SOURCE: Olivera-Williams, María Rosa. “Between Man and Woman: Onetti and Armonía Somers.” In Onetti and Others: Comparative Essays on a Major Figure in Latin American Literature, edited by Gustavo San Román, pp. 105-20. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Olivera-Williams concludes that a gender-based difference exists in the storytelling styles of Onetti and his contemporary Armonía Somers.]

Estaba también la tramposa, tal vez deliberada, deformación de los recuerdos. [“There was also the deceiving, perhaps intentional, distortion of memories.”]

—J. C. Onetti, “La cara de la desgracia” [The Image of Misfortune] (OC [Obras completas], 1338)

Comprendí que jamás, en adelante, debería comunicar a nadie mi mensaje. … [E]ra necesario liberar también al hombre de mi propio favor simbólico, tan basto como el de cualquiera. [“From that moment, I understood that I must never make my message known to anyone. … [I]t was also necessary to release the man from my own symbolic favor, which was every bit as crude as anyone else's.”]

—A. Somers, “El hombre del túnel” [“The Man in the Tunnel”] (131)

Five years separate the births of two of the greatest Uruguayan authors of the twentieth century, Juan Carlos Onetti (1909) and Armonía Somers (1914), and only two months separate the death of Somers (9 March 1994) from that of Onetti (30 May 1994). In her study of the generation of Uruguayan writers active during the 1970s, Somers noted, following Malraux, that “cada generación aporta una imagen del mundo creada por su sufrimiento, por la necesidad de vencer su sufrimiento” [“each generation contributes an image of the world created through its suffering, through the need to overcome its suffering”].¹ Onetti and Somers may be considered as fellow members of a generation; hence, the fantastic, impassioned, and painful images that appear in their literature might represent the fruit of that generation's suffering. These two writers stand out in particular on account of their unique character, their tendency to rail against the hegemonic literary trends of the moment,² and on account of that air of “lobos esteparios” [“steppe wolves”], an expression coined by Somers herself to describe her status as an author.³ That said, it would not be especially enlightening to approach the work of these writers by merely considering them as members of the same literary group. Of course, as Hugo Verani has already noted, Onetti's fiction belongs to a spiritually derelict universe, a world beset by events that appear to indicate the absence of God. Much the same could be said of Somers; like other great Spanish American writers, her work coincides with the project of many European colleagues, as she too sets about seeking “una justificación de la vida misma” [“a justification of life itself”].⁴

The works of Onetti and Somers feature hallucinatory worlds that transcend the bounds of reality and touch upon fantasy, but at the same time they convey the distinct personalities of the two authors. For instance, it is not difficult to find an echo of Onetti himself in several characters in his fiction who prefer lying in bed to working in an office. Neither is it hard to envisage the author, perpetually armed with a cigarette and a whisky, his gaze lost in space, inventing the characters who wander through the streets of a provincial town called Santa María and relate unlikely stories as they go. For Onetti, as he points out in La vida breve [A Brief Life], to write is to save oneself, to write is to live.⁵

It is not so easy to see the petite and demure woman of reality behind the author of La mujer desnuda [“The Naked Woman”] (1950), a first novella that scandalized the prudish city of Montevideo, nor to imagine her eagerness to break the taboos that undermine the individual. However, the apparent schizophrenia between the author and the persona she invented is nothing other than a response to the difficulties facing intellectual, middle-class women in Montevideo during that era. Armonía Etchepare de Henestrosa, the teacher dedicated to her profession, the loving wife faithful to the memory of her late husband, almost the perfect model of Uruguayan femininity, had little or nothing in common with Armonía Somers.⁶ At first, the personality the author established for herself shocked a readership unaccustomed to witnessing individuals affected by loneliness and repugnance when confronted with an uncaring world or the pretentiousness of human existence.⁷ These were not the products of a conventional woman's imagination.

Like the metamorphosis that transforms Rebeca Linke into the naked woman of the eponymous text, Armonía Somers emerges through the process of writing. Reflecting upon her nom de plume, Somers stated: “a lo mejor era una protesta que yo hacía contra el hecho de haber nacido sin que me pidieran la autorización y la osadía de seguir sobreviviendo en un mundo como éste, que no me gusta” [“perhaps I was protesting against the fact of having been born without my consent and against the valor needed to go on living in a world like this one, which I do not like”] (quoted in Risso, 254). If this pseudonym was indeed used to confront a world that displeased the author, it did not serve as a veil to separate her from reality, but as a sort of diving suit to enable her to venture into the waters of reality and of the subconscious in search of the individual as a social and sexual being with dreams and desires. For this reason, as in the case of Onetti, one senses a true love for the human being in the fiction of Somers. In Somers' own words, “a través de la indagación en las profundidades de mis personajes arquetípicos, a través del que llaman por ahí mi despiadado descarnamiento, yo he comprendido a todos los demás que componían el estrato grupal” [“by means of investigating the depths of my archetypal characters, by means of what is called around here my unrelenting starkness, I have come to understand all the others who made up my peer group”] (quoted in Risso, 277).

