SOURCE: Millington, Mark. “Para una tumba sin nombre (1959): Telling Stories.” In Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative, and the Subject, pp. 201-32. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Francis Cairns (Publications) Ltd., 1985.

[In the following essay, Millington examines the metafictional elements of Para una tumba sin nombre.]

In Para una tumba sin nombre Díaz Grey tells a story of people telling stories.¹ In theory, they are the same story, but they turn out to be different. The characters are, in fact, “telling stories”. Where in Los adioses the narrator/focalizer tells a story which seems not to fit the facts, the characters of Para una tumba all tell stories about the same events, but from different angles and such that they are, in whole or in part, mutually exclusive. The reader knows this. But the reader does not know who, if anyone, is telling a true story. Even Díaz Grey's story of the telling of stories is not completely true: he tells the reader this at the end. None of this matters—to Díaz Grey at least. The multiplicity of the story-telling and the complexity of the novel's different layers will be apparent from a summary of its content.

The novel begins with a description of the normal sort of funeral that occurs in Santa María. It then goes on to introduce the unusual funeral involving Jorge Malabia. The narrator of Para una tumba, Díaz Grey, is told of the arrangements for this unusual funeral by Caseros, an employee of one of the town's funeral directors. Caseros is baffled by some of the arrangements, and he is even unsure about the name of the person to be buried: it could be Rita García or Rita González. In any event, Díaz Grey's interest is aroused, and he goes to the cemetery to see what happens. The arrival of the body and its burial are indeed unusual for Santa María, partly because Jorge brings along a goat with a damaged leg. Afterwards, Díaz Grey drives Jorge and the goat back to Santa María, though Jorge refuses his offer of trying to cure the goat. A week later, Jorge appears at Díaz Grey's house and begins to tell him the story behind the funeral and the presence of the goat, which has died and been buried in the week since the funeral.

The story began about two years before when Godoy, a travelling salesman from Santa María, was accosted in Constitución, a station in Buenos Aires, by a girl with a goat. The girl asked Godoy for money to reach Villa Ortúzar, a distant suburb of Buenos Aires, because she claimed that the relations who were supposed to meet her train failed to arrive. Having given the girl money, Godoy leaves the station but immediately realizes that he knows her. He returns to the station and finds the girl telling her story to another unsuspecting traveller. Godoy identifies the girl as one Rita, who had formerly worked for the Malabia family in Santa María. She now lives by telling her story and deceiving travellers. Jorge and his friend Tito hear Godoy's story in Santa María and are rather angry about it, since they have been studying in Buenos Aires for a year and living near Constitución and yet have never noticed the girl whom they both knew in Santa María.

Though Jorge and Tito do not talk about Rita, they know that on their return to Buenos Aires they will try to find her. Both feel that Rita offers the chance of sexual adventure. In Jorge's story, Tito establishes contact with Rita first, but he is the one who eventually starts to live with her. Jorge tells Díaz Grey that he had known Rita when she worked for his family. She had been a servant in the house and had looked after Jorge's mad sister-in-law, Julita. Jorge wanted to sleep with Rita, but she had refused. Eventually she had grown tired of the life of a servant and had left, creating some scandal in Santa María by the wildness of her life with Marcos Bergner, Julita's brother. After a period of this scandalous life, Rita simply disappeared from Santa María. In Buenos Aires, when Jorge and Tito rediscover her, Jorge is unimpressed by Tito's simple sexual ambitions with Rita, because this means that Tito does not appreciate the creative aspect of Rita's story and of the goat. Jorge does appreciate this dimension and, in his view, this makes Rita his. At this point, when the contact has been re-established with Rita, Jorge ceases the first instalment of his story.

Díaz Grey hears no more from Jorge that year and pursues the story himself in writing from the point at which Jorge stops. Díaz Grey begins by filling in the background of the goat. The goat was an addition made to Rita's story by Ambrosio, a man whom she met in Constitución when trying to tell an early version of her story about needing money to continue her journey. Far from giving her money, Ambrosio begins to live with her and to be dependent on her. Ambrosio was probably not the first such dependent man, but he is remarkable for his extreme laziness and for the eventual invention of the goat, which serves to make Rita's story more convincing. As soon as he has invented the goat, Ambrosio is transformed and he disappears. Díaz Grey ends his contribution to Jorge's story by outlining the difficulties that Rita encountered on her own with the goat in Buenos Aires.

By chance, Díaz Grey meets Jorge again, and Jorge calls on him later to continue his story. Díaz Grey notices that he has changed somewhat in the year since they last met—above all, he has become less rebellious and more like a conventional adult. Díaz Grey asks him to read his addition to the story, and Jorge approves of it. Jorge then continues the story from where Díaz Grey left it. He explains how he took Ambrosio's place and lived with Rita for a year, while his parents thought he was studying at university. The major development during this second instalment is that Jorge starts to alter the initial part of the story: he denies that it was Rita who was buried the previous year, but says it was a cousin of hers, whose name he does not give. This cousin simply took Rita's place at some stage and it was she who died shortly thereafter. Jorge regrets that his introduction of a new character spoils the story's perfection, but he claims that the story is now accurate and complete.

Subsequently, Díaz Grey meets Tito in Santa María. By chance, he enters a bar and finds Tito playing with a group of children. Tito appears rather fat and extremely reminiscent of his father. He explains that he is continuing his study of law but that he does not want to leave Santa María. He envisages his future in business on a grand scale. Díaz Grey encourages him to talk about Rita. A rather different story now begins to take shape. Tito claims that Jorge knew by no means all of the details about Rita. Crucially, he says that it really is Rita who is buried in Santa María—she had tuberculosis when he met her in Constitución. Tito explains the financial basis of his own relations with Rita—he paid her as a prostitute—, and he also fills in the background of Higinia, Rita's cousin. Higinia went to Buenos Aires from Santa María but stayed only briefly with Rita before moving on to a highly successful career as a prostitute, of which Tito approves. He suggests that Jorge is responsible for Rita's death because he allowed her to live in poverty while very ill when he was receiving the money his father sent him and giving it away to the communist party. Tito censures Jorge's behaviour and says that Jorge now regrets what he did. He claims that Jorge's substitution of Higinia for Rita in the second instalment proves his guilty conscience. Finally, Tito says that Jorge asked him if he could marry Rita when in Buenos Aires, but that he had to explain to him that, as a minor, this was impossible without parental consent.

Díaz Grey meets Jorge again. Jorge deliberately comes to him in order to clear up the ambiguities of the conflicting versions. It appears that he knows Díaz Grey has been talking to Tito. His way of setting things straight is to claim that he and Tito simply invented the whole story to do with Godoy, Rita, the goat and Buenos Aires in order to see what they could build around a few basic facts. Díaz Grey is amused, and he conjectures that there could be many more versions of the story.

Tito writes Díaz Grey a letter explaining that he had actually once seen Ambrosio with Rita, which would seem to give him an advantage over Jorge, and which also appears to deny Jorge's claim that the story was invented. Díaz Grey concludes by underlining the openness and ambiguity of the story. He says that his own writing is not without deliberate errors, and he wonders if the funeral he witnessed did actually occur. This is unimportant, however, since, after finishing his account, he feels content.

The opening of Para una tumba circles insistently around the known and repeated method of organizing a funeral in Santa María. The first two pages establish the norm, the accepted sort of funeral: “Todos nosotros sabemos cómo es un entierro en Santa María” (987) (We all know what a funeral is like in Santa María). Indeed, on the second page, the anaphoric repetitions of “sabemos” have great impact, not only because of the insistence on unquestioned knowledge, but also because of the scope of that knowledge—it is delimited by “nosotros” and hence it is not simply individual.² And yet the very nature of the “nosotros”—a limited, internal viewpoint—and the heavy reiteration of the verb “saber” (to know) almost inevitably entail the counterbalancing “Pero esto no lo sabíamos; este entierro, esta manera de enterrar” (988) (But we did not know this; this funeral, this way of doing a funeral). In this way, the opening pages of Para una tumba establish the novel's crucial oppositions: the known against the unknown, habit against innovation, the “legal” against the “illegal”.

