[In the following essay, Millington explores the meaning of ambivalent identities in Cuando entonces.]

… Andá al botiquín y prepará medicinas.

Serna asintió con cabezadas obedientes y se alejó hacia lo que llamaban botiquín. Tuve una pequeña emoción porque se trataba de otro escritorio, recostado contra la tela amarilla que ocultaba la pared, alejado de la confusión de muebles que llenaban la habitación en la que, luego de codearse con mil peripecias, fracasos y dudosos triunfos, reinaba, acaso para su siempre, madame Safó.

El botiquín escritorio me puso momentáneamente nostálgico y suprimió años. Porque, nunca poseído, había sido mío en un pasado cada día más remoto. Lo codicié con apenas un poco menos de la urgencia con que se deseaba a una mujer. La primera vez lo vi en casa de un amigo, luego en un negocio de subastas; yo tenía veinte años y muy poco dinero.

Aunque estropeado por repetidas manos de barniz, aquel era mi escritorio.

Tenía su cortina corrediza y curvada y numerosos cajoncitos, semiocultos ahora por dos filas de botellas y una línea adelantada de vasos de tamaños diversos.

Aquella primera vez que vi un escritorio hermano gemelo de éste me sentí invitado, a la vez que percibía una cierta provocación. Y me imaginé, muy vagamente, sentado frente al mueble y escribiendo en un atardecer o en una mañana lluviosa, con el chorro luminoso de la lámpara que me aislaba en el cuarto y caía rígido sobre mis páginas. Yo solo en el edificio; el piso empolvado.

Nunca supe qué estaba escribiendo; posiblemente la novela total, capaz de sustituir a todas las obras maestras que se habían escrito en el mundo y que yo admiraba. Cada cajoncito tenía un letrero de papel porque yo era un novelista esclavo del orden y la disciplina. Un cajoncito estaba reservado para coleccionar adjetivos poco gastados. También disponía de refugios provisorios para adverbios, sustantivos y fetos de frases tan nuevas como brillantes que esperaban, pacientes o nerviosas, ser elegidas para triunfar en la página blanca.¹

I begin with this long quote in the hope that it will disconcert as much here as it does in Onetti's novella. For a piece of furniture that is not mentioned again, this amount of attention is odd, and it is that very oddness that I want to consider. The “escritorio/botiquín” then is to act as the point of entry for my analysis: it is a way of opening up the novella, even if only a few of its secret drawers.

By unravelling some of the detail in this passage I will pinpoint the purpose of its weight and extension. The first striking thing about the “escritorio/botiquín” is its ambivalent identity. It is not just a desk, and it is not just a medicine cabinet. In fact, it is not apparently used as either, since it seems to be a drinks cabinet. The reference to it as a “botiquín” is itself ambivalent, since madame Safó is obviously making a sly joke about alcohol as medicine. So its identity is multiple, and this is compounded when the narrator, Lamas, calls it “his”, though it seems that he has never owned it: it is his and yet it is not his. And subsequently, it is unclear whether this is precisely the piece of furniture that he once knew or whether it is another. He begins by seeming to make a precise recognition, but then it becomes a twin of the desk in the past. It is the same desk and it is not. In all this, the “escritorio/botiquín's” identity slips in and out of focus.

A second element that seems significant in the passage is the role played by time. On first recognition, it is emotion that underpins Lamas' reaction: he is nostalgic and the past suddenly returns to him. And the memory that he has of the desk is centred on emotion: he felt a desire for the desk almost as intense as the desire he might have felt for a woman, though interestingly he could never possess the desk. Here is a nexus of past time and unfulfilled desire. But the past is not exactly reproduced, because, although the memory is important, the desk has been damaged by time which has added coats of varnish. The real desk and desire seem to be only a memory, even if one that can be reactivated vividly.

Thirdly, the “escritorio/botiquín” is mysterious. Its curtain and drawers suggest that things are hidden away inside it, and indeed the drawers are themselves half-hidden by bottles and glasses. Hence, all seems not to be visible on the surface.

