowledge gives her a peculiar kind of power, attained in some of Donoso's other works by old women, as in The Obscene Bird of Night, or derelicts, as in “Gaspar de la Nuit.”

5. The vaguely archaic names of the cousins, clashing with the more “modern” references in the text, reinforce the sense that part of the narrative is to be construed as transhistorical. The role Juvenal plays in building this effect is important, having developed a narrative strategy seen by some as characteristic of postmodernism. John Barth has noted Donoso's relationship to postmodernism in “Post-Modernism Revisited,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 8 (Fall 1988): 16-24.

6. José Donoso, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (Madrid: Seix Barral, 1970).

7. The wall-hanging is also an allusion to Charles Baudelaire's “Un voyage à Cythère.” The joint consideration of the wall-hanging and the poem delineates the deterioration and sorrow to take place in the novel. The final lines of the poem, “Ah! Seigneur! donnez moi la force et le courage / De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!” uncannily encapsulate the characters' final despair. See Charles Baudelaire, “Un voyage à Cythère,” Les fleurs du mal, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961), pp. 111-13.

8. José Donoso, La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981). Page numbers are in accordance with this edition; my translation. See also Philip Swanson, “Structure and Meaning in La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 3 (July 1986): 247-56.

9. José Donoso, Tres novelitas burguesas (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1973), trans. Andree Conrad, Sacred Families (New York: Knopf, 1977). Page numbers refer to the English edition.

10. See Vicente Huidobro, “Altazor,” in his Obras completas (Santiago: Editorial Zig Zag, 1976).

11. See Chapter 5 herein, devoted to Adolfo Bioy Casares.

12. José Donoso, La desesperanza (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986), trans. Alfred MacAdam, Curfew (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988); quotations and page numbers are in accordance with the English translation.

13. José Donoso, Cuatro para Delfina (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982).

14. See the epigraph for Chapter 2.

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