The funeral organized by Jorge disrupts the accepted practice. And its disruptive power is as emphatically reiterated as the norm is at the beginning. The first mention of the funeral is characterized by incomprehension: Caseros, reporting to Díaz Grey his dealings with Jorge, cannot explain why Jorge's father does not pay for the funeral, or why Jorge barters over the price and then buries the body like an animal (990). The indignity of the initial transaction continues into the actual funeral: the horses drawing the hearse are small enough to be mules and are totally the wrong colour—indeed, the colour is scandalous (992). Moreover, the funeral procession has provoked the town's laughter, and the driver of the hearse refuses to drive the hearse into the cemetery (significantly, it is illegal to do so [993]) and also to help carry the coffin. This funeral will not fit in smoothly with any of the normal practices of Santa María.

When the hearse arrives at the cemetery followed by Jorge and the goat, crucial information about the funeral's status begins to emerge:

No llegaron desde arriba, desde el camino de los entierros que todos nosotros conocemos. Vinieron desde la izquierda y se presentaron por sorpresa … después de haber hecho un extenso rodeo, negándose al itinerario de entierro que todos nosotros creíamos inevitable, suprimiendo la ciudad.

(991)

(They did not come from above, from the road for funerals that we are all familiar with. They came from the left and appeared by surprise … after having made a considerable detour, avoiding the funeral route that we all thought inevitable, and cutting out the city.)

Certain details in this alternative route are important. The avoidance of the city is one thing, but the exact positioning is another: they arrive from the left, and from below, not from above as expected (at one moment the hearse is seen as it “trepaba la calle” [992] [climbed the street]). Significantly, the grave is located “en el fondo” (993) (at the bottom) of the cemetery, as if corresponding to this arrival from below. And, on returning with Jorge to the city after the funeral, Díaz Grey says: “… doblé a la derecha para subir hacia el centro” (997) (I turned to the right to go up into the centre of the city), but immediately Jorge stops him and so in effect again makes a refusal of the city, of the right and of the elevated location.³ It is only when, later the same day, Jorge arrives in Díaz Grey's surgery—itself upstairs—that he finally places himself on the upper level, within the city, and it is from that moment that the change begins in him as he starts telling his stories.

However, it is not until these spatial motifs are seen in operation with Rita that their implications become clear and the “wrongness” of the funeral becomes fully focused. The spatial motifs begin to appear in Jorge's account of the period when Rita worked as a servant in the Malabia household before either of them went to Buenos Aires. In Jorge's account, his sister-in-law, Julita, lives in the Malabia house, but “unida y separada de nosotros por el jardín” (1005) (joined to and separated from us by the garden). In Onettian terms, Julita's madness makes this spatial distribution a predictable arrangement. The madness seems to preserve Julita apart emotionally after the death of Federico, her husband, and it also seems to insulate her from the normal, everyday world of the Malabias.⁴ Now Rita's position is that of intermediary—she lives on the same side of the garden as Jorge and his parents, but “cruzaba varias veces por día el jardín y subía la escalera de Julita para limpiar y arreglar” (1005) (she crossed the garden several times a day and climbed Julita's stairs in order to clean and tidy up). The notion of going up is again present here,⁵ and this begins to appear like a social hierarchy when we see that Jorge also lives upstairs in his parents' home, “en el piso alto” (on the top floor), while Rita has a room on the ground level—Jorge can see in from the garden (1005). So Rita is projected as ambivalent—she moves easily between sanity and madness, between the normal and the abnormal—, but she is clearly positioned below the Malabias—both Julita and Jorge live above her. It is significant that Jorge and Tito live on the third floor in their hotel in Buenos Aires, at first only looking down to street level where Rita works, and that they have to go down to become involved with her.

The sense underlying the inappropriateness of Rita's funeral begins to become clearer: the connotations of Rita and her life place her in every sense in the opposite space to the respectable norm of Santa María, and, insofar as Jorge becomes associated with her, he too is outside the normal space. And there is more detail to add to this marginality of Rita. Her symbolic value is consolidated by several details of her life when she has left Santa María. Jorge claims that she is one of those women who will never pass beyond forty, who “se detendrán para siempre en la asexualidad de los cuarenta años” (1012) (who will forever remain in the asexuality of forty years of age). In a sense, like Julita, she is sealed from the normal world. Moreover, Rita's whole position is redolent of the prostitute—Tito claims that this is in fact what she is—, so that reaction to her at the station in Buenos Aires is divided. On the one hand, there are the bourgeois who give her money, thus creating

El alivio de sentir que bastaba desprenderse de unos pesos para que la vida se comprometiera a no hacerlos coincidir jamás con la oscura, agria, insistente forma de la mujer.

(1014-15)

(The relief of feeling that it was sufficient to give up a few pesos for life to undertake never to make them align themselves with the dark, disagreeable, insistent form of the woman.)

These are the tactics of escape, and significantly, when Rita is still using the first version of her story, these people sometimes help her to buy a ticket back to Santa María (1015), that is, back to respectability, to their own side of the opposition. On the other hand, there are those few like Jorge and Ambrosio who live off Rita, who take money from her, and that is clearly to join the ethos of her marginal world. And finally, it is important not to overlook the fact that Rita lives and works in the south of Buenos Aires. In one of Onetti's short stories, “Regreso al sur” (1946), Perla “disappears” in order to live on the south side of Rivadavia as a prostitute, and Constitución, the station where Rita works, is located to the south of Rivadavia.⁶ In this connection, Godoy uses a telling phrase about Rita. When describing the period in which she briefly lived with Marcos Bergner in Santa María, he says: “Cuando llegó a moza y se cansó de ser sirvienta, anduvo haciéndose la loca con Marcos Bergner …” (1004, italics mine) (When she became a young woman and grew tired of being a servant, she started carrying on madly with Marcos Bergner). The word “loca” (mad) clearly associates Rita with Julita, but it also associates her with prostitution, since “una loca” is a prostitute in River Plate Spanish. All these details tend to characterize the subversive mood and value of Rita's world and the experience that Jorge undergoes with her. Her world in Buenos Aires is in opposition to Santa María, just as, in La vida breve, la Queca's world is in opposition to that of Gertrudis, and just as, in Los adioses, the girl's chalet is in opposition to the woman's hotel. In this context, the disruptive force of the funeral is easily explained, and also Jorge's initial refusal to accompany Díaz Grey up to the centre of Santa María: the opposite worlds simply reject each other.

As in the case of la Queca, Rita acts as the enabling force for creation. She herself continually reiterates her invented story, but her most intriguing effect seems to be that, for the few like Ambrosio, she creates the opportunity to contribute to that story. Hence it is not the relationship itself with Rita which is important, and indeed Jorge and Ambrosio seem mostly to ignore her. Rather, Rita represents the gateway to an alternative world. Above all, Rita is entirely bound up with the liberating and subversive “mentira” (lie)—her story is untrue, and all further additions to it are equally untrue. Hence Jorge's insistence on the goat as a lie (1011), because it is “no nacido de un cabrón sino de una inteligencia humana, de una voluntad artística” (1011) (not born of a goat but of a human intelligence, of an artistic will). In the story “El álbum” (1953), where Jorge is the central figure, the woman whom he meets tells exotic stories about her happy past, and Jorge equates the stories with lying:

Y en el centro de cada mentira estaba la mujer, cada cuento era ella misma, próxima a mí, indudable.

(1280)

(And in the centre of every lie was the woman, every story was the woman herself, next to me, indubitable.)

In La vida breve, the point of the lie is that it is the sign of Brausen's transgression. In Para una tumba the lie is subversive and also part of the production of stories.

But the act of lying, of subversive creation, is not just to make the story, because the story has a kind of purpose: Rita pretends to want money for a ticket to continue her journey to Villa Ortúzar. Very little comes to light about Villa Ortúzar, but one or two details are crucial. The actual house that is mentioned as the so-called destination for Rita is “la casita, la construcción de lata y madera en Villa Ortúzar” (1022) (the chalet, the tin and wood construction in Villa Ortúzar). Now, this is obviously reminiscent of the “casita de las portuguesas” (Portuguese girls' chalet) in Los adioses, of the “cabaña de los troncos” (log cabin) in El pozo and of the “casa de troncos” (log house) in Brausen's letter to Stein (La vida breve, part II, chapter XIV).⁷ The “casita” (a temporary and insubstantial house) is the ideal destination, the place that creating the story is aiming for. And it is also important to fix on the surroundings of one of the places in which Rita and Jorge live. It is

… el lugar junto al quemadero de basura, la zanja con agua blancuzca, el eterno caballo muerto de vientre hinchado, de patas hacia el cielo.