Fourthly, the twin functions of the “escritorio/botiquín”—writing and dispensing alcohol—not only gesture in the direction of Onetti's biography, but also create a conjuncture that seems to stimulate the imagination and thence fiction.

Finally, and functionally, the whole passage constitutes a digression in the scene involving Lamas, madame Safó and don Luis, and, in that, seems rather at variance with the imagined, highly controlled writing described by Lamas in the final paragraph.

Now all these features are (not surprisingly) deeply characteristic of Cuando entonces as a whole. The novella is full of ambivalent identities; it revolves around the nostalgia for past desire (the desire for desire) which constitutes the impetus underlying the whole novella; it is mysterious in many aspects—not just details but vital information is delayed or elided, slyly omitted or fragmented; it is full of story telling (not untypically of Onetti), much of which takes place under the influence of alcohol in bars; and it is replete with digressions and apparently tangential material so that its narrative thread is somewhat tenuous. One could argue therefore that, at the level of construction, the “escritorio/botiquín” encapsulates much of what is going on beneath the surface of Cuando entonces.

Perhaps the most striking in this series of compositional features is that of ambivalent identities. It is a feature which is registered at the very start of the first chapter. The novella opens on a borderline, between night and day, and between winter and spring: “Una vez más la historia comenzó, para mí, en el día-noche de Santa Rosa … Volvía Santa Rosa y amenazaba bromeando a Lavanda y Buenos Aires. Treinta de setiembre. Siempre cumple y arrastra la primavera” (p. 15). The storm that accompanies Santa Rosa marks the borderline: it is the moment of an unsettling switch of weather. It is an opening towards the spring and renewal, but it is also a repetition, both in the cycle of the seasons and insofar as it inaugurates another story. So there is established here a certain unfixing and unsteadiness: the story begins neither on one side nor the other of the divide. And this unsteadiness is figured by the storm with its violent and unsettling connotations. Moreover, Santa Rosa herself/itself is also heterogeneous—a date in the calendar, a saint but also a prostitute: “Ahora era en Lavanda y era forzoso esperar la llegada estruendosa de la única puta simpática, que figura, con ofensa, en el santoral de Gregorio XIII” (pp. 15-16). The saint/whore/date is friendly and yet also offensive, and the anonymous narrator goes on to insist on her/its unpredictability—she/it is a tease: “Yo no recordaba haber conocido a una mujer de coquetería comparable” (p. 16). The storm never quite seems to come, and as a teasing whore she is also curiously incorporeal: she is a moment of transition, neither one thing nor the other, a promise or an idea rather than a fulfilment. Santa Rosa sets the scene for what is to follow.

The novella contains a diversity of narrators, although they all use the “yo” form. But the “yo” in the different chapters varies, and temporal shifts undermine any consistency even when the “yo” is apparently the same. In chapter one, the narrator is an anonymous “yo”. In chapter two, the narrating “yo” is Lamas (the novella's central character). In chapter three, the “yo” is Pastor de la Peña.² And in chapter four, the narrating “yo” is again Lamas, but at a time rather later than in chapter two. None of these narrators explicitly alludes either to the narrating or to the material narrated in other chapters: even Lamas in chapter four makes no reference to his previous narration in chapter two.

The diversity (and the discreteness) of the narrators is matched by the diversity of the temporal organisation. The temporal dislocations in the novella are not simple to sort out. In chapter one Lamas is “in exile” in Lavanda and he begins to tell the story of himself, Magda and the “comandante” in Buenos Aires. This triangle has broken up and Lamas now tells his story to the anonymous narrator of the chapter. Chapter two jumps back to the very beginning of the triangle's story, when Lamas is just about to meet the other two for the first time. This is the remotest point in the past to which the novella returns. This chapter ends over a year later, after Lamas has lost sight of Magda and the “comandante” and when he is about to go to Lavanda. Chapter three moves back to narrate the moments just prior to Magda's suicide at the end of her affair with the “comandante”. Chapter three occupies a time therefore before the last section of chapter two (pp. 69-72), when Lamas is on his own in Buenos Aires and before he has gone to Lavanda. Chapter four jumps forward to a moment some time after chapter one when Lamas has returned to Buenos Aires.

