[In the following essay, Terry examines the relationship between fact and fiction in La Muerte y la Niña.]

Facts, Onetti has said, “son siempre vacíos, son recipientes que tomarán la forma del sentimiento que los llene”.¹ Another way of putting this would be to say that facts are relative—doubly so, if they are already part of a fiction—and that their links with the idea of a stable “reality” are more tenuous than might seem. Or one might go further and claim, as many recent novelists have done, that there is no clear and final division between the real and the fictive, and that any kind of language which appears to deny this is by definition false.²

At one point in Onetti's most recent novel, La muerte y la niña (1973), the question of the possible relation between fact and fiction is raised in a peculiarly direct form:

No importa qué recetó el médico para el resfrío de Augusto Goerdel, que tenía once años de edad en el tiempo de la coincidencia supuesta. Esto puede rastrearse, si importara, en los libros de Barthé, boticario, concejal y nuevamente boticario. Lo que importa es ignorar para siempre—y aquí hay una especie de felicidad—qué conversó, qué supo, qué dedujo el Padre Bergner en la posible visita que, se nos antoja, fue crepuscular, lenta y tranquila.

(32)³

The “reality” to which this refers is clearly an intrinsic part of the story: the contrast is between the unimportance of facts which can be checked (the doctor's visit, which actually took place) and the importance of what can only remain a speculation (the “possible” visit of the priest and his imagined encounter with the doctor). And the latter is important precisely because it leaves the imagination free to create its own vision of events; fact, in other words, has had to give way to fiction, and it is in this moving away from facts—or, alternatively, in the way facts themselves are deformed by being incorporated in the fiction—that the possibility of a story may take shape.

The opening situation of La muerte y la niña presents certain facts which in themselves form the elements of a plot: A tells B that his (A's) wife will die if she conceives a second child; she eventually does this and dies as predicted. Stated in this way, the plot has only limited possibilities: a prediction is fulfilled in such a way that there is neither surprise nor suspense. Yet, though there is more to the opening chapters than this suggests, the bare facts are not without their own narrative implications. In the first place, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, prediction and prophecy are closely related to the act of speech: “Prophecy …, insofar as it redoubles everything that will actually happen, … causes us to see in events, not their existential immediacy, but a mere confirmation of speech itself, as events-already-narrated”.⁴ Secondly, the appearance of A represents an intrusion into the life of B, the introduction of a foreign element which will perhaps call for readjustments on the part of B, and which in turn may prolong the story beyond the point at which the initial plot—the prediction and its fulfilment—is completed.

To give the characters concerned their actual names, it is this unexpected intrusion of Augusto Goerdel into the life of the doctor, Díaz Grey, which generates the story that follows. The visit itself, clearly, is paradoxical: the “patient” is not ill and the doctor is unable to write him a prescription.⁵ Though the fact of the prediction emphasizes Goerdel's rôle as a storyteller, the first chapter of the novel opens just after his confession has ended, and it is through the reflections of Díaz Grey that the reader is made aware of what has taken place. For the latter, Goerdel is a future murderer who will commit a “crime”, though one which is not legally punishable. This already involves recasting what I have called the “initial plot”: Goerdel is now a man who announces in advance that he will perform a murder. There is apparently no doubt as to the nature of the “crime”, the victim, the time or the manner, nor, for that matter, about the impossibility of retribution. Thus a gap is immediately created between what Díaz Grey is being told and his intuitive reading of Goerdel's information: it is he himself who introduces the language of murder and criminal investigation, and who senses that he and others, by hearing Goerdel's confession, are being made to act like witnesses in a court case.⁶ Goerdel, for his part, presents the situation merely as a dilemma, ultimately insoluble because of his religious convictions, but which he has already taken steps to postpone by arranging to absent himself for a time from his wife.

What generates the story, therefore, is not the prediction itself, but the question “Why is he telling me this?”⁷ In the course of the first chapter, the various attempts at an explanation founder against a basic impenetrability. Goerdel, in recounting his situation, is fabricating a “plot”—in both senses of the word—which has its aesthetic dimension (he is perfecting a “crime” which is not a crime) (10); in his reading of Goerdel, Díaz Grey detects “la trampa, la hipocresía, la congénita astucia” (all qualities which are emphasized in the account of Goerdel's upbringing in Chapters III and IV) (11). Similarly, Goerdel's own explanation of his visit—“El conflicto, repito, sólo es mío. Por eso le pedí esta entrevista.”—not only confirms Díaz Grey's suspicions but increases his sense of frustration: “No sólo por eso, hijo de perra; hay un espanto detrás, hay un cálculo. Se sentía más débil que su visitante, empezaba a odiarlo con franqueza” (13).⁸ And his final reaction is to feel trapped by something he cannot put into words: “acorralado … por una trampa, una sutileza mayor, un presentimiento indefinible, grumoso y repelente” (17).

Thus the possibility of a story arises from the notion of an enigma to be resolved. As Josefina Ludmer has pointed out, there is a real sense in which Díaz Grey narrates precisely because he is in a state of ignorance: “… en Onetti el médico es el que no sabe y narra porque no sabe: el relato es búsqueda e investigación; el médico no cura, no ‘practica’ la medicina en los relatos; no es visitador … sino visitado: se sitúa en su espacio y recibe relatos”.⁹ The spatial reference in the last phrase also suggests another means by which Onetti's fictions are produced: the fact that so many of the characters are situated between pairs of opposites which, by formalizing the element of difference, create a field of tensions within which the narrative must attempt to find its balance.¹⁰ So, in La muerte y la niña, Augusto Goerdel exists between several sets of poles: Santa María and the Colonia Suiza, doctor and priest, one child and another, the religious life and the secular, and, later, between the Old World and the New. Díaz Grey, for his part, speaks of his long-absent daughter in a voice which is between the past and the present (75), and at another point uses similar terms to refer to his own “birth” as a fictional character: “una de las formas de su condena incomprensible [i.e. his creator's] era haberme traído al mundo en una edad invariable entre la ambición con tiempo limitado y la desesperanza” (56. Italics mine).

The “creator” in this last instance is Brausen, the mention of whom brings into play the whole question of Díaz Grey's status as a fictional character. In La vida breve (1950), the novel which initiates the Santa María sequence, Juan María Brausen is himself a fictional character who invents a sub-fiction based on the imaginary town of Santa María, in which the chief protagonist is Díaz Grey.¹¹ By the end of that novel, as the result of a complex process of overlapping identities, Díaz Grey has achieved the status of independent narrator, and Brausen has disappeared as a person, to become the mythical “fundador” whose statue stands in the square of Santa María, and later the “Dios-Brausen” of La muerte y la niña and other stories. What this means is that, from the end of La vida breve onwards, Díaz Grey is both a writer (in contrast to other characters who are nonwriters or simple informants)¹² and a character who is aware that he is a fictional creation.

