There have been numerous studies of Rosario Ferré's short story “La muneca menor,” the first piece in Papeles de Pandora (1976). While many of these studies are insightful as regards both the fantastic aspects of the work and the feminist quality which underlies it, to date no examination has been made of the indigenous cultural and mythological references and allusions which are pervasive throughout. I should like to investigate Ferré's use of Caribbean/Greater Antilles traditions, customs and mythology, which will serve to contextualize and further elucidate one of the finest stories of the fantastic mode in the Spanish language.

Lucía Guerra-Cunningham explains Ferré's often generous use of specifically Puerto Rican imagery and vocabulary, and helps us understand why the author has turned to Taino mythology in order to address twentieth-century issues and propose solutions:

el sometimiento de lo natural y autóctono … debiera ser recibido … con ira que conduzca a la acción y la rebelión. En este sentido la oposición entre los elementos típicos de la flora y fauna de Puerto Rico y el poder foráneo se relaciona con la homología histórica establecida entre el poder imperialista y el país sub-desarrollado donde éste ha impuesto su hegemonía. La aniquilación de lo primitivo y natural en un intento por subyugar económica y culturalmente en nombre de la civilización, se presenta … desde la perspectiva del dominado quien concibe el consumismo, la dependencia cultural y la tecnología como manifestaciones de una estructura de poder que aniquila el verdadero ser.

(18)

A return to the indigenous, the authentic, empowers the oppressed and the neglected with a sense of identity, self-worth and ultimately power which enables them to proclaim autonomy and/or to exact revenge.¹

“La muneca menor” refers to various concrete images and traditions native to Puerto Rico. The use of a specific myth generally “provides for a more tailored approach to the fantastic,” furnishing a means of identification between author, culture and [implied] reader (Flesca 43). Rosario Ferré draws from Taino myths and her own family history in order to create a tale in which native albeit anachronistic belief systems help to empower a marginal group, in this case women (Franco, “Beyond” 61). In this way, Ferré is able to address two of her preferred topics of interest: Puerto Rico and women.

Taino myths provide the aunt (and the youngest daughter) with the means of recovering a past more favorable for women. As we shall see, Taino women exercised a great deal more control within their own society than they would have in the turn-of-the-century society portrayed in “La muneca menor,” although numerous social structures are shared by the Tainos and the characters in “La muneca menor.” Taino society was essentially matriarchal, and most ceremonial, artistic and community activities were controlled and/or carried out by the women. The line of succession was also determined by the women, and there were cases of female caciques among the Tainos (Pichardo Moya 17, 116). In “La muneca menor,” the aunt is the central point around which family activity revolves. She performs as surrogate mother for her nine nieces and serves as a constant reminder of what the family had once been, thereby preventing them, for better or worse, from recognizing their degeneration.² She also provides a line of succession, albeit through generations of chágaras.³

The aunt, when young, was bitten on the calf by a chágara while she was bathing in the river. The chágara imbedded itself in her leg, which swelled to enormous proportions and emitted a fragrance of guanábana, and remained there after a doctor told her it could not be removed. As she was unable to marry, she resided with her family and dedicated her time to the fabrication of dolls in the likeness of her nine nieces, producing one per year for each niece, until they married, when they would be presented with a final, elaborately constructed doll. Finally, there was only one niece left. The aunt, who had long ago sat down on the balcony never to rise again, had continued to be seen first by the same doctor who had diagnosed her condition as incurable, and later by his son, who recognized his father's “error” (a deliberate deception which paid for the son's medical studies). The son married the youngest daughter and brought her, and her wedding-day doll, to town, where he forced her to sit on the balcony in full view of the public as evidence of his rise in social stature. The doll, whose diamond-encrusted eyes he had stolen and sold, disappeared, and his wife remained seated, eyes lowered, unchanged and unaging, on the balcony. At the end, intrigued by his wife's imperviousness to the passage of time, he placed his stethoscope on her chest at the same time that her eyes opened and furious chágaras emerged from the sockets.

The Puerto Rican essence of Rosario Ferré's work would, at first glance, appear to derive from the interspersing of place names, historical figures and Caribbean vocabulary. Throughout “La muneca menor” we find mention of chágaras, guanábanas, and higüeras; as we will see, these words were selected not for their local color but rather for their importance within Taino culture and mythology. While Yvette López, citing Jeanne Danos' La Poupée, Mythe vivante, has commented on the ritualistic functions and importance of dolls and the similarities between the aunt's ceremonial fabrication and conveyance of meaning to her dolls and those of many other cultures, there is no mention of the particularly Antillean context and interpretation of said ceremonies and rites. By considering and consulting traditional, non-Western sources, the work of Y. López and others can be augmented and supplemented, resulting in a more complete understanding of the imagery of “La muneca menor” and of the story itself.