None of the chapters is explicitly placed with any precision, certainly not against any scale of exact dates, and even their relative positions are not immediately obvious. This temporal vagueness is reflected in the novella's title, the “entonces” being an imprecise temporal indicator, and, although it does suggest that past time is important, it is merely a locus of nostalgia. Moreover, the jumps between the chapters mean that temporal progress cannot be smooth, and that the story (if it can be called that) lays barely any emphasis on forward progress. That is compounded by the quantity of digressive material and by the absence of any move towards a culminating moment or denouement. In fact, the ending of the novella is only refracted by the use of displacement into events which seem to represent a shadowy repeat of what may already have happened to Magda and the “comandante”. In a sense, therefore, it is less a question in Cuando entonces of a narrative structure than of a loose constellation of moments with an affective relation.

Complementing the diversity of narrators and temporal shifts are the numerous digressions and delays, which tend to fill out the narrative elements and create a general stagnation. In chapter one, the digressions and delays seem to be a function of Lamas' drunkenness. He is full of hints and allusions which he takes no particular trouble to elucidate. Indeed, the purpose of chapter one seems to be to open an affective space: on the analogy with the “escritorio/botiquín”, Lamas opens a few drawers and pulls back the curtain a little, but reveals very little that is concrete.

This teasing technique even includes references to his own delaying tactics: “—Tal vez estos ataques de delación me llegan cuando se produce cierta conjunción de astros” (pp. 22-23); and “—Me escapé de Magda. Traición canalla” (p. 24). In chapter two, the conversation between Lamas and don Luis covers eighteen pages (pp. 51-69). Don Luis clearly has a purpose in summoning Lamas to talk, but it takes over twelve pages before he starts to get to the point: “¿qué sabe usted del comandante?” (p. 64)—hardly a difficult question. And it takes another three pages and the introduction of another character before the strange problems caused by the comandante in the night-club begin to be explained. To cap all this, Lamas actually knows nothing about the “comandante”, and rather than throwing any light on the absent centre of the conversation, he simply speculates provocatively: “—En cuanto a sospechar, sospecho. Drogas, tráfico de armas, espionaje bien pagado” (p. 69). In so doing he only confuses the matter further. At the end of eighteen pages very little information has been forthcoming: many drawers are left half-hidden.

That is precisely the point. Delaying the point is the point. There is no centring or final stability in Cuando entonces. There is no real interest in revealing anything about the “comandante”. The novella is a web of hints and possibilities and of gaps in knowledge. In fact, the novella's digressions seem to work in inverse proportion to the amount of secure knowledge conveyed.

In terms of narrative form, the ending is as tantalising and mysterious as all the digressions and delays. Rather than a culmination of the triangular relations of Lamas, Magda and the “comandante', there is a displacement and hence a lack of termination. All is left open and ambivalent. What happens at the end of chapter four is the reporting of the death of Petrona García on the Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires, and then the arrival on the teleprinter of the report of an aircraft crash which has killed all passengers:

(p. 98)

The relevance of the suicide and the crash to chapters one to three is that they seem to coincide with what may have happened to Magda and the “comandante”. In chapter three, Magda is reported to have committed suicide in her apartment on the Avenida Santa Fe, and she has revealed that the “comandante” has just left her to fly north with the president. At the end of the chapter, Lamas reacts badly to the disappearance of Magda and over a period of months laments her absence, appearing not to know that this is caused by her death. In her narrative in chapter three, Magda appears to describe the end of her affair with the “comandante” as though it had just happened—their two years of love are over (p. 82). The “comandante” is being promoted to a new job that requires that he abandon Magda (p. 84), and he appears to be flying off with the president on the day that Magda speaks (pp. 84-85). Hence there is an immediate stimulus for Magda to take her own life. In chapter four, Lamas has lost Magda, completed his “exile” in Lavanda and returned to Buenos Aires to work on another newspaper. And the routine of working on the newspaper is hinted at (p. 96), to suggest that yet more time has passed. In addition, chapter four ostentatiously underlines the passing of time through the ageing of the peripheral character el Lampiño, who is now married with three children (p. 99), where in chapter two, just before Lamas meets Magda and the “comandante', he is a fresh-faced eighteen year old.