One result of this is that Díaz Grey has only as much reality as Brausen allows him, a phenomenon which contributes to the fragmentation which is taken to greater lengths in La muerte y la niña than in any of Onetti's previous fiction. This assumes various forms: in the first place, the text refers several times to Díaz Grey's childhood and student days, that is to say, to a part of his life which antedates his first appearance as a fictional character in La vida breve.¹³ Yet what is striking is not so much that Díaz Grey has been provided with a past of which there was no mention in the earlier stories,¹⁴ but that his memories of this past should lack any sense of continuity. Secondly, this inability to relate memories to one another is shared, on a smaller scale, by Jorge Malabia, though the subject here is the doctor himself: “Malabia se detuvo y comenzó a mirarlo como recordando, como si pudiera aislar dentro de los años, cada vez que había visto al médico. Y estos recuerdos se mantenían independientes, unidos apenas por el nombre” (71). And, significantly, it is Malabia who, a moment later, invites Díaz Grey to explain his past: “Pero, y sí me interesa, conocer su pasado, saber quién, qué era usted, doctor, antes de mezclarse con los habitantes de Santa María. Los fantasmas que inventó e impuso Juan María Brausen” (71-72). It is Malabia's question which leads Díaz Grey to speak for the first time of the daughter, now an adolescent, whom he has not seen since she was three years old. The years of his daughter's infancy represent “el otro mundo perdido” (80); in the intervening time, someone (the mother who is never named?) has continued to send him photographs of her: “otros retratos, otras caras que iban trepando bruscamente las edades, no se sabía hacia dónde, pero sí alejándose de lo que yo había visto y querido, de lo que me era posible recordar. Con permiso de Brausen, naturalmente” (77). This last phrase, with its evident irony, reinforces the sense that, here and elsewhere, the character in question has unexpectedly been provided with a fragmentary past for the sake of this particular story—more specifically, that it is important for the present narrative that Díaz Grey himself should be a father.

Finally, there are the two events which must come as a surprise to readers who know the earlier stories in the sequence: Díaz Grey's marriage to Angélica Inés Petrus, whose insanity is described in El astillero, and the reappearance of Padre Bergner, the mentor of Augusto Goerdel, whose death is recorded in the same novel. Clearly, there is nothing inherently impossible in the fact of the marriage, however unlikely it might seem; what is significant, however, is the lack of any explanation as to how it came about. Given the complete absence of motivation, there is nothing on which the reader could speculate, so that again one is left with the sense that it is the needs of the story itself which have generated a particular situation, as if it were essential to the whole for Díaz Grey to be not only a father but a husband, although this dual rôle demands the existence of two separate women.¹⁵ The reappearance of Bergner, however, is another matter: in one way, it is a deliberate flouting of “realism”; in another, it is as if Onetti had responded with ironic literalness to the words uttered by Díaz Grey in his final conversation with the priest: “Concedido, padre. Tampoco (Brausen) se equivocó con usted. Santa María lo necesita. Casi diría que esta ciudad no es concebible sin usted, ni usted sin la ciudad” (100). Yet, in a more profound sense, Bergner's presence is necessary since he represents another variation on the theme of paternity which lies at the centre of the book.¹⁶ Not only is he Goerdel's “spiritual father”, as he himself asserts at a crucial point in the same interview (97); Goerdel, humanly speaking, is to a great extent his own creation—a relationship which is deeply embedded in the communal history of Santa María and the Colonia, and which, for the purposes of the story, must be prolonged as completely as possible into the present.¹⁷

One effect of such fragmentation is to dispel the illusion that what we are reading is in some way a transcript of “real events” and to confirm our sense of a text which is being created in accordance with its own internal laws. This is a point I shall return to later; in the meantime, it is important to recognize how this process is compounded by the ambiguous status of Brausen himself. Thus, if by this stage Brausen is the “god” of Santa María, it is significant that at one point he is referred to as a “demiurge”, that is to say, as the creator of a world who at the same time is subordinate to a supreme god: “Está obligado, por respeto a las grandes tradiciones que desea imitar, a irme matando, célula a célula, síntoma a síntoma. Pero también tiene que seguir el monótono ejemplo de los innumerables demiurgos anteriores y ordenar vida y reproducción” (24). Here it is Díaz Grey who is reflecting ironically on the fact that his life is permanently out of phase with that of the girls he sees around him. And a moment later, he turns on the “creator” who is responsible for this:

Ellas siempre lejanas e intocables, apartadas de mí por la disparidad de los treinta o cuarenta años que me impuso Juan María Brausen, maldita sea su alma que ojalá se abrase durante uno o dos pares de eternidades en el infierno adecuado que ya tiene pronto para él un Brausen más alto, un poco más verdadero.

(25)

The situation recalls that of Borges's story Las ruinas circulares, another parable of fictional creation. Here, the notion of a superior god is surely a reference to the novelist himself, whose hidden hand controls the apparently self-sufficient Brausen. Yet the chain of hierarchy this suggests is less simple than it looks, since La muerte y la niña, like Onetti's other fictions, seems to imply that the potential writer can only become an “author” when his material—the nucleus of the story—supplies the conditions necessary for the construction of the text to go forward. Whatever the truth of this, the peculiar distinction of La muerte y la niña is that it presents a god in decline, a fact which is reflected in the situation of Santa María itself.

Throughout the novel, Brausen is described as inscrutable, tyrannical and indifferent; the striking thing, however, is that these qualities are related to the action of time. The change this implies is symbolized by the equestrian statue of Brausen which commemorates the “founding” of Santa María. This statue, which portrays Brausen with the features of a caudillo, has already absorbed him into a national myth. In La muerte y la niña, both Bergner and Díaz Grey have the impression that the appearance of the statue is changing: “Y fue el padre Bergner el primero a descubrir, luego de santiguarse, a la luz de los faroles de la plaza, que la cara del jinete de la estatua dedicada a Juan María Brausen, había comenzado a insinuar rasgos vacunos” (49-50). When Bergner looks at the statue by daylight, “la dureza del bronce no mostraba signo alguno de formación de cuernos; sólo una placidez de vaca solitaria y rumiante” (50); nevertheless, the sensation remains, and Bergner's suspicions are later confirmed by Díaz Grey: “Pero el jinete, sí, siempre le sospeché equívocos” (94). A moment later, Díaz Grey recalls the inauguration ceremony described in El astillero (Obras completas, 1177):

Pero durante la inauguración y los discursos—siguió el médico—el caballo tiraba a vaca mansa y la figura de arriba tenía rasgos de potro, de bestia indomable. No volví a verlos con atención. Pero deben haber seguido el proceso. La vaca mansa y el jinete bigotudo. Pero no olvide que la vaca da leche pero también sabe cornear.