Now that both writers are no longer with us, we can only attempt an interview with the personalities they projected through their writing. The present investigation is limited to two stories, Onetti's “La cara de la desgracia” [The Image of Misfortune] (1960) and Somers' “El hombre del túnel” [“The Man in the Tunnel”] (1963).

Both stories were published in the sixties, and they both engage, from very different perspectives, the topics of love, desire, disillusionment and, especially, that of gaining access to reality through writing. For Onetti, literature “es un arte. Cosa sagrada en consecuencia: jamás un medio sino un fin” [“is an art. A sacred thing, therefore: never a means without an end”].⁸ In “La cara de la desgracia,” however, it would appear that Onetti is also interested in fiction as a means of arriving at truth, as a way of grasping reality. Nevertheless, even in this story, fictional discourse delights in its fictionality, a fact that does not hinder, but on the contrary facilitates, the attainment of truth. Through the fictionality of the story, an understanding of the anonymous first-person narrator can be reached.

The forty-something narrator of “La cara de la desgracia” records his personal history and recollections after the death of a young girl with whom he fell in love when they met at a seaside resort. The references to the act of writing throughout the story constantly suggest that writing, borrowing a concept from Derrida, appends a significant supplement to simple events, but at the same time replaces them.⁹ Through the medium of writing, the narrator of “La cara de la desgracia” tries to address his troubled relationship with his late brother, whose suicide made him go to the resort in the first place, and struggles to come to terms with finding love, with disillusionment and ultimately with death:

Sin embargo, debo escribir sin embargo. Pude haber nacido, y continuar viviendo, para estropear su condición de hijo único; pude haberlo obligado, por medio de mis fantasías, mi displicencia y mi tan escasa responsabilidad, a convertirse en el hombre que llegó a ser. … Libre de él, jamás hubiera llegado a ser mi amigo, jamás lo habría elegido o aceptado para eso. Las palabras son hermosas o intentan serlo cuando tienden a explicar algo. Todas estas palabras son, por nacimiento, disformes e inútiles. Era mi hermano.

(OC 1334-35, my italics)

[Nonetheless, I must write, however. I could have been born, and gone on living, in order to spoil his status as an only child; I could have obliged him, though my fantasies, my disdain, and my meagre responsibility, to become the man he ended up being. … Free from him, I would never have chosen or accepted him, he would never have become my friend. Words are beautiful or they try to be so when they aim to explain something. All these words are, by origin, deformed and useless. He was my brother.]

Words that attempt to explain something are “por nacimiento, disformes e inútiles” [“by origin, deformed and useless”]. With their added linguistic value they enrich the object they aspire to explain, but as Onetti understood, even before Derrida's ideas about the supplement attained prominence in the academic world, they also inevitably supplant this object, leaving us only with words and more words. Rather than the actual suicide of the narrator's elder brother Julián, a penalty described as disproportionate to the crime he committed, namely that of embezzlement, the greatest impulse behind the narrative is another written account, the newspaper report entitled “Se suicida cajero prófugo” [“Fugitive Cashier Commits Suicide”] (1334). The narrator makes a ritual of his continual reading of this report, “la más justa, la más errónea y respetuosa de todas las publicadas” [“the most fair, the most erroneous and respectful of all those published”] (1334), leading him to seek an alternative explanation for Julián's fate. However, if the report, “the most erroneous …,” does not do justice to the individual who abused his position as the humble cashier of a cooperative, neither will his brother's version. From this point onward, we discover that justice or, to put it another way, the veracity of written discourse, is nonexistent; in spite of originating from a desire to grasp the truth, discourse distances itself from this objective through its reliance upon the abstract nature of words.

