"Rituals of Rejection" ("Ceremonias de rechazo") is the third, and thus in a sense the centerpiece, of the five stories comprising Luisa Valenzuela's highly-acclaimed collection Other Weapons (Cambio de armas, 1982). Other stories in the volume—notably the first, "Fourth Version," and the last, "Other Weapons"—have receved well-deserved critical attention as complex, suggestive narratives offering a multiplicity of interpretations. In contrast, "Rituals of Rejection" would appear to require little in the way of critical analysis. The story describes a poignant but all too familiar scenario. A woman, here symbolically named Amanda, is enmeshed in a self-destructive relationship with an unworthy lover, and we witness her attempts, ultimately but perhaps not permanently successful, to free herself.

Yet the very simplicity of the plot—if it can be granted so elevated a name—allows us a clear view of some of Valenzuela's characteristic thematic concerns, motifs, and stylistic techniques. The issue of the locus of power in male-female relationships is obviously central, for example, and this is an issue fundamental to her work as a whole. Elsewhere, as in the story "Other Weapons," it is often linked with the more general question of political struggle; even here, such a link is suggested by words like "torture" and "weapon." We also see in this story an emphasis on violence and mind-body conflict that is typical of Valenzuela's work. In addition, her characteristic preoccupation with cyclic processes and metamorphosis is very prominent; indeed, the situation is archetypal, involving a quest, a symbolic death, and a rebirth.

This concern with transformation is underscored both by the narrative point of view, shifting as it does between third- and first-person, and by dominant Valenzuelan motifs such as the mask, the dance, and the mirror. Further, the story is so enriched by echoes from literature (Dante [Alighieri]), folklore, and ritual language of various kinds, some of it unfortunately lost in translation (incantations, prayers, social pleasantries, rhymes, formulaic speech from children's games), that it calls up responses much deeper than the simple plot would at first seem to warrant. Finally, the multifaceted surface of Valenzuela's prose sparkles with her signature wordplay, powerful rhythmic effects (achieved largely through incremental repetition), and extraordinary imaginative juxtapositios. Although her language is here much less ornate than it is in the more baroque passages of her novels, it provides ample evidence of her marked tendency to "think in metaphor."

The story is divided into four sections. In the first, Amanda waits in solitude for a telephone call from her lover, aptly nicknamed Coyote, who has once again abandoned her to take part in mysterious political activities that he will not explain. Although he insists, with characteristic evasiveness, that he is working for "the cause," Amanda's friends warn her that he could be an informer or even a policeman (the story is set in Buenos Aires). In spite of this possibility—or perhaps, as she says, partly because of it—she continues to make herself completely available to him. As the story opens, she is dancing around the telephone, conjuring it to ring with mock incantations, even resorting to black magic by drawing a chalk pentagram around it on the floor to attract Coyote's attention. When it remains obstinately silent, she finally gives up in disgust, "just barely containing her urge to give the phone a good kick and send it flying far away, where it belongs." The wry humor allows the protagonist to bear the pain of the situation, as often occurs in Valenzuela's work. However, the rest of the story describes Amanda's attempt to deliver just such a rejection to her lover, with whom the telephone is symbolically linked.

In the second section, Coyote has appeared at Amanda's house with no apology or explanation for his absence. They go to a Chinese restaurant, where he wields his fork ravenously while Amanda, equally hungry but for other pleasures, "takes him in delicately" with chopsticks "among bamboo shoots and black mushrooms, morsels of chicken, morsels of words and promises of love." But after the meal, just as she is happily boarding a bus in the belief that they are going home together (the sexual symbolism is obvious), Coyote suddenly tells her good-bye, saying that he will call her the next day, "and Amanda, stepping back down from the bus, descends upon him and the sidewalk." Angrily, she insults him and marches off, but after turning right at the first corner and reaching the second, her fury dissipates and she turns right again so that she ends up going around the block and returning to the very spot where she left him. He embraces her in silence and presents her with a long-stemmed red rose. She accepts it, then tells him good-bye ("forever," Valenzuela adds in parentheses, the punctuation indicating both Amanda's unspoken resolve and Valenzuela's characteristic tendency toward afterthought and amplification).