(94)

Thus the cow-like features are themselves ambiguous: on the one hand, they suggest passivity, complacency and lack of authority; on the other, the speculation concerning the presence or absence of horns hints at more brutal, and possibly diabolical, associations.¹⁸

The deterioration of Brausen extends in a curious way to the city itself. By comparison with the earlier stories in the sequence, the topography of Santa María in La muerte y la niña is noticeably vague: at one point it is large enough to be the centre of a police state (72), though at another (53) grass is growing beneath Díaz Grey's window in what was once a busy square. At a less literal level, however, these impressions cease to conflict: at the beginning of the book, Díaz Grey refers to “estos restos de Santa María” (10), and towards the end, in his denunciation of all that Santa María stands for, Goerdel can see it both as a “country” with its distinctive national faults and as “lo que persisten en llamar ciudad, y sólo es un poblado del siglo dieciséis” (127). What links the two visions, clearly, is the sense of living in an imaginary creation whose persistence or erosion depend on the vitality or otherwise of its “creator”. Just as Brausen, in La vida breve, is the narrator who brings into existence an invented world, so his elevation to god-like status and his subsequent deterioration make it possible to conceive the eventual destruction both of himself and of the fictional community for which he is responsible.¹⁹ As usual, it is Díaz Grey who recognizes this possibility, in the course of discussing the statue: “Con perdón de usted, padre, creo que tendremos vida para divertirnos con el terremoto que se lleve al mismísimo infierno al matungo y al jinete ambiguo. Lástima que Santa María esté tan lejos de los Andes” (94).²⁰

By drawing attention to its own genesis as a work of fiction, La muerte y la niña both defeats the reader's conventional expectations and confronts him with the possibility that the “meaning” of the story may lie not so much in a paraphraseable content as in the actual activity he is compelled to pursue in his attempt to “make sense” of the text. What complicates this process is Onetti's characteristic strategy of taking certain elements associated with more traditional forms of fiction and combining them in untraditional ways.²¹ One such form is the detective story, a type of narrative which seems to hold a special fascination for the practitioners of the Nouveau roman and which Onetti has more than once reconstructed for his own purposes. The source of this fascination is not far to seek: the detective story, as Stephen Heath has pointed out, “offers a deep confirmation of the non-problematic nature of reality in absenting writing before an ultimate untroubled truth. In this, … (it) may be seen as the very type of the ‘Balzacian’ novel with its premiss of a realist writing that declares itself transparent before the fixed source of ‘Reality’”.²² Detective novels, one could add, involve clear chains of cause and effect; an apparent “mystery” is used to set up a hermeneutical game in the course of which motives are rehearsed and clues interpreted until the investigation ends in a solution and “normality” is restored. Moreover, the reader who seeks for clues pays a particular kind of attention to the text; as John Sturrock remarks: “The general effect of a detective story is to inflate what it contains with potential meaning, and to show how a plot can seize on anything it likes … and integrate it within a single meaningful, literary structure”.²³

If one turns back to La muerte y la niña with such notions in mind, certain facts emerge which seem to cast a light on the nature of the book as a whole. As we have seen, the opening chapters establish a situation which involves what may or may not be a potential crime. The idea of criminality, however, exists only in the mind of Díaz Grey, for whom Goerdel's strategy in announcing his predicament is a means of perfecting a “crime” for which there can be no legal punishment. Thus the subsequent investigation concerns, not a murder, nor even the cause of a death, but the motives which lie behind Goerdel's confession and, later, his wife's parallel visits to Díaz Grey. As in a conventional detective story, the chronology at this point invites the reader to look for clues. Nevertheless, such dates as are given fail to form a consistent pattern: in the opening chapter, the Goerdels' first child is thirteen months old; in the second chapter, which refers to the following day (23), we are told that Helga Goerdel's visits took place “más de un año atrás” (23), and that before seeing Díaz Grey, she had consulted specialists in Europe (21). The impossible coincidence of dates (“trece meses” and “más de un año”) seems deliberate, as if defying the reader to construct an accurate chronology—as he would be able to do if the story were obeying the traditional conventions.

If, as Díaz Grey suspects, there are hidden motives behind these visits, he fails to discover them. Once the death of Helga Goerdel occurs, this particular question lapses, to be replaced by Díaz Grey's problematical investigation into his own past. Nevertheless, the question of motive arises again on two different occasions in the later stages of the novel, both times in connection with Goerdel. As a narrator, Goerdel tells three separate, though interdependent, stories in the course of the book: (i) the original prediction; (ii) his dream of the Insauberry girl, and (iii) his account of the letters by which he hopes to establish that he was not the father of the child who caused his wife's death.

The last two stories correspond to the two return visits which Goerdel pays to Santa María. The collective verdict on the first of these is left in no doubt: “(No) pudimos—ni podemos ahora—creer en ninguna respuesta convincente sobre su corta, innecesaria visita … El visto bueno de Brausen debió ser motivado por una causa secreta, por un plan que no pudimos comprender hasta que tuvimos nietos. Ni siquiera entender convencidos” (92). The second occasion is more complex: Goerdel has returned a second time to Santa María—he has now remarried and is living in East Germany under an assumed name—in order to make public a series of letters which he claims were written by the true father of Helga's second child. For once, therefore, his motive seems clear, though almost immediately doubts begin to arise. For Jorge Malabia, who is the first to be shown the letters, there is something insane about Goerdel's wish to publish “las que él llama pruebas de una injusticia que a nadie puede doler después de tantos años” (111-112). Díaz Grey, on the other hand, cannot accept the simple explanation of madness: “No debe estar loco, pensé; obstinación, desprecio, una idea fija. El hombre parecía resuelto a cruzar como demente todas las murallas de los cuerdos; a violar, lúcido, todos los obstáculos que construyéramos nosotros, herederos de la locura del bienestar, del invariable ser en la pasividad” (119).