(1022)

(… the place near the refuse incinerator, the ditch with whitish water, the eternal dead horse, with a swollen stomach, its legs pointing at the sky.)

In Los adioses the no-man's-land in which the man takes his walks is the middle ground between the hotel and the chalet and it consists of the hotel rubbish-tip and the dry riverbed. The very similar motifs in Para una tumba seem to fix the location of Rita and Jorge as the transitional place, as the place from which to move on to the alternative destination. Hence Rita tells her story and asks for money for the ticket with which she could carry on her journey to Villa Ortúzar.

The way in which Rita reaches this transitional place is not described in detail. Jorge explains:

Cuando llegó a moza y se cansó de ser sirvienta, anduvo haciéndose la loca con Marcos Bergner, yendo y viniendo en el autito de carrera colorado desde la casita de Marcos en la costa hasta el Plaza o cualquier boliche de donde no hubieran echado todavía a Marcos.

(1004)

(When she became a young woman and she got tired of being a servant, she started carrying on madly with Marcos Bergner, coming and going in the little, red sports car between Marcos' chalet on the coast and the Plaza or any bar from which Marcos hadn't yet been thrown out.)

The initial ambivalence in Rita, the dual pull of the Malabias and Julita, seems to resolve itself in favour of the side of Julita, of “locura” (madness); and automatically the mention of Marcos' chalet reinforces the change. When Marcos rejects Rita that change is continued:

Anduvo con uno u otro por la ciudad, la plaza y los alrededores. Después bajó hacia la otra orilla, los cafetines de la zona fabril. Y no se supo más; sin que nos enteráramos, llegó un día en que dejamos de saber.

(1006, italics mine)

(She went with one man or another around the city, the square, the outskirts. Afterwards she went down to the other shore, the cafés in the industrial zone. And that was all that was known; without our finding out, the day came when we ceased knowing.)

The initial play of “arriba/abajo” (above/below) with Jorge and the funeral is clearly extended here, since Rita descends from the city centre in order to pursue her new, alternative life. And it is interesting to note that in “El álbum” the woman who initiates Jorge sexually is first seen by him as she walks “calle arriba” (up the street) from the port (1274), as if climbing up out of the subversive area of experience. Further, the notion of disappearing from the field of vision of the norm of Santa María is important here: Santa María ceases to see, in other words it ceases to understand, when its ideology is transgressed. The motif of disappearing recurs in “Historia”, where doña Herminia disappears on adventurous, sexual exploits outside Santa María (1259), in “Regreso al sur”, where Perla passes out of sight to be a prostitute, and also in El astillero, where Gálvez's “defection” from the shipyard is accompanied by his completely vanishing.⁸

Since one of the inaugural steps in Jorge's story is Rita's disappearance, it is also important to focus on her reappearance—the way in which her world makes itself known in Santa María.⁹ Her activities are infiltrated by word of mouth: there is no direct contact. Godoy tells the story of his meeting with Rita, and nothing could be more appropriate than that he should be the source, because he is a travelling salesman (1001), the perfect embodiment of the middle-man—between producer and consumer, between Rita's world and Santa María. It is not surprising that, in view of the source of Godoy's subject-matter, Jorge rejects his story as a lie: “… la historia de él era otra, mentirosa …” (1001) (his story was different, a lie). This is an ambiguous statement. On the one hand, it suggests that Godoy simply misunderstands the true significance of Rita's story, and so “mentirosa” is used pejoratively. On the other hand, the statement hints at that capacity for creativity, for invention, in the alternative world, in which case “mentirosa” is a positive assessment. Now, the enabling context for Godoy's being in Santa María to tell the story is that he is over forty and so gave money to Rita, thus keeping her at a distance: he was not entangled with her, he did not involve himself in the creative process, and so he took the return journey to the normal world. The enabling context for Jorge and Tito to hear, to understand and to make full use of the information that Godoy passes on is that they have been living outside Santa María. On their own in Buenos Aires, they have not even seen Rita—their world is as circumscribed, has the same values, as that of Santa María from which Rita has already passed out of sight. But when they return to Santa María the link has been weakened and Jorge describes himself and Tito as “forasteros” (1006) (strangers). Their degree of foreignness is sufficient to make them appreciate the potentialities of Rita when helped by Godoy's mediation.

The creation of awareness of the alternative world seems to depend wholly on mediation. Godoy is the initial mediator who sparks off the entire experience for Jorge and Tito, but there are various mediators or story-tellers in Para una tumba. In the first place, Díaz Grey learns of the plans for the unusual funeral from Caseros, who was involved in the preparations. In addition, Godoy's own story is not told direct to Tito and Jorge but is mediated by another person: “Uno de los muchachos repitió el relato de Godoy” (1006) (One of the boys repeated Godoy's story). And the multiplicity of tellers and mediators is strictly in accord with the strategy in other works by Onetti at this period, after the narrative ambiguities of Los adioses. In “Historia”, apart from Díaz Grey as narrator, Guiñazú and Ferragut both supply information for certain stretches of the story (1257-58 and 1260 respectively), and there is even one contribution from an unidentified “observador” (1252) (observer). The same diversity of sources is present again in “Jacob y el otro” (1961). But in Para una tumba it is clear that the most important tellers are Rita, Jorge and Tito, because of the scope of their contributions, and Díaz Grey, because he contributes to Jorge's story by adding chapter III, and because he also tells the story of all the others' efforts at telling stories.¹⁰ In this way, Díaz Grey is a teller in two senses: he tells a story, and he receives and organizes others' “accounts”.

Now this diversity of source has certain consequences. It has already become apparent that for characters to tell a story works in very close connection with to tell a lie. In a revealing passage of “Historia”, it is suggested that truth and falsehood are continuous concepts, equally useful in constructing a story:

Bailan, son bailarines, eso puede afirmarse, y no es posible decir otra cosa, si hemos jurado decir solamente verdades para descubrir o formar la verdad. Pero no hemos jurado nada. De modo que las mentiras que pueda acercar cada uno de nosotros, siempre que sean de primera mano y que coincidan con la verdad que los tres presentimos, serán útiles y bienvenidas.

(1253)

(They dance, they're dancers, that can be stated, and it's impossible to claim anything else, if we've sworn only to speak truths in order to discover or form the truth. But we haven't sworn anything. So that the lies that any one of us can put forward, as long as they're not borrowed and they coincide with the truth that we all three intuit, will be useful and welcome.)

In “Historia” there is a kind of committee deciding on what might be feasible as conjecture—it is a collective effort at construction. In Para una tumba each teller seems bounded in his/her task by what he/she thinks the listener will accept. And this, combined with the notion of the acceptable “lie”, results in the plurality of the versions: it is the inevitable consequence. The existential plurality of La vida breve shifts in Los adioses, Para una tumba and the contemporaneous stories on to the level of narration, so that here the interest is far more on the different ways of telling stories and hence of looking at the world.

Even before Jorge starts to modify his story and before Tito provides an explicit counterposition, there are elements in Para una tumba which point to the interest in multiple possibilities. This tendency is epitomized by the ending of Jorge's account of his early connection with Rita. Rita leaves the Malabia household and lives with Marcos Bergner until

… Marcos se aburrió y la cosa tuvo alguno de los sabidos finales: la dejó desnuda en un camino, la tiró al río, la dio una paliza imperdonable, o simplemente desapareció hasta que el hambre obligó a la muchacha a salir de la casa de la costa y buscar un hombre que significara un almuerzo.

(1006)

(… Marcos got bored and the affair had one of the known endings: he left her naked on a road, he threw her in the river, he gave her an unforgivable beating, or he simply disappeared until hunger forced her to leave the house on the coast and to look for a man who would represent lunch.)

Four distinct possibilities.¹¹ The plurality is a function of the limited point of view within the story, and also of the insistence on the stories' belonging to particular individuals. Correcting himself over his story-telling, Jorge states: “… acaso esas sugerencias le sean útiles para aproximarse a mi comprensión de la historia, a mi historia” (1006) (perhaps these suggestions may be useful to you in order to get closer to my understanding of the story, to my story). There is no doubting the emphasis—Jorge implies that a unique, true story exists but this hardly interests him:

Puedo estar equivocado cuando creo que mi historia es infinitamente más importante que la historia. La historia puedo contársela en dos o tres minutos y entonces usted, sobre ella, construye su historia y tal vez …

(1009-10)

(I may be mistaken when I think that my story is infinitely more important than the story. The story could be told in two or three minutes and then on it you could build your story and perhaps …)

The true story is made immediately susceptible to Díaz Grey's possible efforts to make of it something to please himself, even though Díaz Grey was not in the least involved in the events on which the story is supposedly based. Indeed, it is notable that Díaz Grey has by this stage already made suggestions to Jorge—for instance, that his hotel room in Buenos Aires overlooked the square in front of Constitución (1007)—which have been acknowledged as true, or rather simply admitted into Jorge's version. And this is no more than a continuation of the multiple sources of Rita's own story—a story which is invented and improved upon by successive men and perfected by Ambrosio's creation of the goat: each adds to or modifies the story, the collective lie.