But as the third and longest section of the story begins, we see that Amanda has by no means won the battle. She has had the telephone disconnected, but she recognizes that she needs to do more, since Coyote represents almost a part of herself, a part that must be ritualistically removed. So, after preparing a bath with perfumed bath salts, she puts on white face cream as the symbolic mask she needs for "exiting from the stage" and stepping into a new and better life. As she waits for this mask to work its magic, overtones of self-denial, masochism, violence, and even death are very prominent: "I'm a fire burning its own flames, the white face says, facing the insane mirror, barely moving its mouth." Rinsing the cream off, Amanda observes that her artificial pallor—the "whitewash" of her "facade"—vanishes down the drain. What returns to her, however, is not only her original skin coloring but also her original suffering. (In the Spanish text, the rhyme "colores"/"dolores" reinforces the parallel.) Not completely satisfied, wanting to do something more drastic to reach her essential self and rid herself of Coyote's influence, she applies another facial mask, a transparent coating that smooths her features until they appear angelic, then violently peels it off and scrubs her face with an abrasive bath mitt.

With her skin now smarting and burning, Amanda decides that she had better proceed "with less fanaticism and more tenderness. One shouldn't erase one's face quite so literally." She paints a mask around her eyes with orange face cream, smears white cream on her forehead and chin, and draws ritualistic patterns on her face with lipstick and eyeliner. Thus "tattoed," she prepares to enter her bath, which has cooled and needs to be refilled, but before doing so, she notices that her legs are unshaven. With kaleidoscopic rapidity, her thoughts shift from a mock invocation ("Protect us, oh Aura,… from hairy legs that in moments of true bliss may hinder the hand that caresses") to a reminiscence of childhood to a very real, very anguished sexually charged lament for her lover. As she tries to decide whether her break with Coyote has been an act of bravery or of cowardice, a rejection "so as not to be rejected," Amanda plucks at her legs "with fury and tweezers, a contradictory combination." Finally, in a violent scene bringing to mind witches' cauldrons, she strips the hair off with steaming hot black wax.

Thus "purified"—returned, in a sense, to a hairless prepubescent state—Amanda at last prepares to enter the bath. But it has again cooled off and must again be emptied. Filling it for the third time, she adds pine-scented salts, and the fragrance reminds her of the forests where she spent her summers as a child. As memories flood her mind, she remembers how the tiny toads in the forest used to deposit a few drops of urine in her hand when she attempted to catch them. At first she dismisses this as a "useless defense" but then decides that it may be worth trying. In the end (the passage is an artistic tour de force), she releases her own urine into the bathwater, and Valenzuela describes her as "sumptuously" submerged in a sea permeated by her own fluids, "surrounded by her own self. Ecstatic. Her private inner heat now surrounding her in the pine forest with sunbeams filtering through the branches and giving her a halo of sorts. A golden aura amid the white foam." And the "halo," the "golden aura," now belongs not to some haloed deity that she must invoke, but to herself, now no longer in Coyote's embrace (and grasp), but triumphantly surrounded by a part of her own body.

One thing remains: to dispose of the rose, now withered and dead. The next morning, in the fourth and final section of the story, Amanda picks it up and carries it toward the turbid waters of the River Plate. After walking three blocks—an echo of her earlier three-block walk away from and back toward Coyote, except that she now proceeds "knowing her destination"—she glimpses or envisions a person dressed in white "as in Dante's sonnet" (possibly herself, although the identification is not made explicit in the Spanish text). Amanda observes that this figure looks more like a nurse than like "long-lost Beatrice," and concludes that this is appropriate, since what she wants is to cure herself of her unrequited passion, not to die because of it as the nineteenth-century romantic tradition would dictate.