The tale spun by the narrator in the quest to explore his existential culpability for transforming Julián into the corrupt cashier, is believed by neither the fictitious listener, Arturo, nor by the readers of “La cara de la desgracia.” Arturo states: “Veintiocho días que ese infeliz se pegó un tiro y vos, nada menos que vos, jugando al remordimiento” [“It's twenty-eight days since that poor wretch shot himself and you, none other than you, are toying with remorse”] (1335), later adding, “Conozco toda la historia. … Explicame qué culpa tenés si el otro hizo un disparate” [“I know the whole story. … Explain to me how it is your fault that he did something stupid”] (1337). We cannot believe the narrator's suggestion that he is to blame for his brother's death on account of his own birth, which he claims deprived Julián of his privileged status as an only child. This is especially unbelievable as the narrator was five years younger and posed, therefore, no real threat to his brother's position as the elder. In any case, we do not believe in his culpability because his own story makes it incredible. The use of the subjunctive in the passage quoted above permits the possibility that his explanation could possess another meaning, or that something unsaid can be read into it. “Pude haber nacido, y continuar viviendo, para estropear su condición de hijo único” [“I could have been born, and gone on living, in order to spoil his status as an only child”] (1334) suggests that the narrator is blaming himself for the failure and death of his brother. But equally, this may not be justified, as Arturo perceives. Moreover, if an excess of words is required to explain the apparent truth of the real, this implies a voluntary or involuntary selection not only of words, but of memories too. The narrator writes: “Y estaban, pensaba yo, los recuerdos de infancia que irían naciendo y aumentando en claridad durante los días futuros, semanas o meses. Estaba también la tramposa, tal vez deliberada, deformación de los recuerdos” [“And there were, I thought, the memories of infancy which would go on being born and increasing in clarity in the days, weeks and months to come. There was also the deceiving, perhaps intentional, distortion of memories”] (1338, my italics). If this double-edged nature of writing, on the one hand enriching the object to be explained, but, on the other, substituting it, replacing it with words of new meanings, allows us access to the plurality of the present, it also prevents the discovery of a single interpretation.

Onetti's story relegates lived experience to a secondary position in order to give primacy to fiction, to the linguistic ecstasy that produces a multiplicity of meanings and readings. The narrator relates a series of events that he tries to explain and understand from an external position. In search of truth, the narrator falsifies and distorts his account, not only altering the chronological order of events, but also his knowledge of certain facts. Let us leave for a moment the Onetti of “La cara de la desgracia,” who is the same Onetti we encounter throughout his entire literary production, in order to question the Armonía Somers of “El hombre del túnel” about the function of writing. Let us ask if there is an outbreak of “semantic libido” in her literature; in other words, does she relish the simple pleasure of storytelling?

Firstly, we should note that the act of writing is not mentioned in Somers' story and that the story is related by a first-person narrator who, like the narrator of “La cara de la desgracia,” is given no name. “El hombre del túnel” appears to relate a voyage through the tunnel of the subconscious in search of the wholeness of feminine experience, a wholeness that is restricted and denied by the culture of the era and the place. It tells of the emotional relationship between the narrator and a mysterious man, “vestido de oscuro” [“darkly dressed”], with “una ramita verde en la mano” [“with a little green branch in his hand”], wearing an old-fashioned mustache, and who seemed to be immune to the aging process from the time the narrator was seven until her death (128). In the case of Onetti, the narrator found difficulty in describing events not because of their horror, but rather on account of the problems of discourse itself. Hence, when he tries to recreate the image of the young girl outlined against the restaurant window, he writes: “Sólo quedó de la muchacha algo del pelo retinto, metálico en la cresta que recibía la luz. Yo recordaba la magia de los labios y la mirada; magia es una palabra que no puedo explicar, pero que escribo ahora sin remedio, sin posibilidad de sustituirla” [“Of the girl there remained only a hint of her dark hair, metallic where the light fell on it. I remembered the magic of her lips and her gaze; magic is a word I cannot explain, yet I have no choice but to write it now as there is no possibility of replacing it”] (1342-43, my italics). The narrator of “El hombre del túnel,” for her part, delves into her inner experience, restricted by the process of cultural indoctrination that affects every social being, and she tries to rescue herself through language.

The little girl of seven is at an age when the individual gradually begins to venture beyond the security of the family circle, already equipped with a code of values as a talisman against the dangers lurking in the outside world. She enters a concrete pipe and finds the darkly-dressed man with “una sonrisa de miel que se desborda” [“a honeyed smile that bursts forth”] (128), who is, in fact, her own image of masculinity: “Es claro que ni por un momento caí en pensar que era yo quien había estado buceando hacia todo, sino que las cosas se vendrían de por sí a fuerza de tanto desearlas. … El hombre de las suelas gruesas y clavetadas en forma burda, estaba sentado, efectivamente. … Vestía de oscuro, llevaba un bigote caído de retrato antiguo y tenía una ramita verde en la mano” [“It is clear that I never thought for a moment that it was I who was diving down in search of everything, but that things would arrive by themselves on the strength of my wishing for them so much. … The man with the coarse, thick-soled, studded shoes, was sitting still, in effect. … He was dressed darkly, he wore a mustache out of an old portrait, and he had a little green branch in his hand”] (128). Further on, the narrator indicates that her image of the man in the tunnel, her own creation of masculinity, is invisible to others.