But these details are preparatory to the later global emphasis on ambiguity, which emerges when Jorge makes the second visit to Díaz Grey. This marks the beginning of his purposive “emptying” of the story. Jorge's strategic move is to deny that Rita is in the grave in Santa María—it is not her but her cousin. His motive seems to be to obliterate the story. He allowed this one false element to stand because it suited his purpose:

… déjeme volver un poco atrás para liquidar definitivamente la historia. Todo lo que le conté hace un año era verdad, menos, claro, lo que permití que creyera, el malentendido que quise mantener.

(1029)

(… allow me to go back a little in order to finish with the story once and for all. All I told you a year ago was true, except of course, what I allowed you to believe, the misunderstanding which I wanted to maintain.)

Jorge's unexpected reference to the truth (to which I will return) finds an explicit counterbalance in Díaz Grey's stance: Díaz Grey is only interested in one thing in the story, and that has nothing to do with its truth (1043).

Jorge's attempt to obliterate the story continues at the very end of the novel, during his third visit to Díaz Grey, where he actually denies the whole of the part relating to Buenos Aires, Ambrosio and Rita. He now claims it to have been the invention of himself and Tito, and so he creates a void at the very heart of the story.¹² But this process of denial is not all, because, in communicating with Tito separately, Díaz Grey obtains clear counter-assertions that Tito actually knew Ambrosio when Jorge did not, and that Jorge really did lose the year out of university of which he previously spoke. These are denials of Jorge's own denials, and simply add to the already accumulated weight of contradictory evidence from Tito's own story. In fact, Díaz Grey's opinion is that the cross-currents of the case suggest that a further thousand versions are quite feasible:

Quiero decir que da para mucho más, la historia; que podría ser contada de manera distanta otras mil veces.

(1044)

(I mean that the story is good for a lot more; that it could be told in a different way another thousand times.)

Underlying this progressive retelling and emptying of the story, there is a symbolic motif which physically enacts the process of filling and emptying. At some stage, either before beginning to tell his story or shortly after starting, Jorge fills his pipe and begins to smoke—on the first two occasions at least, when he is going to build the story and not cut parts out. Furthermore, as Díaz Grey himself observes (1013), the emptying of the pipe corresponds to the end of different sections in the telling process. One might take the pipe to be the form of the story, the bare data, which Jorge provides with a different “filling” on each occasion, so that, as Díaz Grey says, there could be a thousand different ways of filling in the formal outline.

But, having seen the undoubted process of emptying in the novel, it is not enough to concentrate on this emptying alone. One could stop with that, but it would be settling for a good deal less than one might. In that connection, I think that it is useful to consider something which Jonathan Culler says:

Sometimes … the work itself tells us where to stop, closes itself by offering a definitive commentary on its theme, but even then we need not accept that stopping place and may go on to reach others which our conventions of reading provide. It may well be that we stop when we feel we have reached the truth or the place of maximum force and not, as Barthes suggests, that wherever we stop becomes the place of truth; though of course the alternatives are not mutually exclusive.¹³

Hence, reading Para una tumba might stop with a delineation of the ambiguities created by the different stories, and this would certainly be a strategy familiar from certain kinds of formalist criticism. But, in my judgement, it is of crucial importance that the story about Rita and Jorge in Buenos Aires and its progressive emptying do not constitute the entire subject-matter of the novel. The story and its emptying are set in a framework which makes of the ambiguities more than a formal issue. The story—its versions and its emptying—are presented within a framework which suggests a structure of values underlying the characters' story-telling and connected to the “ideological geography” that has already been discussed. Hence, the emptying is best understood not just as a formal device, but as a function of different values—Jorge's, Tito's and Díaz Grey's. What is important is less the content of the story about Rita, than why individuals favour a particular slant, and this must draw into the discussion Díaz Grey's constant assessment of people: their positions and values. To adapt the opening dichotomy of the novel concerning knowledge: what the reader does not know is what happened; what the reader can know is why he/she does not know, in other words, why the story is emptied.

.....

The survey of the positions and values of the different tellers begins with Tito. On his first contact with him, Díaz Grey observes his appearance. He hesitates to call him a man, but about his clothes there is no doubt:

… estaba vestido como para una fiesta, con un traje oscuro de chaleco, con zapatos negros y lustrados, con un pañuelo blanco colgando las puntas en el pecho. El sombrero negro, de alas levantadas, le tapaba una rodilla; vi, mucho después, la doble ve de la cadena del reloj en el vientre.

(1033)

(… he was dressed as for a special occasion, with a dark three-piece suit, with black shiny shoes, with a white handkerchief hanging its corners over his chest. The black hat, with raised brim, was covering a knee; much later, I saw the W of the watch chain on his stomach.)

He is the essence of a certain seedy respectability. Moreover, as Díaz Grey points out later,

Está engordando; puede suponerse que la resolución que brilla, hostil, fanática y remota en sus ojos verdes y fríos es la resolución de engordar.

(1036)

(He's getting fat; it's deducible that the determination that shines, hostilely, fanatically and remotely in his cold, green eyes is the determination to get fat.)

At an earlier point in the novel, Jorge expresses his disgust for Tito's acquiescence in getting fat, and a further comment by Díaz Grey shows the full import of both the formal clothes and the capitulation to obesity—Tito is imitating his dead father:

Aquella imitación se cumplía de dos maneras, en dos campos: por medio de la ridícula perla en la corbata, la cadena del reloj, el peinado, diez detalles más que fui descubriendo, todo esto nacido de la voluntad consciente; y por medio de la voluntad oscura de su cuerpo que se había puesto a crecer en el cuello, el vientre y las nalgas, remedando con exactitud, con cierta modestia, la figura desagradable del padre muerto.

(1036)

(That imitation was carried out in two ways, in two areas: through the ridiculous pearl in his tie, the watch chain, the haircut, ten other details that I was discovering, all this born of conscious will; and through the obscure will of his body which had begun to expand at the neck, in the stomach and buttocks, exactly copying, with a certain modesty, the unpleasant figure of his dead father.)

The gradually increasing fatness is simply Tito's transition or apprenticeship into his father's world and it is consistent with this that Godoy is also obese. Tito's future intentions are therefore far from surprising—he is going to remain in Santa María and finish his law studies (Santa María's status as the location of legality is never clearer). Díaz Grey's final opinion of him is dismissive, since Tito has opted for his father's delusions, for “la misma fe en los principios, en el éxito” (1037) (the same faith in principles, in success), which fundamentally means that he has reduced himself to a geometrical calculation in which all he has to do is “perseverar, despersonalizarse, ser apenas” (1037) (to persevere, to depersonalize himself, barely to be).

While this meeting of Tito and Díaz Grey illuminates the former's position in the overall distribution of events, it would be wrong to see Tito here without due mention of another moment related by him from the period in Buenos Aires. For it transpires that Tito's connection with legality is strong throughout, even when in Buenos Aires. When Jorge goes to him and asks for advice about how he can marry Rita, it is Tito who immediately articulates the probable impossibility of it because Jorge is a minor. This negative view is supported by a professor of law in the university, whose advice is tinged with a paternalistic attitude towards Jorge. The aligning of Tito and the professor in the legal negation and Jorge's angry reaction to it suggest in fact that, though in Buenos Aires, Tito is never really in the same marginal world as Jorge. That is further evidenced by his specific attitude to Rita. For him, she is simply a prostitute, and so he sleeps with her and gives her money, just as Godoy and so many others do. The financial basis of Tito's relationship with Rita indicates that the creative dimension of Jorge's relationship with her is not within his understanding, and in fact he claims to have no idea what Jorge might be trying to add to Rita's story—he makes three crass suggestions: “una paloma para llevar en el hombro” or “una serpiente que le envolviera un brazo” or “un tigre bramador” (1040) (a dove to carry on her shoulder, a snake to wrap round her arm, a roaring tiger). But his consistency is obvious, for when Díaz Grey comes upon him in Santa María he is busy playing with the “niños mendigos” (begging children), giving them sweets, spending his father's money (1033-34), and the children are in an analogous position to Rita, who is also forced to beg for money.