If some time has passed since Magda and the “comandante” disappeared (as Lamas puts it, p. 69), one is left in chapter four with a disconcerting repetition via displacement. It is doubly tantalising since there is room for confusion over names. Magda is only a professional name, and so the death of Petrona García may even hint at the real underlying identity of the character. Also, in the report on the teleprinter, the reference to the president, ‘=, in inverted commas is odd and may suggest that this is not a person but perhaps the name of an aircraft. In which case it is not clear that someone called “el presidente” actually died in the crash, though it would seem probable that an aircraft with this name would be used by a president. Hence, there is considerable ambivalence about the ending of the novella, all based on the fact that the events mentioned in chapter four appear to follow on so neatly from the narrative elements set up in chapters one to three. But the identity of the events which might close the narrative is deeply undecidable. Chapter four may gesture at narrative closure but it is not achieved definitively.

The general principle of instability and ambivalence is continued in the area of character construction. There is a play of names and functions attributed to almost all characters that precludes fixity. It is as if the characters had no solid centre. This is particularly daring in respect of the permutations with characters' names, since, in realist fiction, the name is conventionally the fundamental element holding character to some sort of stability. The ambivalence of characterisation is evident with don Luis, madame Safó and the “comandante”, but also with very minor characters like the barman in the No name, who is variously called Simons, el Sim and Sims. Don Luis is virtually (and paradoxically) characterised via permutation, almost as if he were a name and variations. There are doubts about his name from the very start of his appearance in chapter two where Lamas says: “Ahora se hacía llamar Serna y, a veces, en algún diminuto delirio de grandeza, afirmaba que su nombre verdadero era Luis de la Serna” (p. 51). There exists the strong possibility that neither of these is his real name. But out of this ambivalent beginning multiple variations arise. He is called (not necessarily only once): Serna (p. 56), don Luis (p. 62), Luisito (p. 59), and don Luisito (p. 63). In addition, madame Safó calls him “m'hijo” (p. 65) and “muchacho” (p. 66), and Lamas calls him “barman” (p. 61), “el sirviente” (p. 63), “un semental” (p. 62) and (ironically) “el innombrable” (p. 66), despite the plethora of names provided for him!

Madame Safó is only a little less diverse than don Luis. Initially she is called “la mujer” (p. 57). Then, in the absence of an introduction to Lamas and in view of her apparent similarity to a woman from his youth, she is named madame Safó (p. 58). Having recalled this name for her from his past, Lamas immediately casts doubt on its applicability because of the ravages of time on the woman and the resulting difficulty of identification (pp. 58 and 66). Madame Safó is clearly the professional name of a madame in a brothel in any case, and cannot be taken as her real one. Lamas subsequently runs through various other names for her: “vieja remendada” (p. 63), “la señora” (p. 63), “señora abuela” (p. 65), “anciana” (p. 66), “madame” (p. 66) and “madame señora” (p. 67). As with don Luis, these permutations are part of Lamas' reaction, a defensive aggression in an uncertain situation, but there is no independent information and so both characters take shape in the novel via heterogeneity.

Much the same can be said of the “comandante”, who is identified with his military role throughout. Or rather with his military roles. In chapter one, he is the “capitán” and in the rest of the book “el comandante”. There is no explanation for this switch, indeed there is no allusion to the switch at all. The switch is consolidated by madame Safó's casting doubt on the authenticity of his military position altogether. She says that: “se hace o se hacía llamar comandante” (p. 63), and she suggests that he might have hired his uniform. With no further corroboration, she casts him as simply play-acting.