In the interview which follows, Goerdel is a troubling presence who is creating a situation which Díaz Grey finds difficult to interpret: “Nunca pude saber si estaba improvisando el infortunio o si recitaba un discurso sabido de memoria … Busqué diagnósticos, síndromes, seguro de no acertar” (120). Later, however, Díaz Grey believes he has detected a secret motive: “Y después comprendí que no había regresado sólo para luchar contra la calumnia y la injusticia. Quería hablar de sí mismo, quería explicarse, quería cubrir con desinteresado cinismo un tiempo de su pasado, la anécdota de una mujer muerta, años atrás, no por él sino por una niña, voluntad insondable de Brausen” (122). Once again, as in the opening chapter, the emphasis is on Goerdel as storyteller; the verb “cubrir” contains a possible ambiguity: he wishes to “cover” a portion of his past by providing himself with an alibi, but there is also the sense in which one tells a story in order to “cover” a void, to postpone the final lapse into silence and death.²⁴ Yet in the end, Goerdel leaves the letters to speak for themselves, as if the written text were a guarantee of truth. But this is precisely what they fail to do. In the final chapter, Malabia and Díaz Grey scrutinize the letters “con fingidas impaciencias” (132), as if they were consciously parodying the preliminaries to a decisive revelation. Their conclusions are set out in the form of “evidence”, but they offer no clear solution: the letters could be genuine or forged (since they are only photocopies, it is impossible to determine their age) and the signature (a capital H) is unidentifiable. Though both Malabia and Díaz Grey seem prepared to doubt the authenticity of the letters, nothing is certain, and Díaz Grey's comment—“… que los muertos entierren a sus muertos. Y que los hijos de perra se conserven fieles a su destino” (135)—closes the “case” simply by reiterating the opinion of Goerdel expressed on the first page of the novel.

Thus the detective story is emptied of its traditional content by a systematic distortion of its basic constituents. The “crime” is not a crime, the investigation of motives leads nowhere, the possible forgery is never proved and the investigators are indifferent to the attempt to reach a solution. In other words, not only is the pursuit of knowledge finally frustrated, but the whole nature of what there is to know becomes problematical. The parodic element, moreover, not only affects the plot, but also extends to the rôles of the major characters. Where in the realist novel the doctor is traditionally the bearer of knowledge, Díaz Grey gropes his way through a situation he never fully understands and achieves no final illumination. The other confessor-figure, Padre Bergner, is a priest who has no knowledge of souls—“las almas serán siempre desconocidas” (43)—and whose faith in the guidance of Brausen is eventually rewarded with silence. And similarly with the younger characters: Goerdel is a disciple of Bergner, but not in a religious sense, and Malabia's relations with Díaz Grey, though retaining some of the features of mentorship apparent in earlier stories, have reached a state of crisis from which they may or may not emerge intact.

This distortion of conventional rôles, together with the ambiguous allusions to the detective story form, may suggest a mainly negative approach to fiction, designed chiefly to confound the reader's normal expectations. This shock element in itself, clearly, has a positive side insofar as it enforces a closer attention to the text and a more critical attitude towards literary stereotypes. At the same time, there is a much deeper sense in which La muerte y la niña hints at the sources of fiction in general, partly through its treatment of the theme of paternity, and partly through its handling of the whole question of sexual relationships. Here again, as I have already suggested, there are ambiguities: Goerdel is a father, though by the end of the novel the paternity of his second child is in doubt; Bergner is a “father”, though in a spiritual, not a material, sense, and eventually his hold over Goerdel is broken; Díaz Grey has a daughter, but the identity of the mother is never revealed. It is this last relationship in particular which gives depth to the story—literally so, since it refers to a past which is irrecoverable, but whose memory it is necessary to preserve, since it represents the only kind of love which Díaz Grey has experienced, a permanent source of suffering which has become inseparable from his sense of identity.

The first mention of the daughter occurs, significantly, in the context of sexual love:

El amor se había ido de la vida de Díaz Grey y a veces, haciendo solitarios o jugando a solas al ajedrez, pensaba confuso si alguna vez lo había tenido de verdad. A pesar de la hija ausente, sólo conocida por malas fotografías, que ahora, fatalmente, estaba bamboleándose en la dichosa sucia adolescencia y cuyo nacimiento no podía prescindir de un prólogo.

(22)

The use of the word “prólogo” can hardly be casual: her birth must have had a “prologue”—it must have been preceded by some feeling for the mother—but, as far as this particular woman is concerned, no “story” followed. What follows, in effect, is a different kind of story, one made possible by the fact that Díaz Grey is a father. This story, which is essentially that of Díaz Grey's own past and its possible repercussions on the present, could be said to grow out of the absence of the mother—another instance of a narrative which is constructed in order to compensate for a lack. What is even more striking, however, is the sense that it is Díaz Grey himself who has “given birth” to his daughter, rather as, in La vida breve, it is the male—Brausen—who “gives birth” to the writing in response to the sexual mutilation of his wife.²⁵

Díaz Grey's involvement with his daughter is the subject of Chapter IX, the final part of his conversation with Jorge Malabia. The whole of this chapter is a reply to Malabia's question concerning his past: “Díaz Grey se levantó y trajo hasta el escritorio dos juegos de naipes y un sobre hinchado de fotografías y cartas.—Hay un pasado—dijo casi con asombro, como si no lo entendiera del todo” (75). It is clear from this opening that “daughter” and “past” are synonymous, insofar as the past represents for him a kind of emotional truth, “algo que importaba, sin dudas, más que ella o que yo: mi amor a la niña de tres años” (77). Thus the game with the photographs becomes a “truth game” whose justification lies in the suffering it entails: “Y entonces … yo jugaba el gran solitario; miraba las caras atento y calmoso para sufrir mejor, para que el juego valiera la pena …” (78-79). One of the characteristics of the “game” is the elimination of chance: even when they are laid face downwards, the identity of the photographs is clear, since their dates are written on the back. Another is that it can never be lost or won: “un juego que siempre moría sin dejarme saber si había ganado o perdido” (78). Thus the “game” is more an exercise in meditation than a true game, unlike the game of patience which it replaces. The contrast could hardly be clearer: as against the arbitrary systems of the patience cards, the photographs represent an unchangeable ritual, more akin to the repeated playing of the “discos sacros” than to the shifting alternatives of chance.²⁶ Nevertheless, there is a difference: if the photographs never vary, the images they convey remain a constant source of speculation. Those taken in infancy belong to “el otro mundo perdido” (80): it is the three-year-old girl who represents a lost possibility of love; the later ones, on the other hand, though no less “real” as images, are deformations of the original, to compensate for which Díaz Grey constructs a “faceless woman”, a blank which his imagination can feed on without fear of contradiction. It is this last desperate attempt to deny “reality” which relates Díaz Grey's action to the process of fictional creation, to the notion, already apparent in much of Onetti's work, that fiction can only arise as the result of a deliberate break with “reality”, or, alternatively, that facts matter only to the extent that they provide material for conjecture.