At this point, it is tempting to embark upon a psychoanalytic study of Somers' story. The image of masculinity created by the girl and embodied in the man in the tunnel is nothing other than the image of the father: this strong man, with “suelas gruesas” [“thick soles”], “vestido de oscuro” [“darkly dressed”], and possessing a “sonrisa de miel” [“honeyed smile”], is what the child desires, but is forbidden by society, being portrayed to her as a “cosa” “terrorífica” “llamada violación” [“terrifying” “thing” “called rape”] (129). Her desire for the father, the basis of her image of masculinity, the image she will seek throughout her life, is taboo. The strong, good-natured man becomes, thanks to “ellos” [“them”] (impersonal society), dehumanized and dehumanizing; he becomes the “hombre raro,” “vago,” “violador” [“strange man,” “layabout,” “rapist”]. Avoiding a digression into psychoanalysis, let us just say that literature is for Somers a means of recovering her individuality, of recuperating her dreams and desires, by describing that which culture and society prohibit (“Violación, hombre dulce. … Así fue cómo la imagen inédita de mi hombre permaneció inconexa, tierna y desentendida de todo el enredo humano que había provocado. … Hasta que un día decidí no hablar más” [“Rape, sweet man … that was how the provisional image of my man remained disconnected, fresh and free from all the human tangle that it had provoked. … Until one day I decided to say no more”] [129]). As Cristina Peri Rossi observed when reflecting upon the nature and purpose of literature, describing things is a way of controlling them.¹⁰ Here I would venture to say that the act of describing/writing functions as a way of getting to know oneself, especially in the case of women authors. If words call out to other words in a kind of semantic orgy—something that Dostoevski understood and Lacan complemented with the idea of the receptor, the fact that what one says is determined by the other¹¹—engagement in literature, for women in general, and for Somers in particular, is not only an enriching exercise, but also an attempt to describe the indescribable.

The desire of the narrator of “El hombre del túnel” for the masculine other is condemned by society, which transforms this other into a repulsive rapist. Culture denies the narrator the words to describe her desire. Hence, she is forced to immerse herself in her own subjectivity. To achieve this, she must slip into “el túnel” [“the tunnel,” down “la escalera” [“the stairway”] and across “el cruce de la calle” [“the road junction”], three lanes that enable her to reach the realm of the desire awakened during infancy. But in order to describe this desire, she must seek recourse in an almost fantastic type of fiction, in which the boundaries of reality are blurred, in which linear time disappears and where the sensuality of the feminine reigns supreme: “—Gracias por la invención de las siete caídas—alcancé a decirle [al ‘hombre de la sonrisa de miel’] viendo rodar mi lengua como una flor monopétala sobre el pavimento [resultado del impacto de las ruedas de un vehículo]” [“‘Thanks for the invention of the seven sins,’ I managed to say to him (‘the man with the honeyed smile’), seeing my tongue roll like a monopetalous flower on the pavement (the result of the impact of the wheels of a vehicle)”] (134).

Onetti, himself a cog in the cultural machine, a fact that in no way negates the strong current of social criticism running throughout all his work, became a story-writer through the use of masculine rhetoric, recreated in linguistic labyrinths that never cease illuminating the individual's complex relation with a hostile, alienating world. Somers, on the other hand, marginalized like the character of Rebeca Linke in her first story, perhaps because the weight of masculinity continues to dominate culture even in the twentieth century, explores herself through an essentially feminine discourse, examining the inner self whose escape is prevented by the social self. If the added semantic value of words takes Onetti into an essentially literary world, to the very heart of culture, this same added value permits Somers to divest herself of the archetypal image of the feminine and to slip from word to word, from meaning to meaning, toward a more complete and open image of the female self. Thus, we can say that the masculine rhetoric of Onetti inserts him into the cultural system, whereas the feminine rhetoric of Somers places her on its margins.

Let us now inquire about love, a recurrent theme in the fiction of both Onetti and Somers. For Onetti, love represents the fullness of the moment, but it always ends in misunderstanding and disillusionment, a fact that does not detract from its glory. Love is a feeling that, like dreams and high-brow literature, falsifies reality in an attempt to obtain communication, to recuperate lost innocence.

Recalling his apparent communion with the girl on the bicycle, the narrator of “La cara de la desgracia” states:

Era indudable que la muchacha me había liberado de Julián y de muchas otras ruinas y escorias que la muerte de Julián representaba y había traído a la superficie; era indudable que yo, desde una media hora atrás, la necesitaba y continuaría necesitándola.