According to Tito, Ambrosio exploited Rita—he took her money and lived off her earnings—, and so he condemns him. In Tito's ideology, financial probity is paramount, so that to give Rita money for a service rendered is acceptable, but to take money from her is immoral. In just the same way, he adopts a “moral” stance towards Jorge, because, according to him, Rita's tuberculosis was exacerbated by the failure to take the correct steps while she was living with Jorge and the money Jorge was receiving from his father could easily have been spent on a cure rather than given away to the communist party. Tito even goes so far as to suggest that Jorge has a guilty conscience after the affair:

… al fin, después de un año de perversidad, de bravata, de estupidez, el asunto le quedó demasiado grande y no pudo soportar el remordimiento.

(1041)

(… in the end, after a year of perversity, bravado, stupidity, the thing got too big for him, and he couldn't cope with the remorse.)

For Tito to introduce the notion of remorse is thoroughly consistent with his standpoint. In La vida breve Brausen imagines the reaction of la Queca's normal clients after they pay and leave her, and remorse is among the likely residues of the encounters that he mentions (626-27). Similarly, for Tito, who does not live in Rita's world but merely passes unconsciously through it, remorse is an important feature of experience with her. And that is made the more emphatic when he is seen to provide himself with an alibi to pre-empt the possibility of regret or guilt. Tito's ploy to salve his conscience is that, by sleeping with Rita, he has found a way to give her money when he thinks she needs it:

… yo seguí acostándome con Rita cuantas veces tuve ganas o cuando sabía que los pesos que le daba eran necesarios para ellos.

(1041)

(… I carried on sleeping with Rita whenever I wanted to or when I knew that they needed the pesos that I gave her.)

The incongruous combination of juvenile pride in his sexual prowess and selfless charity pinpoints the hollowness of his “morality”.

In view of the values displayed by Tito, the ideological world to which he belongs, it comes as no surprise that he claims his story as the true one, for his commitment is not to the creativeness and the “mentira” of Rita's space, but to the legality and anti-“mentira” of the world of Santa María. Nothing could be more appropriate than that he should pay for the drinks that he and Díaz Grey have drunk while they have been talking: Tito and Godoy and those who view Rita as a prostitute always give money; the creative give their stories in payment.

In Tito's version of the story, Higinia acts as internal support for his attitudes and ideology. I think that it is fair to say that Higinia is to Rita as Tito is to Jorge. In the first place, Higinia is “gordita” (plump), is well dressed and has money to spend (1039); as with Tito, these are details with specific connotations. Moreover, like Tito, Higinia is only a temporary visitor to Rita's room: she stays “unos días, dos semanas” (1039) (a few days, two weeks), and then returns occasionally, while Tito says that he “caía rara vez por la pieza” (1039) (rarely dropped in to the room). But the main point is that Higinia is simply a prostitute and no more—she is trying to make money, she, like Tito, is ambitious and has her objective in a certain kind of success. Unlike Rita, she is not truly marginal, nor does she act as the stimulus for the creation of a story, but rather she proceeds on a purely financial basis. The only difference with Tito is that she stays in Buenos Aires (no thought of carrying on to Villa Ortúzar for her), while Tito returns to Santa María. So it is that Higinia is projected by Tito as a supplement to his viewpoint and as a contrast with Rita. It makes little difference that Jorge's version has Higinia take over from Rita, since this comes as a result of his emptying strategy at that stage. The reader knows little that is unquestioned about Higinia. What he/she does know is that her roles in different versions of the story are a function of different tellers' values, and there is little or no common ground between these.

To move on to Jorge is to progress to the novel's key, changing figure. The initial meeting with Díaz Grey (992-1014) reveals a certain state of affairs, which becomes progressively modified through the novel. One of Díaz Grey's first assessments of Jorge relates him specifically to that world into which Brausen tried to move in La vida breve. Jorge is

… jugando correctamente hasta el final el juego que se había impuesto, ardoroso y sin convicción verdadera.

(996)

(… playing correctly up to the end the game which he had imposed on himself, fervently and without any real conviction.)

This playing of a game by Jorge is allied to what Díaz Grey sees in him that is absolutely alive; he finds in Jorge “la egolatría y la resolución de sentirse vivo a cualquier precio” (1000) (the selfishness and the determination to feel himself alive at any price). In accordance with this, Jorge has his own special uniform. Just as Tito is defined by his clothes, so too is Jorge: he appears in the cemetery in a hopelessly inappropriate suit—a city suit, the city being Buenos Aires—, as if to emphasize his commitment to the alternative place. And so, logically, he does not go into the centre of Santa María in this suit—when he returns from the cemetery with Díaz Grey, he makes him stop the car and he gets out before they can climb into the centre of the city. At a later stage, Díaz Grey articulates the implicit philosophy of Jorge—the credo, as it were—which gives his initial posture its cogency:

No quiero esto o aquello de la vida, lo quiero todo, pero de una manera perfecta y definitiva. Estoy resuelto a negarme a lo que ustedes, los adultos, aceptan y hasta desean. Yo soy de otra raza. Yo no quiero volver a empezar, nunca, ni esto ni aquello. Una cosa y otra, por turno, porque el turno es forzoso. Pero una sola vez cada cosa y para siempre. Sin la cobardía de tener las espaldas cubiertas, sin la sórdida, escondida seguridad de que son posibles nuevos ensayos, de que los juicios pueden modificarse. Me llamo Jorge Malabia. No sucedió nada antes del día de mi nacimiento; y, si yo fuera mortal, nada podría suceder después de mí.

(1025-26)

(I don't want this or that from life, I want it all, but in a perfect, definitive way. I'm determined to refuse what you, the adults, accept and even want. I'm from another race. I don't want to start again, ever, either this or that. One thing and then another, by turns, because the turns are inevitable. But each thing once and for all time. Without the cowardice of having one's retreat covered, without the sordid, hidden certainty that new attempts can be made, that opinions can change. I'm called Jorge Malabia. Nothing happened before the day I was born; and, were I mortal, nothing could happen after me.)

The force of opposition to, of rejection of the safety net of values that Tito embraces is unequivocal here. And this opposition receives emphatic further stress when Tito tells Díaz Grey of Jorge's rejection of the kind of remorse that he tries to ascribe to him after the Rita affair:

Nunca me podré arrepentir de nada porque cualquier cosa que haga sólo podrá ser hecha si está dentro de la posibilidades humanas.

(1041)

(I can never regret anything because whatever I do can only be done if it's within the range of human possibilities.)

The relationship with Rita is in accord with this. From the references made to her period of employment with the Malabia family it emerges that at one point Jorge proposed to her that they sleep together and that he was rejected. There is, therefore, an initial incompatibility, but this disappears when Jorge descends to the level of the street in Buenos Aires. But it is interesting to observe that before either Jorge or Tito meets Rita in Buenos Aires there is a discrepancy in their objective. For Tito it is simply a sexual adventure. This idea disgusts Jorge, in part because that is also his own motive, but also because he wants something else—the dimension that Tito does not comprehend. So when Jorge does establish his relationship with Rita he has clearly moved out of the parental, legal zone of Santa María (Rita, therefore, no longer rejects him), and into that creative marginal world which Ambrosio previously occupied.

However, when Jorge arrives in Díaz Grey's office after the funeral, the process of retransformation, of return begins. Where he wore the city suit to the funeral, he now wears another disguise, that of the poor of Santa María, which still counts as an oppositional stance to the dress of his peers in Santa María; but the difference is that he is in the centre of the city, he has risen from the “abajo” (below) system, and his clothes are not from Buenos Aires but from Santa María. Nevertheless, Jorge is still hostile to Díaz Grey, telling him he does not understand, provoking him to ask questions and correcting him over minutiae, and he thus asserts a strong degree of independence.