Nevertheless, she feels that she is committing a subversive act by walking toward the river to throw away the dead rose. In her mind, the rose that Coyote held is not only like a broken mirror that brings bad luck but also a kind of weapon that "makes her run a thousand risks. [Hers would be] an ironic fate: imprisoned for carrying a rose." (And what she is doing is subversive, for she is freeing herself, at least for a time, from the dependence of women on men that underpins many social structures.) The rose, of course, has multiple meanings. It was given by Coyote as an "offering" in a gesture that, for Amanda, was an "offense," but at a deeper level it represents a dangerous weapon, sexual passion, and throwing it away is an act of severance. As she herself comments, "Sic transit," the unspoken "gloria" being not the "gloria mundi" (for that is what she is trying to recapture) but the past glory of Coyote that she hopes to efface from her memory.

As suggested above, the physical paths traced by Amanda in the story reflect her growing independence. In the first scene, her obsessive dance around the telephone is focused on an object identified with Coyote, circumscribed by the walls of the room, circular and thus theoretically never-ending, and ultimately fruitless. In the second scene, her journey around the block begins promisingly but is also ultimately unsuccessful. In this final scene, however, she knows her goal, and the river—unlike her mute telephone and silent lover—receives her with a "lapping of tame, soft waves, a welcoming sigh." Described in a beautiful, memorable metaphor as a vast vicuña poncho "rippled by a secret breath," the river of vicuña, soft and precious, stands in marked contrast to Coyote, an animal of rough coat and rougher ways—a predator, a thief, a devourer of flesh, including carrion. (We recall his greedy attack on the food in the Chinese restaurant, in contrast to Amanda's slow, delicate approach with chopsticks.)

The vicuña has also been on the endangered species list for years, and this leads us—through a metaphorical byway—to an important aspect of the story: although Amanda ends in triumph, she understands that other Coyotes may eventually enter her life. She says that she will try to be "solid within, to stop the game from repeating itself," but the possibility is there, for her name is, after all, Amanda. Although "the Coyotean cycle" may have closed, the phrase itself implies eternal recurrence. Amanda herself identifies Coyote with her unfulfilled desire, and those familiar with Valenzuela's other work may remember Luis Cernuda's observation—reproduced on the cover of the Spanish edition of her 1977 novel Como en la guerra (He Who Searches)—that "el deseo es una pregunta cuya respuesta no existe" ("desire is a question that has no answer"). Desire is the human condition, and therefore one must assume, however reluctantly, that Amanda's freedom is tenuous and may be transitory.

Nevertheless, it is freedom, symbolized by her appropriation of roles formerly held by Coyote. During her walk home from the river, for example, she digs up a plant and brings it back to her garden as he used to do. In the final scene, she is neither entangled in the "jungle" associated with Coyote nor immersed in the comforting but unreal "pine forest" of the bath. Rather, she is surrounded by her own garden, a garden that she herself cultivates and waters. As she dances there, showering herself and the plants with a hose that Coyote has bought and installed, both the phallic symbolism and the regeneration theme are obvious. Whereas before with the telephone she had danced without song and without success and whereas before during the bath scene her mirror had revealed only a death-white face, at the end of the story she is singing and the mirror reflects her whole body—nude, wet, and engaged in that most self-sufficient of activities, calisthenics—and "confirms her song."

The song may also be intended to suggest a renewed ability to write. The metaphor is ancient, writing is a recurrent theme in Valenzuela's work, and Amanda has told us that, once free of Coyote, she will be able to indulge in "more gratifying—albeit solitary—activities: writing, for example, answering all those letters." (Previously, her "writing" has been limited to the chalk pentagram and the bizarre designs that she draws on her own face; and she ultimately destroys them both, stepping on the pentagram and allowing the designs to dissolve in the heat of the bathwater.)