(1348)

[It was beyond doubt that the girl had freed me from Julián, and from the many other wrecks and messes which the death of Julián represented and had brought to the surface; it was beyond doubt that I, since half an hour earlier, needed her and would continue to need her.]

The death of Julián, that man who had never grown or lived, the man who “desde los treinta años le salía del chaleco olor a viejo” [“since he was thirty the smell of old age had emanated from his jacket”] (1334), represents the death of innocence and leads the narrator to connect the girl with his late brother: “Entonces, sin escuchar, me sorprendí vinculando a mi hermano muerto con la muchacha de la bicicleta” [“Then, without listening, I surprised myself by linking my dead brother with the girl on the bicycle”] (1340). Considering himself in some way to blame for being unable to prevent Julián's suicide, he feels the need to protect the young girl from death: “ambos [el hermano y la muchacha], por tan diversos caminos, coincidían en una deseada aproximación a la muerte, a la definitiva experiencia” [“both (the brother and the girl), by such diverse paths, shared in a desired approximation to death, to the definitive experience”] (1341). Death can be overthrown by love. Love, after all, embodies the mystery of the human condition and is an expression of individual liberty, a process of “caída y vuelo” [“falling and soaring”], to borrow the words of Octavio Paz. In La llama doble del amor [“The Double Flame of Love”], Paz writes: “Doble fascinación ante la vida y la muerte, el amor es caída y vuelo, elección y sumisión” [“A double fascination before life and death, love is falling and soaring, choice and submission”] (97).

The sense of fullness experienced by the narrator in the face of love, which enables him to tell the story of his brother to the object of his love in “una seria voz masculina” [“a serious, masculine voice”] (1347)—I think the adjective “masculina” is very important here—and which allows him to speak of his blame and to feel in some way absolved, is, however, condemned to failure. It is doomed not because love is a human phenomenon, and thus subject to the ravages of time—“el amor no vence a la muerte: es una apuesta contra el tiempo y sus accidentes” [“love does not vanquish death; it is a wager against time and its accidents”], says Paz (220)—but because the narrator invents the object of his love and, in doing so, negates her as a person. But is love not always like this? Has Stendhal not already told us that love is a process of crystallization that progressively idealizes and transforms the object of love? All those of us who love or have loved understand this process of magnifying the object of our amour. But love demands freedom, voluntary submission, understanding, and, above all, the unconditional acceptance of the other person. Paz observes: “Se ama a una persona, no a una abstracción” [“One loves a person, not an abstraction”] (107).

The narrator does not realize, or does not wish to acknowledge, that the girl is deaf, despite many indications of her lack of hearing: “La vi fumar con el café, los ojos clavados ahora en la boca lenta del hombre viejo” [“I saw her smoke with her coffee, with her eyes fixed on the slow-moving mouth of the old man”] (1342); “En la playa desierta la voz le chillaba como un pájaro. Era una voz desapacible y ajena” [“On the deserted beach, her voice screeched like a bird. It was an unpleasant and alien voice”] (1345); “sonó trabajosa la voz extraña”; “la voz dura”; “—Qué—roncó.—Hablaste. Otra vez” [“the strange voice sounded wearily”; “her hard voice”; “‘What?’ she snorted. ‘You spoke. Say it again’”] (1346). Neither does he wish to acknowledge the girl's lost innocence, ignoring Arturo's ironic use of the words “nena” [“kid”] and “señorita” [“young lady”]: “—¿Café?—preguntó [el mozo].—Bueno—sonrió Arturo—; eso que llaman café. También le dicen señorita a la muchacha de amarillo junto a la ventana” [“‘Coffee?’ asked the waiter. ‘O.K. then,’ said Arturo with a smile, ‘they may call it coffee. They also call the young girl in yellow over by the window “Miss”’”] (1342). He also ignores the comments of the waiter who speaks with a wry smile of the girl's nocturnal bicycle rides, from which she returns with tousled hair and no make-up, and of her reputation among “los muchachos ingleses que están en el Atlantic” [“the young Englishmen from the Atlantic”] (1343). Through not accepting this reality, the narrator, in a move that resembles the rhetorical function of the simile, makes the connection between the independent life of the girl and that of his brother, who had been stealing from the cooperative for five years despite appearing to have resigned himself to a mediocre existence. Just as some small and insignificant man speaks about the life of the girl, a wretched woman from a squalid café, Julián's lover, prematurely aged by bad living, reveals the story of the fraudulent life of the narrator's brother, hoping, like the waiter in the café, for a financial reward.