Jorge's reappearance for the second instalment of the story (1023-31) brings certain modifications, not so much to his appearance (for instance, he is not “más gordo” [1023] [fatter]) as to mental attitudes. A sign of the change comes at the end of the first part of the encounter, where Díaz Grey and Jorge exchange some final words before separating:

Hablaba muy de arriba hacia abajo, desde la estatura del caballo …

(1024)

(He [Jorge] spoke from very high up downwards, from the back of the horse …)

Now this physical disposition clearly contrasts with that at the end of the first encounter, when Jorge will not accompany Díaz Grey up into the centre of Santa María but chooses to remain below and outside. In fact, these first two phases (992-1014 and 1023-31) have important structural features in common. Firstly, they have bipartite forms, with an initial meeting—in the cemetery or in the hospital—followed by an extended meeting in Díaz Grey's surgery during which Jorge can tell his story. Secondly, the first part of each pair of meetings centres on the fate of particular employees—in the first, the Malabias' former servant Rita, in the second, Tito's father's employee.

This symmetry only emphasizes the fact that Jorge's objective in talking to Díaz Grey the second time is to change what occurred the first time:

Estaba decidido y resuelto a modificar, a cualquier precio, aquella otra noche de diciembre.

(1025)

(He was resolved and determined to modify, at any price, that other December night.)

The desire to modify comes because Jorge is forgetting what he was before. That credo which Díaz Grey imagined for him is still potentially statable, but Díaz Grey recognizes Jorge's growing distance from it—he no longer realizes that it can still be his. In the course of the attempt to modify what was said before (and that is what the emptying process consists in), Díaz Grey discovers three “suciedades” (obscentities) to which Jorge has now surrendered. In the first place, there is his unironic seriousness, which fatally links him with his father:

… aprendió a tomarse en serio, y no con la desesperación y el sentido de fatalidad de antes, sino tranquilamente, sin intuir el ridículo y la propia miseria. Casi como se toman en serio su padre y cualquiera de los hombres de la mesa de póker del Club Progreso.

(1026-27)

(… he learnt to take himself seriously, and not with the previous desperation and sense of fatalism, but calmly, without intuiting the absurdity and his own abjectness. Almost as his father and any of the men at the poker table in the Club Progreso take themselves seriously.)

The similarity of Tito with his father signalled his allegiance to legality and the status quo, and in Jorge's case it shows the change that is being worked in him. And, as an automatic consequence, the second obscenity consists in the loss of his rebelliousness, which is replaced by cynicism, by “lo que está al alcance de cualquier hombre concluido” (1028) (what is within the reach of any finished man). His individuality is being eroded, but by conscious practice—it is Jorge himself who is trying to effect the substitution: “… trata de sustituirla [la rebeldía] con cinismo …” (1028) (he is trying to replace rebellion with cynicism). He is in a transitional phase, however, since he still has hostility in him: he does not hide his reluctance on being asked to read Díaz Grey's manuscript. But, at another moment, after going to the window,

Regresó … rejuvenecido, casi exactamente en un año; pero esto duró poco porque yo había aprendido a manejarlo.

(1028)

(He returned … rejuvenated, by almost exactly one year; but this did not last long because I had already learnt to control him.)

Jorge's previous rebellious independence seems much reduced since Díaz Grey can now control him. The third and last obscenity is that Jorge has learnt precisely what he earlier disowned, that is, he has learnt to regret. The third obscenity

… consiste en el pecado adulto de creer a posteriori que los actos sin remedio necesitan nuestro permiso.

(1031)

(… consists of the adult sin of believing a posteriori that the acts which cannot be helped need our consent.)

The ideas of accommodation and of adult weakness stand in stark contrast to his former belligerent opposition, his potential “una sola vez cada cosa y para siempre” (1025) (each thing once and for all time) without subsequent modification, without the messiness of guilt and justification.

When Jorge ultimately reappears for the third phase (1043-44), the symbolic indicators of his position again undergo modification. Díaz Grey meets him on ground level (1043)—there is no hint here of above or below—in a way that is reminiscent of the encounter between Tito and Díaz Grey on ground level in the market. There is a suggestion that Jorge will send a car to give Díaz Grey a lift so that the whole story can be finally clarified, and that lift would clearly be an inversion of the lift in the first encounter that Díaz Grey gave to Jorge on returning from the cemetery. In addition, the first meeting had Díaz Grey waiting for Jorge in the cemetery, and the second occurred by chance. This third meeting finds Jorge waiting for Díaz Grey outside his surgery—a progressive reversal of positions. Jorge is changing, and it is especially notable that Díaz Grey is no longer touched by him. Díaz Grey previously responded to Jorge's spirit, to his hate, but that has now been entirely replaced:

Si me estuvo odiando en la última entrevista, aquel odio se había transformado en paciencia, en aceptación.

(1043)

(If he was hating me in the last interview, that hate had changed to patience, to acceptance.)

The hostility has become utterly tame. Jorge may still be wearing the clothes of the peasants of Santa María, but he is essentially a different person now. Where the ambivalence of the second occasion leads Jorge to modify the first instalment of the story, this time he actually wants to cut out, to censor a large portion. And what is to disappear (with all the ideological connotations of that word discussed above)¹⁴ is precisely the alternative world, the world which corresponds to the self he is casting off:

Toda la historia de Constitución, el chivo, Rita, el encuentro con el comisionista Godoy, mi oferta de casamiento, la prima Higinia, todo es mentira.

(1044)

(The whole story of Constitución, the goat, Rita, the meeting with the salesman Godoy, my offer of marriage, the cousin Higinia, that's all a lie.)

The final word clearly sets the seal on his change—when “mentira” is pejorative, as it is here, the evaluation is fixed squarely on the side of legality, of Santa María, and so denies creativity. In the second instalment, Jorge already adopted the idea of truth as a criterion for correcting his story (1029), but it is here that the results are most devastating. He is changing the story because of the change in himself, and the elements he rejects or represses are precisely those that stand in opposition to his increasing assimilation into the world of Santa María—where he began by rejecting Santa María, he now rejects Buenos Aires. The emptying in Para una tumba corresponds in large part to this change in Jorge's position and values, although it also owes something to a clash of individuals' points of view.

Viewing Jorge's experience as a whole, there emerges a further dimension—a kind of archetypal infrastructure—which may help to illuminate the change in his position. I want to speculate that insofar as Jorge is seen to move gradually from a position in the marginal world of Buenos Aires to a position within the social and cultural norm of Santa María—the “legal world”—, his experience may be conceived in general terms as a working out of the Oedipus complex. In these terms, Santa María might be the world of the Father and Buenos Aires that of the Mother. Jorge's instinct leads him to commit himself to the area of experience in Buenos Aires defined by a woman, Rita, who, whatever else she does, offers certain sexual attractions to him. If the speculation is pursued, this may be seen as the male child's desire to be united in as a complete a way as possible with the Mother. Jorge's enquiries about marrying Rita give concrete form to the desire to perpetuate his liaison with her. And yet, this union is forbidden in the Law of the dominant, Santa María culture. The need for Jorge to obtain parental permission to marry Rita may be seen as the immediate manifestation of the operation of the “legal” system. Thus the paternal Law of Santa María stands against the Buenos Aires underworld, the world of desire and instinctual behaviour, and attempts to preclude participation in it—“it does not exist”, people “disappear” when they go there. As Jorge's movement demonstrates, he ultimately colludes with the “legal world” in trying to eliminate the desire for the Mother. In terms of the Oedipus complex, this might be seen as a normal development, as the male child accepts the language and culture of the Father and permits a kind of castration to occur. By accepting the Law, the child is enabled to take up a certain position within a society, is granted the status and rewards of an adult subject, but at the inevitable price of repressing desire, of splitting the self. This alignment with the paternal Law—the symbolic order of Santa María (in the Lacanian sense)—is demonstrated by Tito, who willingly embraces and imitates the forms of his father's world in Santa María (including both the study of its legal system and the adoption of his father's physical form). But, above all, the alignment with the paternal Law is demonstrated by Jorge, who renounces the attachment to Buenos Aires, denies/represses its existence, and starts to assume the pattern of life appropriate to Santa María, his father's world.¹⁵ The emptying of Jorge's story is a symbolic enactment of the castration that occurs as the Oedipus complex is resolved in favour of the Father's dominance and right to the Mother. Similarly, the burial of the woman's body (whether Rita's or Higinia's) corresponds to a sort of repression of the Mother's presence as the male child comes to identify with the Father. The repression of desire, the burial of the body, splits the subject: the unconscious is created by the suppression of drives incompatible with the full assimilation into conscious social life. In terms of the Oedipus complex, therefore, Jorge may be seen as passing through the Oedipal phase and ultimately resolving it in a way which psychoanalysis views as normal and desirable.¹⁶ This parallel between Jorge's experience and the Oedipus complex may not be viable in all details—for instance, Jorge is obviously too old to be a literal example of the complex—but, in its general thrust, it does help to clarify the nature of the major dynamic character of the novel.