It is not just the name of the “capitán/comandante” and his military standing that are in doubt. There is a racial complexity in him that is never quite clarified. His dark complexion creates doubts in Lamas' mind, but he decides that he is neither “negro ni mestizo. Morocho” (p. 18). But later he does refer to him as “negro” only then to deny it and claim that he has some Indian blood (p. 21). Later he even calls him “el cobrizo” (p. 24) and “el príncipe indio” (p. 25). These racial oscillations are compounded by the “capitán/comandante's” physical dualism, for Magda reveals that, although he has a dark face, his body is very white: “Luego vine a saber que estaba curtida por el sol permanente de su país y que su cuerpo era blanco, anémico como el de una muchacha inglesa” (p. 22). Here the racial complexity grows to include yet another point of reference—Englishness. And significantly, it is not just a difference of colour but a pronounced polarisation between the body and the face, which seems to preclude any stabilisation around a simple centre. Who or what this character is remains entirely open and oscillating.

Interestingly, the two main characters, Lamas and Magda, are a little less heterogeneous than these three, and moreover they are constructed around an apparently stabilising device. With Magda there is some play on names. From the start it is not clear that Magda is her real name (p. 18), although no other is known. But there are permutations on it: María de Magdala (p. 18) and María Magdalena (p. 20). There are other variations used to describe her: when she is in the El dorado she is a woman, but in the No name she is a “muchacha” (p. 27), a change underlined by the different clothes that she wears in both places (p. 26). And it is pointed out that she has other forms and styles in her repertoire, giving the impression that she is potentially a series of images. This impression is underlined by Pastor de la Peña in chapter three. In his one and only meeting with her he cannot decide whether Magda is refined or common. At first he thinks that she is common but well-dressed (p. 78), but later he is less sure, thinking that she may be the black sheep from a good family (p. 83). This instability in her identity is compounded by the doubts over her suicide, when it may be that the ending of chapter four reveals a truth about her—that she is called Petrona García—, but without giving really solid grounds for this. Through all this ambivalence, there is, however, an important element of continuity: her love for the “comandante” and the constancy of her desire for him.

Lamas, as the extradiegetic narrator in chapters two and four and as the intradiegetic narrator for parts of chapter one, is a less mobile character than any of the others (though he complements them by being the one to move physically throughout to enable the various conjunctures of character). His lesser ambivalence may be explained because he presents himself and only in chapter one is he the focus of another's attention. He is constructed around two main axes: masculinity and love/desire.

Lamas' initial characterisation in chapter one links him to a pronounced masculinity. He is associated with heavy drinking, horses, gambling and prostitutes (pp. 20, 23, 28). Moreover he takes a patriarchal view of Magda and other women. When the “comandante” is absent, he wants to assume responsibility for paying for Magda (p. 25) and so continue her position as a kept woman.³ When Magda tells Lamas that while having sex with him she made him a cuckold by thinking of the absent “comandante”, Lamas' wounded masculinity prompts him to murderous feelings (p. 49). These features, unlike so many with the other characters, are consistently used and relatively conventional. The other stable aspect of Lamas' character is his love for Magda, though it would be more appropriate to call it desire since it is unfulfilled and constantly frustrated (rather like his past desire to possess the desk [p. 60]). Even after their very brief intimacy (which only lasts while the “comandante” is away and because Magda confesses that she cannot do without a man [pp. 46-47]), Lamas is thoroughly preoccupied by her, walking past her flat, hoping for a renewal of their relations and for her return to the No name (pp. 71-72).

Love and desire are the elements which link the fragments of the novella together. But in each case (Lamas' and Magda's), it is a frustrated emotion. For Lamas, there is no sign of reciprocity from Magda: it is not that she dislikes him, simply that she has no real desire for him. There is therefore an asymmetry in the relations of the central triangle: Lamas loves Magda who loves the “comandante”. This lack of relation of desire between Lamas and Magda leads to the creation of some tension, and to the absence of any consummation. It is a source of constant destabilising.