Díaz Grey's own explanation ends in ambiguity:

Y alguna noche que no será más triste que las otras, quemaré todas las fotos cuya edad pasa los tres años. Si me decidí a pensarla mujer sin cara no fue porque ella se estuviera convirtiendo en una mujer distinta, año tras año, un remiso correo tras el otro. Lo hice porque no tuve fuerzas para tolerar que ella fuese una persona.

(80)

On the face of it, this might seem to mean that he cannot bear to think of his daughter as a separate individual with a life of her own. But there may well be an echo of something which has been said of him earlier in the novel: “Las mujeres no le importaban de verdad: eran personas” (23)—in other words, they do not interest him as women, they are just “people”. On this reading, therefore, he is not prepared to accept that she has become “just another person”. The distinction is important, since the second possibility implies a kind of degradation which is not necessarily present in the first. In Onetti's world, to be “degraded”—not in a moral sense, but simply by being “ordinary”—is to cease to be a subject around whom fictions can accumulate.²⁷ That the Díaz Grey of La muerte y la niña can place women in general in this category is perhaps a function of his marginality, the apparently self-appointed rôle from which he can still be shaken by particular circumstances. His composure, certainly, can still be troubled by the presence of an enigma, and the greatest enigma of all concerns his sense of the “otro mundo perdido” symbolized by his three-year-old daughter. It is this sense of “otherness”, whether embodied in space or time, which indicates most forcibly the gap between common reality and the unfamiliar, the world of “difference” in which all true fictions are rooted.

Within this world, women occupy a privileged position, both as agents and sufferers. In La muerte y la niña, the theme is first suggested at the end of the opening conversation between Goerdel and Díaz Grey. It is possible, says Goerdel, that his wife may have discussed her situation with other people: “Pero no es imposible que ella, tan desesperada como yo, y además mujer, haya hablado con amigas o parientes. Las mujeres, es distinto. Creen, como los enfermos crónicos, usted lo sabe mejor que yo, que si divulgan sus problemas van obteniendo una ayuda, o por lo menos un apoyo, a cambio de cada confidencia” (17). This notion that women inhabit a different world is reinforced in Chapter II, where Díaz Grey reflects on the lover's momentary awareness of the other's mortality: “Aquel momento verdadero en que uno de los amantes, casi nunca la mujer porque se Sabe y es cierto, immortal, celosamente repetida desde el principio y hacia el infinito” (24). Woman as representative of the irrational, the cyclical and the continuous: these are familiar themes, in literature as elsewhere. Yet in La muerte y la niña, as in other stories by Onetti (“La cara de la desgracia”, Para una tumba sin nombre), the narrative hinges on the death of a woman, the event without which this particular story could not exist. In terms of Onetti's fictional strategy, this suggests two things: that women represent a world of “difference” in relation to which a male character is able to assume his rôle as narrator, and that, in a profoundly unrealistic sense, women die in his fictions because they are unable to tell stories themselves.

The first proposition is easier to grasp than the second, though the two are ultimately inseparable. In its most extreme form, its field of operation is the “mundo loco” of Queca, the prostitute of La vida breve, who initiates Brausen (in his assumed character as Arce) into a world which she herself possesses but cannot articulate. Thus the fulfilment of Brausen's potentialities as narrator depends on his excursion into a world of prostitution and madness from which he eventually (unlike Queca) emerges with a fully created fiction. Queca, on the other hand, dies violently, and her death initiates the final flight which forms the climax of the novel. In La muerte y la niña, the one character who is genuinely insane (though her “madness” is of a different order from Queca's) is Angélica Inés Petrus, now mysteriously married to Díaz Grey. In spite of obvious differences, there are certain parallels which suggest that a similar pattern is being worked out. In one of his few references to Angélica Inés, Díaz Grey remarks on the nature of her insanity: “Ella, todos lo dicen, no sabe nada de nada. Pero entiende, o se entiende” (70). In other words, in her madness, like Queca, she has imaginative, though not rational, understanding—the quality through which others (in this instance Díaz Grey) may be able to create “literature”.

This impression is confirmed by a later reference to her dreams:

Mi manera de ayudarla era múltiple. [The narrator is Díaz Grey.] A veces le decía entusiasta que jamás vio el mundo puta semejante; otras, me mostraba entristecido, no demasiado, por mostrarse lujuriosa, perdida en la impudicia. Acaso nunca llegara a entenderme. Pero siempre se aplastaba los huesos de los brazos contra las costillas, para reír o para llorar. Siempre terminaba feliz, resbalando hasta alguno de sus misteriosos sueños enredados que alguna vez recordaba, o volvía a soñarlo mientras me sujetaba temblando para que yo la escuchara.

(131-132)²⁸

The parallel here is with the anonymous voices (the mysterious “ellos”) which Queca hears in her room, and which, for Brausen, are the embodiment of the private world which she herself is incapable of articulating. Angélica Inés does not die—though it is easy to think of her as condemned to a living death—and her initiatory effect on Díaz Grey is less certain. Though in a sense she is the “creator” of her own dreams, she can never be a “narrator”; she tells her dreams to Díaz Grey, but they are never written down and consequently do not enter into the story. Nevertheless, she provides a dimension which extends Díaz Grey's imagination and which, like his feelings for his daughter, creates a rift in his persona through which the possibilities of fiction may enter.

The one real death in the story is that of Helga Goerdel, who dies, presumably, early in her married life, and whose marital relations are barely sketched in. As Josefina Ludmer has observed, the absence of the type of married woman who lives at the centre of a family is a constant feature (and a possible limitation) of Onetti's fiction.²⁹ Yet, if one thinks in terms of fictional strategies rather than of “real life”, the reason for such a limitation becomes clear. As Ludmer herself says: “Los personajes femeninos sólo entran en esta categoría [i.e. that of characters who cannot become narrators]; no escritoras, no narradoras, “otras' por excelencia, son las salidas: dementes, locas, extranjeras, o las no entradas: adolescentes; se niega aquí a la mujer adulta, madre, ‘responsable’”.³⁰ The “differences” of women, in other words, are most marked when they exist at some remove from ordinary social life. It is precisely because they belong to a world which is in some sense alienated that they are able to provide the challenge which the potential narrator must take up. The latter, on the other hand, is by definition a character who is able to move between the worlds of difference and normality and ultimately to find a point of rest between them in the fiction which he is able to create. In La vida breve, this point of rest is the imaginary world of Santa María, though in subsequent narratives the pattern is repeated within the imaginary world itself. The women, in each instance, fulfil their function at a cost: if writing is a kind of “salvation”, as Onetti's characters often assert,³¹ it is a solution from which women are excluded by virtue of their “otherness”. To fail to achieve salvation—to be unable to “tell a story”—is to invite destruction; even to compromise with one's “difference” by entering the world of domesticity does not basically alter the situation since for women, at least in Onetti's scheme of things, there is no corresponding process of initiation from which the conditions of fiction could emerge. Thus Helga's virtual suicide takes place, in a more than usually literal sense, for the sake of the fiction: not only in order to advance the plot, as might be the case in a realist novel, but in order to demonstrate what, for the author, is a truth about the nature of fiction itself.