Ambrosio figures in the novel as a simple parallel to Jorge. It is not just that their respective periods with Rita have several common features, but, perhaps more interestingly, that they react in similar ways to their eventual separation from her. The gradual change in Jorge is initiated after Rita is buried and he goes up into the centre of Santa María to tell the story; in Ambrosio the change occurs as soon as he has finished the nine months' gestation of the idea of the goat and then actually acquired it. After that creative period, the change in him is noticed by Rita. From the taciturn, inert figure he is transformed:

Comparado con su recuerdo, que Rita había creído definitivo, el hombre fue locuaz y cordial; parecía más delgado, un poco ojeroso, con un aire de liberación y amansado orgullo.

(1019)

(Compared with her memory, which Rita had thought definitive, the man was talkative and cordial; he seemed slimmer, a little heavy-eyed, with an air of freedom and muted pride.)

It is as if Ambrosio had passed through a tunnel and emerged on the other side to carry on exactly as he was before entering it. Now that the creativity is behind him he is no longer remarkable—he would be capable of giving Rita the money she asks for if he were to meet her again in the station:

… la cara horizontal ya no era hermética y ensimismada; era la cara vulgar de un joven buen mozo, capaz de entusiasmos y bravatas, el rostro nunca visto de alguien a quien se puede limosnear dinero para un viaje hasta el otro extremo de la ciudad.

(1020)

(… the horizontal face was no longer hermetic and withdrawn; it was the ordinary face of a pleasant young man, capable of enthusing and bragging, the previously unseen face of someone who you could ask for money for a journey to the other end of the city.)

That he could be asked for money reduces him to the uniformity of all the others in the station—he crosses back to the world which gives money to Rita, and this distances him from her definitively, just as Jorge is finally distanced from her world.

The movement of Jorge can be gauged by his relationship with Díaz Grey, who acts as a fixed point of value throughout. At the start of the novel, their relationship appears to be that of two people with certain crucial things in common. In their first encounter, there are two details suggesting their similarity. After Díaz Grey has driven Jorge back from the cemetery, Jorge gets out of the car and he looks in at Díaz Grey:

A través del vidrio de la ventanilla subido a medias nos miramos fumando, los dos con el cigarrillo colgado de la boca.

(997)

(Through the half-raised car window we looked at each other smoking, both with a cigarette hanging from our mouths.)

The two are momentarily frozen in a quasi-mirror image of each other, and this link is further underlined by Díaz Grey's not using the familiar “tú” form in addressing Jorge: he uses the polite form, and so manifests a respect for Jorge which is totally unlike the reaction of the other men at the funeral.

These early indicators are complemented later by more overt statements. During the second part of this first encounter, in his surgery, Díaz Grey observes that Jorge has respect for him, which is caused by his awareness that “pertenecemos a la misma raza” (1009) (we belong to the same race). This sense of common ground, of coincidence in their apartness, is underlined firstly by Jorge's direct statements that he finds it possible to talk to Díaz Grey, in contrast with his experience with the rest of Santa María, and secondly by Díaz Grey's formulation, during the second meeting, of Jorge's potential credo, which he not only shapes, but to which he also gives his assent.

These factors establish the initial common ground, especially in that Díaz Grey is the one favoured with the story, and also in that he is allowed to contribute to it—chapter III is his creation and Jorge simply accepts it into his story. But there is a divergence as the two meet on subsequent occasions. Díaz Grey is a constant touchstone, he is the outsider at the beginning and at the end—the ironical observer, calm and attentive (especially to Jorge) throughout. But at the end he calls Jorge “m'hijo” (1044) (my boy) in compassion, when he sees how Jorge has betrayed the earlier, shared values—the “m'hijo” is patronizing, recognizing Jorge's weakness, and is on a different plane from his earlier respect. It is indicative that, while Jorge is trying to suppress the story and tell the “truth”, Díaz Grey still has the same attitude as before—he does not want to know precisely what happened:

Ignoraba el significado de lo que había visto, me era repugnante la idea de averiguar y cerciorarme.

(1045)

(I did not know the significance of what I had seen, the idea of making investigations to find out was repugnant to me.)

For Díaz Grey the play, the creativeness is still paramount, because he has no position and beliefs to project which would make the “truth” important. In sum, Díaz Grey and Jorge diverge, or rather, Jorge moves away from Díaz Grey's position.

Onetti's novels are often built around twin poles, movement in terms of which is crucial. Where in Para esta noche Ossorio and Morasán are the mutually defining antitheses of motion and value, where in La vida breve Brausen and Díaz Grey advance in parallel, where in Los adioses the man oscillates between the woman/hotel and the girl/“casita”, in Para una tumba, the twin poles seem to be Rita/Buenos Aires/Díaz Grey and Tito/Santa María. Jorge's switch from the former grouping to the latter is the essential dynamic movement of the novel. In that way Jorge's statement that “Tito y yo inventamos el cuento” (1044) (Tito and I invented the story) is his definitive alignment with Santa María, the completion of the mutation, the final shattering of the link which joined him with Díaz Grey in “la misma raza” (the same race).

More can be said about Díaz Grey's role in the novel. His whole state of mind is made manifest by his narrative strategy and his passive control of events. Imprecisions or inversions of logic are simply accepted and cause no disruption. Talking of the choice of firm for funerals in Santa María, he points out that

… la elección se había decidido en rincones de la casa del duelo, por una razón, por diez o por ninguna.

(987)

(… the choice had been made in corners in the house of mourning, for one reason, for ten or for none.)

The self-cancellation of the reasons—ten or none—does not create any disconcerting effect. Similarly, he generalizes about Jorge's efforts in telling him the story:

… el muchacho hablaba tratando de convencerme de cosas que él sólo suponía o ignoraba.

(991)

(… the boy spoke, trying to convince me of things which he only surmised or knew nothing about.)

The apparent logical impossibility of Jorge's being able to convince him of something he does not even know about causes no concern, since Díaz Grey is not striving for a watertight reasoned discourse—he is mostly not striving at all. Except that, as in La vida breve and Los adioses, the interest in penetrating characters' motivation or illusions is perhaps the most notable feature of the focalization, which, in Para una tumba, is the responsibility of Díaz Grey. Observing Jorge, he remarks:

… pude ver, superpuestos y confundiéndose, dos respetos: el que él me tuvo siempre, a pesar de todo, de tantos pequeños todos, porque sabe que pertenecemos a la misma raza, y que yo, principalmente por indolencia, me he mantenido fiel a ella … El otro respeto era deliberado y falso; lo usaba para defenderse, para conservar las distancias y la superioridad.

(1009)

(… I could see, superimposed and becoming mixed, two respects: the one he always had for me, despite everything, despite so many small everythings, because he knows that we belong to the same race, and that I, mainly out of indolence, have remained faithful to it … The other respect was deliberate and false; he used it to defend himself, to maintain his distance and his superiority.)

The subtlety and detail of Díaz Grey's assessments mean that his mediatory role is stressed. Where in Tierra de nadie and Para esta noche the world of the characters is rendered impersonally, here (as also in Los adioses) there is far less sense of its intractability: things and people are placed in an interpreting framework. The novel's tendency to process or interpret its own content is most strikingly apparent in Díaz Grey's comments on Jorge's technique as a story-teller:

Es un mal narrador—pensé con poca pena—. Muy lento, deteniéndose a querer lo que ama, seguro de que la verdad que importa no está en lo que llaman hechos, demasiado seguro de que yo, el público, no soy grosero ni frívolo y no me aburro.

(1012)

(“He's a bad narrator,” I thought indifferently. “Very slow, stopping to take time over what he likes, sure that the truth that matters is not in what they call facts, too sure that I, the audience, am not vulgar nor frivolous and that I'm not getting bored.”)

I think the point here and elsewhere is perhaps not so much the desire to attach a particular meaning to an event or to an action (although there is clearly a desire to categorize these features by seeing them in the abstract or conceptually), but rather to deflate pretence, to penetrate a surface impression, to destroy illusion. Hence the typical biting aside which deflates Caseros:

Después mencionó al chivo …, mientras yo fumaba y él no, porque es avaro y remero y supone un futuro para el cual cuidarse.