For some critics, the girl's innocence is real, and her promiscuous reputation is false.¹² But we cannot ignore the device of the simile, which, as we have just seen, connects and embellishes a series of events through indicating their similarity to others. The narrator, however, after making love to the deaf girl in the wood alongside the beach, states: “tuve de pronto dos cosas que no había merecido nunca: su cara doblegada por el llanto y la felicidad bajo la luna, la certeza desconcertante de que no habían entrado antes en ella” [“I suddenly had two things which I had never deserved: her face, overcome with weeping and happiness in the moonlight, and the unsettling certainty that they had not entered her previously”] (1347, my italics). We should return now to the use of the adjective “masculina” to describe the narrator's voice as he speaks to the girl. Onetti's presentation of love in this story is essentially masculine. The mature man who falls in love with the innocence of a young girl is the perfect formula for the man to transfer his desires onto her, to realize through the girl, who in Lacanian terms has “denigrated” his soul, his longing to discover the truth.¹³ Moreover, he observes the virginity of the girl because, as Georges Bataille indicates,

the female partner in eroticism was seen as the victim, the male as the sacrificer, both during the consummation losing themselves in the continuity established by the first destructive act. … [The act of violence] is intentional like the act of the man who lays bare, desires and wants to penetrate his victim. … The woman in the hands of her assailant is despoiled of her being.¹⁴

The narrator requires the virginity of the girl in order to save himself and, by destroying her previous being through the act of love, he is able to reinvent her with her face bathed in tears of joy for the love that he has to offer.

There is nothing more startling, yet it goes strangely unnoticed by many astute readers of Onetti, than the expression used by the narrator to describe his desire to undress and possess the girl: “empezamos a enfurecer y besarnos. Nos ayudamos a desnudarla en lo imprescindible” [“We became excited and started to kiss. We helped each other to undress her only as far as it was essential”] (1347, my italics). The eagerness with which the lovers kiss seems to indicate a sudden outburst of sexuality on the part of the girl, whose deafness had prevented her from hearing the narrator's words. In the case of the narrator, this episode marks the materialization of his desire to dispossess the girl of her being and to transform her into the object of his fantasies. Moreover, it is the narrator who removes the girl's clothes, like Bataille's sacrificateur, but the employment of the first person plural (“nos ayudamos” [“we helped each other”]) suggests an encounter of equals. The latter is undermined, however, by the use of the third person feminine singular, “la” [“to her”], as an indirect object. “La” suggests that the girl has become the mere object of the narrator's desire. Through the girl's negation as subject in the act of love, the narrator briefly finds his soul, the same soul with which he wanted to rescue both his brother and the girl from a chaotic world.

The dialogue between the narrator and the girl becomes a monologue, given that the girl cannot hear. The act of love is simply a projection of his desires onto a being that can respond sexually, for this is her only mode of communication with the outside world. We are told that the girl knew how to kiss and that she kissed feverishly. The brutal death of the girl, which is described in a horrifyingly realistic fashion, similar to that of Julián, reveals the impact of a dehumanizing reality that destroys the illusions of the individual. The death of the girl confirms her promiscuous past, but, like the suicide of Julián, it is a grotesque and disproportionate punishment. For this reason, and once again using the language of the simile, “ya nada tenía importancia” [“nothing matters now”] (1348), neither the girl's lie about her punctured tires, which the narrator discovers to be fully inflated, nor the fact that the narrator is accused of killing the girl, a crime he did not commit. “No se preocupen: firmaré lo que quieran, sin leerlo” [“Don't worry: I shall sign whatever you want, without reading it”], the narrator says to the police, “Lo divertido es que están equivocados. Pero no tiene importancia. Nada, ni siquiera esto, tiene de veras importancia” [“The funny thing is that you are mistaken. But it does not matter. Nothing, not even this, really matters”] (1358).

The death of the woman, the impossibility of love, and hence of communication, suggests the absence of God. Faced with the impotence of the individual, Onetti replies with a story in which words create an apparently arbitrary and ambiguous order. Through their “semantic libido,” they give meaning to the meaningless aspects of life. Although it may be an illusion, the narrator's dream to momentarily recover purity from the misery of the world is realized through the act of writing.

Can we speak of love in the work of Somers, which, in the words of Ángel Rama, recreates “un universo material sordo y disonante, una experiencia tensa de la crueldad y la soledad” [“a material universe, deaf and dissonant, an intense experience of cruelty and solitude”]?¹⁵ Let us recall that “no hay amor sin erotismo como no hay erotismo sin sexualidad. Pero la cadena se rompe en sentido inverso: amor sin erotismo no es amor y erotismo sin sexo es impensable e imposible” [“there is no love without eroticism, just as there is no eroticism without sexuality. But the chain breaks when turned around; love without eroticism is not love, and eroticism without sex is unthinkable and impossible”] (Paz, 106). The search for desire, for sensuality, for eroticism is present in Somers' characters, especially when they are women. If social circumstances restrain the libido of every individual, that restraint is great for those who possess the capacity for the reproduction of the species. Woman is dominated by the image of the Virgin Mary, through which she is desexualized and denied erotic pleasure. In other words, she is obliged to reproduce, but like a virgin-mother she is deemed to be passive in the miracle of the creation of life. It is not in vain that Somers asks for the wax effigy of woman's body to be melted down to liberate the inner self.