The possibility of a metaphorical equation between singing and renewed creativity is strengthened by the fact that, in the final pages of the story, Valenzuela openly relates the exterior to the interior, the visible to the invisible world. We may have deduced that the beautiful maroon-leaved woodland plant represents the protagonist herself (a similar symbol is used in "Other Weapons"), but it is Valenzuela who tells us that the plant is "proof of how Amanda no longer needs the Coyote to tend her outer garden. And the inner one? It may be the same one, inside and out, merging."

This linkage between external acts and internal change is central to the story. What we see is the ritual transformation of a cowed, obsessed woman to a free, self-sufficient one—a symbolic death and rebirth, complete with aspects of purification (entering the bath), renunciation (discarding the rose), and vegetation rites (transplanting the maroon-leaved plant, which, unlike the rose, is rooted in earth and will not wither). Through her own initiative, Amanda has carried out a series of acts that transform her from the meek person whom Coyote addresses as "mamacita" to a goddesslike state approaching that of the archetypal Mother Earth.

What is more, she is a self-sufficient Mother Earth who supplies her own life-giving water so that vegetation can grow. We recall that Coyote, in contrast, has been described as a vampire who sucks out her vital fluids. Water in its many forms—the bath, urine, a golden cup of tea that "tastes like sunlight," the river, and so on—is an organizing metaphor in the story. The message is clear: by acting rather than languidly waiting to be acted upon, Amanda has granted herself new life.

The opposition between waiting and acting—and, implicitly, between death and life—is set up in the quasi-syllogistic opening sentence ("To wait, seated in a chair, is the deadest form of dead anticipation, and waiting [is] the most uninspired form of death, so Amanda finally manages to … set her anxiety in motion") and informs the narrative throughout. While circling the telephone, for example, Amanda muses that "the dance helps you forget the rigor mortis of absence and waiting. You shake your hair out, you shake up your thoughts." Later, after she discards the rose, her new, freer motion is linked with a more authentic renovation (a hair image is again glanced at): "Amanda takes off, wandering through the park of Palermo, and the sweet scent of eucalyptus starts combing through her soul, reconstructing it for her and giving her back all she had lost while following the Coyote's tracks."

A related theme is the play between the infernal and the celestial—the violent extremes of experience so prominent in Valenzuela's work as a whole. At the outset, for example, Coyote is described as a "mediator between heaven and hell." Although this phrase may reflect certain Indian legends in which the coyote has positive, even Promethean aspects, at the simplest level it obviously refers to Amanda's ecstasy when she is sexually united with her lover and her despondency when she is not. "When I'm with him, the unconfessable in me runs wild—my darkest desires grow wings, and I can feel angelic, even though it's just the opposite." Coyote controls and guides Amanda's life, but it is a perverse sort of "guidance" that leaves her no room for growth. Later on, we find a passing reference to another powerful guide, Beatrice, Dante's companion in the Paradiso and his major source of inspiration. Although, as noted above, Beatrice is here pointedly transformed into a nurselike figure, the allusion stands, and it is important for several reasons.

First, it suggests the possibility that the structure of Valenzuela's narrative reiterates the tripartite structure of the Divine Comedy, i.e., that Amanda makes an allegorical journey from a personal Hell (with Coyote either absent from her life, as in the first section of the story, or present but perennially elusive, as in the second), through Purgatory (the cleansing rituals of the third section; the hot wax may even reflect the purifying fire of Purgatorio XXVII) to Paradise (the joyous garden scene of the fourth and final section). (We note that the main action of the story takes place on three consecutive days, and that the events of those days correspond to the Hell-Purgatory-Paradise sequence described above.) The reiteration would be partly ironic, of course, in that the culmination of Dante's journey is reunion with Beatrice and a vision of the Celestial Rose in the Paradiso, while at the end of "Rituals of Rejection" Amanda is alone and triumphantly free of the rose, though surrounded by vegetation.