Many readers must have been troubled by the way in which Helga's second child is referred to in the text both as “un niño” and “una niña”.³² In Jorge Malabia's account of her death immediately after the event, the two sexes are juxtaposed quite naturally: “La mató—gritó Jorge—. La mató a medianoche con un varón. Ella había pensado siempre en una hembrita” (59). In the last two chapters of the novel, however, the references fluctuate: (Goerdel) “la concepción de la hija asesina” (121); (Díaz Grey) “una mujer muerta por una niña” (122); (Goerdel) “Sólo quiero probar que el niño no pudo ser mío” (127) (italics mine). And this fluctuation is carried over into the scrutiny of the letter in the final chapter: “se insistía sobre el nacimiento de un niño” (132) (the letters, if genuine, must precede the birth); and “la gestación y nacimiento de la niña (133) (at this point it is Díaz Grey who is explaining) (italics mine). If one bears in mind the fact that Helga was expecting a daughter, one simple explanation of the apparent inconsistency suggests itself: each time the word “niña” is used, there is a reference, direct or indirect, to the mother (“concepción”; “una mujer muerta por …”; “gestación”), so that “niña” could stand for “the child as the mother thought of it”. However, such an explanation, though possible, seems to have little to do with the pattern of the story as a whole, to which the title itself forms an important clue.

La muerte y la niña (“Death and the maiden”) translates the title of the well-known song by Schubert. The musical allusion in itself may suggest the “discos sacros” of Díaz Grey, possibly the only character in the novel for whom the title would have this connotation. What is clear is that the word “niña” (as in the song) is associated with death—here, the death of the mother, not of the child. (This, of course, is the association which would work for Helga Goerdel, who knew that she would die in childbirth and was expecting a girl.) What is more, it places the child in a pattern which includes Díaz Grey's daughter and the Insauberry girl who is the motive behind Goerdel's first return.

The fact that Díaz Grey has a daughter, not a son, links him in yet another way to the “different” world of women; despite her “facelessness”, she appears to belong, like the young violinist with whom Díaz Grey escapes at the end of La vida breve, to the class of virginal adolescents through whom “salvation” may be achieved. The presence of the Insauberry girl is more mysterious. In Goerdel's dream, the dead Helga first draws his attention to the twelve-year-old girl (“la niña de los Insauberry”) as if she were a substitute for the daughter whom she never had: “… la empujaba apenas [it is Bergner speaking], para que se adelantara y fuese inconfundible. Diría que en el sueño, reiterado, crónico, la actitud de la difunta no era la de orden u oferta. Simplemente, mostraba a la niña, quería que el soñador no la olvidara” (99-100). It is only in Bergner's later version of the dream that she offers the girl as a future bride: “Tantos días, noches, de súplica y ruego, tantos sudorosos amaneceres con la difunta empujando la niña, quebrando el silencio al final para ordenar. Siempre vestida de blanco” (106). Bergner persists in this view in the face of Díaz Grey's scepticism: it is the latter who sees the girl in the dream as a daughter to be adopted by Goerdel, whose children are all male, and it is Bergner's anger at what he takes to be a wilful misinterpretation which leads to the final rift between the two men. The scene has other consequences, both for Bergner's relations with Goerdel and ultimately with Brausen, whose “divine” guidance merely brings the Insauberry story to an abrupt and unexplained end. What matters in the present context, however, is that María Cristina Insauberry appears, ambiguously, as a child-bride: both the daughter whom Helga never had and a new version of herself, the woman who was taken by death. And the fact that, in the dream, Helga is dressed in white suggests that she has reassumed a virginal quality—perhaps even that she herself has come to resemble the girl in the song.

The pattern all this creates is a curiously shifting one, as if the word “niña”, first established in the title, continued to reverberate outwards through several important areas of the text, without ever presenting a clear-cut meaning. Moreover, there is a sense in which the shifting quality is located in the language itself. On this view, the word-pair “niño”/“niña” would be an example of what Stephen Heath calls “metaplasm”, defined as “change or transmutation in a word by adding, transposing or introducing a syllable or a letter”.³³ Heath uses the term to describe the way in which a text like Robbe-Grillet's Dans le labyrinthe structures itself by means of a constant process of verbal repetition and variation, so that “action”, in the normal sense of the word, becomes “the action of the narrative taking possession of itself”. The case of “niño”/“niña” is simpler, though its effect could be described in similar terms. Just as the system of inflection of the language concerned makes it possible for “niño” to generate “niña” and other members of the paradigm, so at the level of plot, the same process of modification can be made to create a series of ambiguous relationships whose interplay, and the demands which this makes on the reader's attention, form the true “subject” of the book.

By now it should be clear that La muerte y la niña is not so much a novel in the conventional sense as a work in which various traditional ingredients of fiction are reconstituted in such a way that the reader is at a loss to extract from it a separate, describable “meaning”. Since the story is constructed with the sort of material which is familiar from other kinds of fiction, certain expectations are created for the reader; yet if he attempts to construe the story according to these expectations—to fill in the deliberate hiatuses, to attempt to reconcile the conflicting details, to assume that every effect has its appropriate cause—he will be mentally writing a quite different novel. Above all, perhaps, he will be assuming a relation to an external reality which the author sets out carefully to destroy. As John Sturrock reminds us in his study of Borges, “the process of fiction (is to) substitute language for the world”.³⁴La muerte y la niña begins with an intrusion into the everyday life of the protagonist—a break with his “normal reality”—and it ends with a return to that reality: “Era ya de mañana quando dejamos de jugar al ajedrez. Me levanté para entreabrir las ventanas y silenciar el andante de Bach” (135).³⁵ In between, a story has been told which offers its own kind of reality, to experience which is ultimately to submit to the permutations of language itself. These permutations have nothing to do with “the truth”: all stories, even those based on recollections of “fact”, have a tendency to become “tall stories”, attempts to cover gaps in what is known to be true. Words themselves may sometimes tell the truth, but more often than not, as Goerdel recognizes, they are used to deceive: “Como usted escucha, doctor, estoy usando el mismo lenguaje que le sirve a usted para mentir. Sin ofensa. Todos mentimos, aún antes de las palabras. Por ejemplo, yo le digo mentiras y usted miente escuchándolas” (124).