(989, italics mine)

(Then he mentioned the goat …, whilst I smoked and he did not, because he is mean and an oarsman and he assumes that there is a future for which to look after himself.)

And this is a technique which is equally applied to himself. The irony is by no means partial. In response to Jorge's question as to why he is in the cemetery, Díaz Grey replies:

—Pasaba—mentí placentero—. Venía de ver un enfermo y estuve visitando el cementerio porque me dio por pensar en la próxima mudanza.

(994)

(“I was passing,” I lied pleasantly. “I was coming from seeing a patient and I was paying a visit to the cemetery because I started thinking about my next change of abode.”)

What Díaz Grey is doing is to allude to the unpleasant truths that others seem to hide—as so often, he is trying to pierce others' self-deceptions, the kind of self-deception which Jorge progressively practises on himself. And yet, Díaz Grey is uniformly passive, his black sense of humour (manifest in the last quotation) never deserts him: he does not respond to Jorge's provocations (1006-07), and he will not overpress his interest in Jorge's story (1012-13). His patience with human weakness is perfectly exemplified at the end, where he feels a simple peace and pleasure for having written everything down:

Lo único que cuenta es que al terminar de escribirla [la historia] me sentí en paz, seguro de haber logrado lo más importante que puede esperarse de esta clase de tarea: había aceptado un desafio, había convertido en victoria por lo menos una de las derrotas cotidianas.

(1046)

(The only thing which matters is that, on finishing writing the story, I felt at peace, sure of having achieved the most that can be hoped of this kind of task: I had accepted a challenge, I had turned into a victory at least one of the daily defeats.)

At the end of the novel, Díaz Grey's unaltered point of view, his stability, acts as a point of balance after the narrative dynamism created by the change in Jorge: Díaz Grey is the point of rest which completes the narrative trajectory. In that connection, it is important to stress that his pleasure in story-telling does not derive from any transcendental capacity in it—story-telling does not provide the “meaning of life”, for that is the kind of ultimate truth which he rejects throughout the story. There is no humanist belief in a religion of art, in the capacity of art to provide answers, or to enable the self to realize itself in the act of creation. On the contrary, story-telling simply amuses him. And it is this attitude which is ultimately privileged in Para una tumba. At the end of the novel Díaz Grey occupies a position which is not problematized or ironized, except insofar as he refuses to take anything very seriously. His attitude throughout is one of undramatic demystifying. Like the narrator/focalizer of Los adioses, he is both a reader and a teller—he reads other people and their self-deceptions, and he tells the story. But he is totally unlike the narrator/focalizer of Los adioses in the ultimate unquestioned authority of his statements: his reading is never in the least challenged. And there is a curious paradox here. On the one hand, the value-system of Díaz Grey appears to eschew any notion of superior truths or sovereign consciousness—the self is part of a complex, continuous web of relations and interactions: the self is decentred. And yet, on the other hand, the position of Díaz Grey within the narrative organization lends him centrality and ultimately privileges his position in a way which runs counter to the very attitudes and values he exhibits. His beliefs have led him to withdraw from and to belittle the strivings and commitments of others, to place the self at an angle to the ideology and pattern of life in Santa María (rebellion is too active a response for him), and yet the novel's organization leaves him as the centralized residue of all that occurs—it is his angle of vision which emerges unscathed at the end.

Notes

1. The title of the novel is subsequently shortened to Para una tumba. At no point in the novel is the narrator called Díaz Grey. At most he is identified as a doctor (1033, 1035). But this title and the narrator's position within Santa María make it unnecessary to treat him as any other than the character who appears with the name Díaz Grey in most of Onetti's novels after La vida breve.

2. The use of the “nosotros”, as implied corroboration of the main focalizer/narrator, is widespread in Onetti in the 1950s. It occurs in “Historia del Caballero de la Rosa y de la Virgen encinta que vino de Liliput” (1956) (subsequently shortened to “Historia”). For example:

   En el primer momento creímos los tres conocer al hombre para siempre … (1249) (From the first moment, we all three thought that we knew the man for all time …)

   Empezamos a saberlo al día siguiente … (1268) (The next day, we began to find out about it …)

   Supimos también que Guiñazú … visitó Las Casuarinas al día siguiente. (1270) (We also found out that Guiñazú … visited Las Casuarinas the next day.)

   Such references form a background of support for Díaz Grey's individual viewpoint. The same also occurs in “El infierno tan temido” (1957). For example:

   Cuando Risso se casó con Gracia César, nos unimos en el silencio, suprimimos los vaticinios pesimistas. (1294) (When Risso married Gracia César, we joined together in silence, we suppressed pessimistic predictions.)

3. It is noteworthy that Díaz Grey says that, as he drove him into Santa María, Jorge sat on his left (996), which maintains Jorge's position, but, intriguingly, implies that the car is a right-hand drive.

4. Julita figures as a major character in Juntacadáveres (1964).

5. This spatial distribution is reminiscent of Angélica Inés in El astillero. She lives upstairs, above ground level, in her father's house. It is also worth noting that the “casita” (chalet) in Los adioses—the location of a girl who has a certain equivalence as an outsider with mad women in Onetti—is up in the mountains.

6. It is worth pointing out that, in “El Sur”, Jorge Luis Borges writes: “Nadie ignora que el Sur empieza del otro lado de Rivadavia” (No one is unaware that the South begins on the other side of Rivadavia); in Ficciones (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1973), p. 190.

7. In “Historia” it is also the case that the intrusive pair live for a short time in a “casita” by the beach (1254).

8. It is also true of Higinia, in Para una tumba, that she “disappears” from Tito's field of vision when she commits herself to a life of prostitution (1039). The significance of this for the reader's understanding of Tito will become clear in the later discussion of his ideological position.

9. Rita's last home in Santa María before dying and being taken to the cemetery is “uno de los ranchos de la costa” (990) (one of the huts on the coast). Thus her re-entry into Santa María is via the same kind of place as her exit: an insubstantial house on the coast. This hut is the predictable alternative location on the margins of Santa María.

10. At the very end of chapter III, Díaz Grey writes: “El cabrón, que es lo que cuenta” (1023) (The goat, which is what counts/recounts). This play on words is typical of the novel's humour. Ostensibly, Díaz Grey means that the goat is all-important. But the remark also seems to apply to Díaz Grey himself (“cabrón” can mean “bastard”), since he is the one recounting/telling the story at this moment of the novel. This latter reading of the word is lent some weight by the fact that the goat is usually referred to as the “chivo”. Above all, the phrase is ironic as the goat is one of the few characters in Para una tumba who does not recount a story!

11. In “Historia”, a letter from Specht to the strange couple terminates their liaison, but the letter is accounted for in diverse ways by those who do not read its contents:

    Los echó porque se habían emborrachado; porque encontró al muchacho abrazado a la señora Specht; porque le robaron un juego de cucharas de plata que tenían grabados los escudos de los cantones suizos; porque el vestido de la pequeña era indecente en un pecho y en una rodilla; porque al fin de la fiesta bailaron juntos como marineros, como cómicos, como negros, como prostitutas.

    (1256)

    (He threw them out because they had got drunk; because he found the boy embracing Mrs Specht; because they stole a set of silver spoons bearing engraved shields of the Swiss cantons; because the dwarf girl's dress was indecent at a breast and at a knee; because at the end of the party they danced together like sailors, like comedians, like negroes, like prostitutes.)

12. It is implied, during Jorge's third visit to Díaz Grey, that Jorge has been talking to Tito. Jorge refers there to Díaz Grey's interview with Tito in the market (1043).

13. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 229.

14. See pp. 210-11.

15. At one point, Díaz Grey says of himself and Jorge: “Podría ser su padre y no sólo por la edad” (1009) (I could be his father and not only because of my age). If the speculation on the Oedipus complex is to be convincing this assessment needs to be carefully considered, since the “fatherhood” of Díaz Grey is associated with the world which is not Santa María, and that runs counter to the view of paternalism that this speculation is developing. However, the context of Díaz Grey's remark is such that the understanding of the word “father” here is in terms of the pair's kinship, their belonging to the same breed, rather than involving any of the connotations of Law and interdiction associated with the Father in the Oedipus complex.

16. See lecture twenty-two in Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis for an exposition of the Oedipus complex. For a lucid (and conveniently concise) exposition of Lacan's reading of the Oedipus complex, see Anika Lemaire's Jacques Lacan, pp. 82-85.