The fact that a female protagonist is implicitly compared with a male, Dante, is also significant, for it suggests Valenzuela's characteristic openness—her resistance to boundaries and categories. (In interviews, she has repeatedly said that she is fascinated by transsexuality, and many of her works touch on this theme.) Still another important facet of the allusion to Dante is the specific mention of his sonnet on Beatrice, especially if, as seems possible, Valenzuela is remembering not only the famous "Tanto gentile" (Vita Nuova XXVI) but also "A ciascun' alma presa, e gentil core," which immediately follows Dante's description of Beatrice as dressed in purest white (III). The focus of the latter poem is not on the well-known revitalizing, beneficent powers of love but on its cruelty. Beatrice is envisioned sitting on the lap of the God of Love, who has a terrifying aspect and who forces her to eat Dante's burning heart, which he holds in his hand. Although the image of the eaten heart was a medieval commonplace, today it shocks. It reminds us of the destructive nature of Amanda's obsession with Coyote before she breaks free through ritual transformation.

The phrase "ritual transformation" is here used advisedly. It has been chosen because its convenient grammatical ambiguity—is the word "ritual" an adjective or a noun?—conveys a fundamental dualism in the story as a whole. Not only do we have the "transformation" of the protagonist, we also have the transformation of ritual itself. For the ceremonies devised by Amanda are not the conventional tribal rites familiar to us all—characteristically public, carried out in groups, and male-dominated. On the contrary, Amanda's are idiosyncratic ("of her own invention") and performed in solitude. Perhaps most important, they represent an ironic inversion of beautification rites that are associated with the enticement rather than the rejection of males in our culture.

Amanda's rituals—applying "practical" cosmetic masks, putting on makeup, removing body hair, taking a scented bath—could all, under different circumstances, have been acts aimed at seduction. Here, however, they are transformed. The cosmetic masks and hair removal are not intended to enhance her skin but to strip away the "old" Amanda, the one addicted to Coyote. The garish, primitive makeup, which is itself a kind of mask, is not designed to compliment her features but to obscure them—or, to put it another way, to allow a previously hidden part of her personality to emerge. (The mask is an extremely important motif in Valenzuela's writing; and she has commented—with her characteristic spirit of contradiction—that what interests her is the unmasking made possible by the use of the mask.) Finally, Amanda's bath, discussed in detail above, does initially scent her body with the aroma of pine, but this "cosmetic" effect is far over-shadowed by the most un-cosmetic addition of urine to the bathwater. The bath is a defense and an assertion of self, not a beautification ritual designed to please someone else.

The ironic inversion (or subversion) of traditional values and associations is, as several critics have pointed out, a fundamental feature of Valenzuela's work. It is related to her radical questioning of constructs often thought of as dominated by males, by logic, and by conventional categorization. One aspect of this questioning is Valenzuela's insistence on breaking apart, altering, and/or combining traditional words in untraditional ways. Her coinage of the appellation bolastristes for Coyote in the present story (Spanish text) is a typical example. (Literally "sadballs," and vaguely lyrical as well as sexual, it appears in the English as "little bastard.") As [Sharon] Magnarelli has put it, "Valenzuela seems determined to prove that she is not at the mercy of language, that she does have power and control over that medium."

In "Rituals of Rejection," Valenzuela goes far beyond mere questioning of tradition, whether tradition takes the form of a word, a relationship between unequals, or a beautification rite. Carefully structured, economically but poetically written, the story is not merely a rejection but an affirmation. It is a celebration of the independent self—a self that no longer needs to seek validation in a man's embrace, a self that can rejoice in seeing itself reflected not in a man's eyes, but in a mirror, free and whole and strong. As such, the story is in many ways more positive than any of the rest in Other Weapons. Here there is violence, but it is transcended; here there is death, but it is overcome. The protagonist's "weapon" is not merely the written word, or the spoken one, or fantasy, or amnesia, or a revolver. It is her body itself, and what she does with that body.