The narrator of “El hombre del túnel” creates something that very few women have achieved, an ideal of masculinity, an object of erotic desire that she wishes to transform into a living subject. The problems confronting this image of the ideal man come from outside, from culture. To safeguard the image, the narrator opts for silence, as the Somers epigraph of the present paper shows. But silence fails to save the image; rather, it endangers it by burying it in the depths of the subconscious. In order that the narrator's desire for the other can continue, in order that she can go on living, she has to express herself. She must learn how to tell “la verdadera historia” [“the true story”] (129). She must discover a way of describing things in order to control them.

The narrator immerses herself in her inner being; she slips through a tunnel and slides down a banister in search of her sexuality, her eroticism and her femininity. Otherwise she would become the stereotypical woman, the housewife prematurely aged by a routine existence. In other words, she would become a projection of her “yo-social” [“social self”], as Teresa Porzecanski has noted.¹⁶ From within her subjectivity, she can once again discover the image she created in infancy of the man with the “sonrisa de miel” [“honeyed smile”]. But to find the words to describe this image, it must pass into the dimension of the fantastic. Only through a story in which the boundaries of the permissible and the prohibited are blurred, in which time is converted into an eternal present, and in which reality and imagination are confused, can the narrator's desire crystallize in words.

But this desire is not satisfied. The union of the narrator with the man with the green branch on the other side of the street is crushed beneath the wheels of a motor vehicle. Porzecanski states that “la facticidad de lo real-societario” [“the falseness of social reality”] prohibits the satisfaction of the desires of “la sensualidad de lo femenino” [“feminine sensuality”] (103). I would say that this desire goes unfulfilled because, as Freud understood, what matters is not the satisfaction of the self, but rather the drive of desire, which gives meaning to the individual's existence. When the process of desire ends, the life of the individual loses meaning. The narrator ends up going down through a tunnel, the tunnel of death, yet she continues to speak as an indication that desire will return.

We have asked fundamental questions of Juan Carlos Onetti and Armonía Somers, who have answered us through their two stories, revealing their similarities and differences in the art of narrating. But the major point to emerge from this interview, which attempted to focus upon the function of writing for both authors, is the existence of an essentially masculine discourse in Onetti's “La cara de la desgracia,” and a discourse that reveals the complexities of women's writing in Somers' “El hombre del túnel.”¹⁷

Notes

1. Armonía Somers, “Diez relatos a la luz de sus probables vivenciales” [“Ten Stories in the Light of Their Existential Possibilities”], 114.

2. In his prologue to the anthology of Somers, La rebelión de la flor [“The Flower's Rebellion”] Rómulo Cosse states: “Estaba ya cerca la mitad de este siglo XX, tan rico en cambios y transformaciones, cuando el modelo narrativo imperante en Uruguay [que no era sino la réplica del relato realista europeo occidental y decimonónico], se fisura y estalla. … Es precisamente, la escritura artística de Onetti y Armonía Somers, el factor que produce el estallido de aquel modelo” [“It was close to the middle of the twentieth century, a century of changes and transformation, that the prevailing narrative model in Uruguay (which was none other than an imitation of nineteenth-century, Western European realism), fractured and broke down. … The artistic mode of writing of Onetti and Armonía Somers was the very factor that produced the collapse of that model”] (3).

3. “Durante veinte años de magisterio no dejé traslucir al lobo estepario” [“During twenty years of teaching, I did not let the steppe wolf shine through”], quoted in Roberto de Espada, “Armonía Somers,” Maldoror 7 (Montevideo: 1972) (quoted in Risso, 270).

4. Hugo Verani, Onetti: el ritual de la impostura, 185.

5. “Pero yo tenía entera, para salvarme, esta noche de sábado; estaría salvado si empezaba a escribir el argumento para Stein, si terminaba dos páginas, o una, siquiera, si lograba que la mujer entrara en el consultorio de Díaz Grey y se escondiera detrás del biombo; si escribía una sola frase, tal vez” [“But I had the whole of Saturday night to save myself; I would be saved if I began to write the screenplay for Stein, if I completed two pages, or even one, if I managed to make the woman enter Díaz Grey's surgery and hide behind the screen; if I wrote a single phrase, perhaps”] (456).