At an early stage in the novel, Goerdel and Bergner are accomplices in lying: they consciously take part in a game of mutual deception whose rules they scrupulously observe. This collocation of lying and gameplaying can hardly be fortuitous: all through La muerte y la niña there are implied parallels between games and the making of fictions. Both, obviously, take place at one or more removes from reality; both depend on a combination of chance and choice, and both are attempts to keep time at bay. In the two examples I have already mentioned—the game of mutual deception between Goerdel and Bergner and Díaz Grey's game with the photographs—the analogy is clear: in the first, the protagonists tell stories to one another (both sins and forgiveness are “inventions”) to conceal the separate egotisms which would destroy their relationship; in the second, Díaz Grey attempts to shut out a reality which may be even more painful, because less ordered, than the fiction he has constructed.

The most revealing example of all, however, is what might be termed the “game with history”, since this gives a clue as to how the novel itself should be read. In Chapter XI, just before his final encounter with Goerdel, Díaz Grey reflects on his poor performance in History as a student:

La falla estaba en que no era capaz de relacionar las fechas de batallas militares o políticas con mi visión de la historia que me enseñaban o intentaba comprender. Por ejemplo: desde Julio César a Bolívar todo era para mí una novela evidente pero irrealizable. Innumerables datos, a veces contradictorios, se me ofrecían en los libros y en las clases. Pero yo era tan libre y tan torpe como para construir con todo eso una fábula, nunca creída del todo, en la que héroes y sucesos se unían y separaban caprichosamente. Napoleón en los Andes, San Martín en Arcola.

Siempre sentía la reiteración: los héroes y los pueblos subían y bajaban. Y el resultado que me era posible afirmar, lo sé ahora, era un ciento o miles de Santas Marías, enormes en gente y territorio, o pequeñas y provinciales como ésta que me había tocado en suerte. Los dominadores dominaban, los dominados obedecían. Siempre a la espera de la próxima revolución, que siempre sería la última.

(117-118)

Díaz Grey's account of history, clearly, is based on fictional terms: he cannot relate dates (“facts”/“reality”) to his vision of history as a novel. (Consequently, if history is a fiction, then facts must lose their “real” status before they can enter into the fiction.)³⁶ Thus he constructs a “fable” in which events and people combine or separate by a kind of poetic logic which overrides the normal logic of cause and effect. The “fable”, moreover, is repetitive (it does not progress); it is also representative of fiction as a whole, since the imaginary world on which it is based—Santa María—is one microcosm among many. Finally, therefore, if people live in hope of an ultimate revolution which would break the pattern of repetition, this, by contrast, would constitute a linear development—the kind of “progress” of which Díaz Grey is sceptical, both in real life and, by implication, in fiction.

Thus, in Díaz Grey's view of history, the barrier between reality and fiction would be irremediably blurred. It would not collapse entirely—fiction is always to some extent a break with external reality, though it makes use of that reality for its own purposes—but its ambiguous nature would ensure the continual production of multiple meanings. In fiction itself, these meanings are an intrinsic part of the activity of reading the text: they are not imported from outside, however much they may appear to feed on external reality; nor can they be gathered into a single, detachable, “meaning”. To read La muerte y la niña with the kind of attention it demands is to recognize that, instead of “reading the book for the story”, we are pursuing the traces of several, sometimes contradictory, stories, in order to arrive at the sense of a text whose justification, quite simply, is its own existence. Or as Gabriel Josipovici has put it, in a not dissimilar context: “As with a Cubist painting, the reader is forced to move again and again over the material that is presented, trying to force it into a single vision, a final truth, but is always foiled by the resistant artefact”.³⁷ To compel us to resist the imposition of a false unity, by reminding us that the products of language themselves are man-made, not natural, arrangements is perhaps the most urgent task of contemporary fiction-writers, and it is one to which Onetti continues to make his own distinctive and splendidly intelligent contribution.

Notes

1. Quoted in Fernando Aínsa, Las trampas de Onetti, Montevideo, 1970, p. 36.

2. Cf. Jean Ricardou, Le Nouveau Roman, Paris, 1973, p. 121: “Ce qui, dans un texte, se prétend réel, n'est jamais qu'une fiction au même titre que ce qui se prétend fiction”.

3. All page references are to the first edition (Editorial Corregidor, Buenos Aires, 1973).

4. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, Princeton, 1972, p. 195.

5. This situation is modified on p. 15, when Goerdel assumes that Díaz Grey will write him a prescription, but the latter refuses. The comparison here is with the confessor, who does not write prescriptions either.

6. Cf. “Camina desganado contando al mundo su futuro crimen, asosinato, homicidio, uxoricidio (alguna de esas palabras cuando el Destacamento de Policía se acuerda de mí, cuando necesita al médico forense) …” (p. 10) and “Y así nos va convirtiendo a todos en sus testigos de cargo y descargo …” (p. 10).

7. There is a parallel here with Helga Goerdel's equally mysterious visits to Díaz Grey at the beginning of Chapter II (pp. 21-22).

8. There is an echo of “cálculo” a moment later, when we are told that Goerdel “parecíó contar en silencio y quietud mientras Díaz Grey hablaba” (p. 14, my italics). The ambiguity here (Goerdel is “calculating”, but may also be “continuing his story” in silence) is repeated later (p. 95), when Goerdel is referred to as a “contador”—both a “keeper of accounts” and a “teller of stories”.

9. Josefina Ludmer, Onetti: los procesos de construcción del relato, Buenos Aires, 1977, p. 124. This is the most serious study of Onetti's fictional methods so far to have appeared, and one to which I am greatly indebted.

10. Ludmer, op. cit., p. 184.

11. Díaz Grey actually originates as a projection of Brausen himself. Cf. “Entraría sonriente en el consultorio de Díaz Grey-Brausen …”, Obras completas, Mexico City, 1970, p. 458.

12. In Onetti, for reasons I shall explain later, women as a whole neither write nor narrate. Informants are those who, in Josefina Ludmer's words: “extraen los datos de un modo directo (de primera mano); son intermediarios entre los hechos de ‘la realidad’ y el narrador, que los organiza” (op. cit., p. 168). She also points out (p. 168, n. 20) that Onetti's informants tend to be degraded by their contact with “reality”. Jorge Malabia, as he appears in La muerte y la niña, is a case in point: once a writer (of poems), he has now abandoned his literary ambitions and has succumbed to the crude patriotism which Díaz Grey finds so repugnant.

13. In La vida breve, he is described as “un borroso médico de cuarenta años” (Obras completas, p. 442); in El astillero, he is nearly fifty, still unmarried and apparently childless; in La muerte y la niña, he is simply “(un) anciano” (p. 54) and now has a teenage daughter.