It is important to append a supplement here, for Lamas loves Magda who loves the “comandante” who loves Magda. There is reciprocity in the latter relation—at least Magda insists on it, though the reader is never close enough to the “comandante” for independent corroboration. However, even this reciprocity of emotion is disrupted since the “comandante's” official responsibilities break the relation and the diplomatic police force him to abandon Magda and return to the respectability of living with his wife (p. 84). (It might be worth pointing out that Magda's dreams of fulfilment with the “comandante” also take the form of respectable domestic banality [p. 82].) So even here, if love is a stable point of reference formally in Cuando entonces, it is still not ultimately a stabilising element at the level of content. Even in the case of Magda, love is superseded by desire and frustration for a lost object, and that uncertainty leads to her suicide.

Viewing the novella through a Lacanian perspective, the implied narrative seems to be the turning of love into desire. The Imaginary realm (where there is an ideal(ised) harmony between mother and child, between self and other, where love coincides with its object) is disrupted: for Lamas, it is disrupted by the absence of reciprocity in Magda; for Magda, it is disrupted by the police (representative of the Law, the Symbolic order). The result is the state of desire in which Lamas and Magda cannot achieve satisfaction—the subject is left in isolation in the Symbolic (able only to find Imaginary fulfilment). And in that respect, it is significant that Lamas is a journalist and so defined by words, since the Symbolic is identified with the Law of language. As so often in Onetti, dealing with and living on in the Symbolic is the fundamental problem, and Magda for one cannot do it. To be in the Symbolic is to be set adrift in the unstable world of signifiers, and that is precisely what one finds in Cuando entonces: the heterogeneity and ambivalence throughout the novella enact the conditions of the shift from love to desire. Its permutating signifiers are concordant with the signified shift from Imaginary to Symbolic.⁴

I want to end by invoking another piece of furniture only implied in the novella—the roulette table. Roulette is introduced as another object of Lamas' desire: he wants to go to Lavanda to have easy access to roulette, although his attraction to Lavanda is also linked to the desire to avoid the memory of Magda in Buenos Aires. Hence, roulette is linked to both positive and negative desire. But the roulette table is of interest because it suggests an attraction to chance. Roulette, like so much in Cuando entonces, is almost synonymous with openness and unpredictability. It is beyond the control of human agency, rather like the motif of desire. In the roulette table one finds a sort of metaphor of the two central relationships in the novella, both of which fail with no reason really being advanced to explain them—Cuando entonces does not develop a discourse of explanations and rationalisation. In a sense therefore, the roulette table (in its representation of the elements of unpredictability and of human dependence) functions in the novella rather like the “escritorio/botiquín” by hinting at the underlying parameters of the characters” actions, even though neither is particularly foregrounded to do so. By contrast, it is not chance that leads me to finish with this piece of furniture—it cannot be so after the decision to start with the “escritorio/botiquín”. Just as that was a means of entry into the novella, so the roulette table is a means of exit via symmetry, a symmetry that need not imply completion.

Notes

1. Juan Carlos Onetti, Cuando Entonces (Madrid: Mondadori, 1987), pp. 59-60. All subsequent page references will be included in the text.

2. Pastor de la Peña's narration also includes a striking switch of mode. For most of the chapter he gives a direct oral account of events to a specified intradiegetic narratee, “el comisario”, but on pp. 86-87 he changes into conventional narration with a description of “el comisario” as if he were addressing an implied third party. On p. 87 he reverts to direct oral address of “el comisario”.

3. One of the masculist cliches of Cuando entonces is that Magda lacks agency. This is typified by the headings of chapters one to three which all describe her in the passive. Among her few actions in the novella are agreeing to sleep with Lamas and committing suicide.

4. See J. Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, translated by A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977).