6. In “La insólita literatura de Somers,” Ángel Rama notes: “Nada más magisterial, dulce y hasta convencional que la persona que encubre el seudónimo Armonía Somers, casi el prototipo de la maestra de primeras letras de voz aterciopelada, de empaque maternal, de suave tono vital” [“There is nothing more magisterial, sweet, and even conventional than the person behind the pseudonym Armonía Somers, almost the prototype of the primary school mistress with a velvety voice, a motherly presence, and a soft, lively tone”]. Ángel Rama, “La insólita literatura de Somers: la fascinación del horror,” Marcha 1118 (Montevideo: 1963) (quoted in Risso, “Un retrato para Armonía (cronología y bibliografía),” 262-63).

7. See, for instance, the reviews of El derrumbamiento [“The Collapse”] by Mario Benedetti (Número 22 [Montevideo: January-March 1953]) and Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Marcha 679 [Montevideo: 17 July 1953]). Both critics express their distaste for a style of writing whose rawness they initially judge to be merely a literary pose. Both Benedetti and Rodríguez Monegal would later recognize the authenticity of Somers' voice.

8. J. C. Onetti, “Divagaciones de un secretario” [“Rambling Thoughts of a Secretary”] (1963), in Réquiem por Faulkner y otros artículos, 173.

9. “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. … But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. … Compensatory [suppléant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance that takes-(the)-place [tientlieu].” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144-45.

10. Cristina Peri Rossi, “Aspectos socioculturales, simbólico-artísticos y místico-religiosos del juego de azar.”

11. Dostoievski lamented in a letter written on 27 May 1869 to Maïkov: “The main thing is sadness, but if one talks about it or explains it more, so much more would have to be said.” Quoted in Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, 186.

12. Verani writes: “También la muchacha presenta una imagen falsa. Se tiene un mal concepto de ella, aparece como poseedora de un ayer tormentoso y promiscuo ante los ojos de los empleados del hotel donde se hospeda el “hombre.” Sin embargo, la verdadera imagen de la joven se conoce después del acto de amor en la playa.” [“The girl also presents a false image. One receives a bad impression of her; in the eyes of the employees of the hotel in which the ‘man’ is staying, she appears to have had a turbulent and promiscuous past. However, the true image of the girl becomes known after the love scene on the beach”]. For Verani, the narrator's assertion of the girl's virginity is accurate. See Verani, Onetti, 180-81.

13. Jacqueline Rose explains in her prologue to Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: “Lacan sees courtly love as the elevation of the woman into the place where her absence or inaccessibility stands in for male lack, just as he sees her denigration as the precondition for man's belief in his own soul” (48-49). And later, “As negative to the man, woman becomes a total object of fantasy (or an object of total fantasy), elevated into the place of the Other and made to stand for its truth” (50).

14. Georges Bataille, Eroticism, 18 and 90.

15. Ángel Rama, “La generación crítica (1939-1969),” in La crítica de la cultura en América Latina, 236.

16. Teresa Porzecanski, “Sensualidad y socialidad en ‘El hombre del túnel’,” in Cosse, ed., Armonía Somers, papeles críticos, 101.

17. The author is grateful to the Helen Kellog Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame for a travel grant to attend the Onetti and Others conference in St. Andrews, July 1995.

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.

Cosse, Rómulo, ed. Armonía Somers, papeles críticos. Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 1990.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins UP, 1976.

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York & London: Macmillan, 1982.

Onetti, Juan Carlos. Réquiem por Faulkner y otros artículos. Ed. Jorge Ruffinelli. Buenos Aires: Calicanto, 1976.

Paz, Octavio. La llama doble del amor: Amor y erotismo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1993.

Peri Rossi, Cristina. “Aspectos socioculturales, simbólico-artísticos y místico-religiosos del juego de azar.” Paper presented to the Congreso nacional de asociaciones y técnicos para el tratamiento y rehabilitación de la ludopatía. Valladolid, 1994.

Rama, Ángel. La crítica de la cultura en América Latina. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985.

Risso, Álvaro J. “Un retrato para Armonía (cronología y bibliografía).” Cosse, 247-99.

Somers, Armonía. “Diez relatos a la luz de sus probables vivenciales” [“Ten Stories in the Light of Their Existential Possibilities”]. Afterword to Diez relatos y un epílogo [“Ten Stories and an Epilogue”], by an anonymous editor. Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1979.

Somers, Armonía. “El hombre del túnel,” in La rebelión de la flor: Antología personal [“The Flower's Rebellion: A Personal Anthology”] (Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 1988), 127-34.

Verani, Hugo. Onetti: el ritual de la impostura. Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1981.