14. In La vida breve, Brausen states quite bluntly: “Pero no interesaba el pasado del médico, su vida anterior a su llegada, el año anterior, a la ciudad de provincias, Santa María” (Obras completas, p. 443).

15. In El astillero, Díaz Grey warns Larsen that it would be dangerous for Angélica Inés to have children: “Es duro de decir, pero sería mejor que no tengan hijos” (Obras completas, p. 1120).

16. Cf. Ludmer, op. cit., p. 174, n. 27: “… los narradores de Onetti se encuentran siempre en una situación análoga a lo narrado: en Los adioses, el tuberculoso narra al tuberculoso (sobre el personaje tuberculoso), en La muerte y la niña son todos ‘padres’ …”.

17. Though Bergner “dies” in an earlier novel and is alive in this one, there is some doubt as to whether he is dying or not, as Malabia suggests in Chapter X: “Prometió verlo a usted, no quiere saber nada con mi tío Bergner, moribundo o sano” (p. 122). At various points in La muerte y la niña, it is as if a special tempo of ageing were imposed on the fictional characters, who, nevertheless, are not exempted from death. Cf. the reflection which opens Chapter IX: “No nos estaba permitido envejecer, deformarnos apenas, pero nadie impedía que los años pasaran, señalados con festejos, con el escándalo alegre y repugnante de la inmensa mayoría que ignoraban—a veces podía creerse en un olvido—que los burócratas de Brausen los habían hecho nacer con una condena de muerte unida a cada partida de nacimiento” (p. 91).

18. The same combination of qualities occurs in the updated version of the Cain-Abel story which ends Chapter V, where Brausen acts with the brutal cynicism of a “caudillo político” (p. 60), but finally lapses into indifference, “ahora insignificante, nunca amistoso pero ya lánguido, tal vez, también él, soñoliento” (p. 62).

19. At the beginning of the novel, Díaz Grey speaks of praying to “Padre Brausen que estás en la Nada”. Thus, Brausen is a god whose realm is “la Nada”—the “nothingness”, one might claim, from which fiction itself is created.

20. One of the most curious references to Brausen occurs in Chapter XI: “… el crepúsculo que empezaba a devorar la luz de todos los días que nos repetía Brausen, Juan María, casi Junta para los ateos” (p. 120). The implication seems to be that, for those who do not believe in the “divinity” of Brausen, the latter would be something like the equivalent of Junta (the Larsen of Juntacadáveres and El astillero), that is to say, a kind of “failed artist”.

21. Cf. Ludmer, op. cit., p. 47, n. 4: “Las narraciones de Onetti se producen en el interior de la concepción clásica del relato, aunque con multitud de operaciones de distanciamiento de este esquema …”.

22. Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: a Study in the Practice of Writing, London, 1972, p. 34.

23. John Sturrock, Paper Tigers: the Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, Oxford, 1977, p. 127.

24. Cf. Ludmer, op. cit., on Para una tumba sin nombre: “A partir de allí [i.e. the death of Rita], Para una tumba cuenta indefinidamente cuentos; reitera cuentos (mentiras, versiones) que intentan conjurar el vacío original … Si Rita ‘no cuenta más el cuento’, si la muerte consiste en ‘no contar’, hay que desencadenar—por inversión, por negación—un mecanismo que, como el de Scherezada, postergue la condena” (pp. 161-162).

25. On the possible relation between the physical amputation which Gertrudis undergoes at the beginning of La vida breve and the “compensatory” origins of the narrative, see the opening section of Josefina Ludmer's study “Homenaje a ‘La vida breve’”, op. cit., pp. 18-36.

26. On the significance of the game of patience and the “discos sacros”, see David Musselwhite, “El astillero en marcha”, Nuevos aires IV, no. 11 (1973), 3-15 (p. 8). For Musselwhite, the “discos sacros” represent “un orden familiar, como el correr de las estaciones y de la vida”, in contrast to the “barajar de las alternativas, los órdenes y sistemas provisionales que pueden compararse con las ‘recordaciones y deformaciones’ de la estructura narrativa”. It is perhaps significant that, in La muerte y la niña, the game with the photographs replaces the game of patience “con una regularidad cíclica” (p. 77).

27. At the beginning of the last chapter, Díaz Grey tells how his daughter has finally returned to Santa María, and that he has introduced her to Jorge Malabia: “traté de reunirlos sin un propósito determinado, sólo por la curiosidad, casi científica, de verlos, en lo que me fuera posible, reaccionar” (p. 131). And he adds: “Acaso ésta no sea otra historia”. This final sentence could mean several things: (i) perhaps it is a story Díaz Grey will never tell; (ii) perhaps it belongs to the same story (but in what sense?); (iii) perhaps there will be no “story”. If the latter, it may be because the daughter has become “una persona” in the sense I have just described.

28. There is a curious echo here of the connection between madness and prostitution in the reference to Angélica Inés's “shamelessness” and in the (admittedly metaphorical) use of the word “puta”.

29. It is noticeable that, in La vida breve, Brausen values the sterility of Queca, whereas he is repelled by Raquel, his sister-in-law, when he finds that she is pregnant.

30. Ludmer, op. cit., p. 121.

31. At one point in La vida breve, Brausen reflects: “Cualquier cosa repentina y simple a suceder y yo podría salvarme escribiendo”, Obras completas, p. 456.

32. The only critic I have come across who refers to this discrepancy is José de la Colina, who speaks of “algún descuido (¿cuidado descuido?), como el de ese niño recién nacido que páginas después es niña” (Plural IV, no. 1, 1974, 73). I have assumed that the effect is deliberate.

33. Heath, op. cit., p. 147. The phrase quoted in the next sentence occurs on p. 149.

34. Sturrock, op. cit., p. 26.

35. As Josefina Ludmer has observed, the window symbolism is particularly evident in Chapter IV, which describes the crucial discussion between Bergner and Goerdel: “El punto más antinaturalista (menos referencial) de la escritura de Onetti se encuentra en La muerte y la niña: ‘Bergner fue separándose de la opacidad gris de la ventana’ (p. 41); ‘Después miró la ventana ciega por la lluvia’ (p. 45); ‘mirando la ventana negra’ (p. 49). Sólo se ve la ventana; no hay nada ‘más allá’; el vidrio—el lenguaje y la escritura—es ya la única realidad contra ‘la realidad’” (op. cit., p. 160).

36. Cf. the passage on the unimportance of facts which can be checked (p. 32), quoted above, p. 150.

37. Gabriel Josipovici, “Modern literature and the experience of time”, in Josipovici (ed.) The Modern English Novel, the Reader, the Writer and the Work, London, 1976, 252-272 (p. 264).