The first indigenous reference which can be applied to “La muneca menor” comments on the miraculous procreative powers of the aunt, which are emblemized in her swollen calf. This motif recalls the miraculous creation of human beings from body parts that characterizes the native cosmogony of the Caribbean, and of North and South America, and which ultimately may be connected with the generation of manioc and its propagation through cuttings. A particularly striking published example of this comes from the Orinoco Basin.⁴ French anthropologist Jacques Lizot spent six years living among the Yanomami of this region and collected a number of myths and traditions from them, including the one which follows, and upon which “La muneca menor” would appear to have been based, entitled “El hombre de la pantorilla prenada”:

Antano no existían más que dos hombres. Eran ambos conotos y fue uno de ellos quien por primera vez salió encinta. No habían pensado en el lugar donde salen los excrementos: no habían pensado en la sodomía. Un día, uno de ellos dijo:

—¡Tengo ganas de hacer el amor!

E hizo el amor introduciendo el pene en el hueco de los dedos del pie.

La pantorilla de éste comenzó a crecer, justo en el lugar del músculo: la pantorilla estaba encinta. Pronto el músculo explotó para dar a luz un recién nacido. El que había engendrado preguntó:

—¿Es un varón?

—¡No, es una hembra!

Cortaron el cordón umbilical y el hombre cuya pantorrilla había explotado se acostó cerca de ella en su hamaca. La alimentó con agua. La hija creció y llegó muy pronto a la edad de la razón. El que la dio a luz y la nutrió la tomó por esposa.

Se instalaron juntos en el mismo fuego. La desfloró cuando tuvo sus reglas y ella no tardó en salir encinta. Tuvo una hija que el padre dio a su companero. Así los Yanomami proliferaron.

(13)

The similarities between the two stories are significant. The source of the aunt's reproductive powers came from the chágara which had embedded itself in her calf near the muscle, the same location from which the man had given birth. The vengeful chágaras that emerged from the empty eye sockets at the end of the story were the progeny of the original river chágara, the new generation which would proliferate just as the Yanomami had before them. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the Yanomami myth may be considered as a source for the events transpiring in “La muneca menor,” and the Yanomami's status as possible forbearers of the Caribbean peoples merits the myth's inclusion within a discussion of Taino mythology.

An additional consideration is the relationship of the Yanomami birth myth to what Baruch and Rohrich call “modes of reproduction outside the natural” (xiii). They see the unusual procreative procedures mentioned in women's mythic and utopic writings as indicative of the precarious control that women have over their bodies in reality (xiv). Ferré's women are domestic fixtures, decorations, whose fates would have been entirely determined by their gender had it not been for an accident of nature (in the guise of a chágara). The chágara's residence in the aunt's calf was prolonged by the doctor in whom the aunt and her family trusted, never suspecting that he would abuse his position of confidence. The aunt's physical well-being was manipulated, as would her niece's physical and emotional condition later be by the doctor's son. The rebirth of their female independence, and their revenge upon those who had controlled them, is initiated by the emergence of the chágaras through the eye sockets—as unusual a reproductive procedure as from the leg. Ancient myths equated women with nature, giving them power and influence with the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms (Richter 13). It is with the help of nature (woman + chágara) that Ferré's women are able to regain control.

The correspondence of the Yanomami creation myth to La muneca menor strongly suggests that Ferré was aware of the tradition and adapted it for the purposes of her story. There are various other cultural elements which appear throughout La muneca menor which seem to indicate that the author's nostalgia for Puerto Rico's past glories extended beyond turn of the century aristocracies to the customs and traditions of the original inhabitants, free from both North American and European influences. These customs are specifically Caribbean, primarily Taino, and will be shown to have analogous components within the actions and circumstances surrounding the aunt, the youngest daughter, the dolls and the chágara.

The dolls, their manufacture, their significance and their storage can be shown to correlate with the Taino custom of fabricating cemis.⁵ A cemi (or zemi), first described by Fray Ramón Pané in his Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios (1498) as “los ídolos que [los taínos] tienen en casa” (21), may be thought of as a stone⁶ idol representing deities personifying the earth, sun, water, wind, life, death, etc., and serving as a sacred medium allowing the power of the numinous to flow from the spirit world out into human experience and from human need into the cosmos. They also represented abstract divinities, local spirits, deceased family members and natural phenomena (Cassá 151; Fernández Méndez; 20; Stevens-Arroyo 60). Most cemis were manufactured according to supernatural dictates and “were representatives of the dramatis personae of dreams and visions” (Steward and Faron 220). The person, force or spirit to be represented in the cemi can therefore be said to have been conceptualized at an extra-sensory level/super-human plane, dictated from on high. There is a clear connection between the routine preceding the fabrication of a cemi and that which occasioned the construction of a doll. Just as the chiefs dreamed and created as per the dictates of their religious beliefs, so too did the aunt, for whom “[el] nacimiento de una muneca era siempre motivo de regocijo sagrado” (10). The cemis were not constructed on a whim; the person, object or force dreamed or hallucinated was predestined as a model. So too were the nieces of the aunt: “cuando se despertaba con ganas de hacer una muneca … llamaba a su habitación a la nina con la que había sonado esa noche y le tomaba las medidas” (11). Obviously the aunt had in mind more than a capricious life-sized chronology of the growth patterns of her nieces; she (and Ferré) must have been aware of the existence and power of the cemis, and of the power of those who created them.⁷

As has been previously mentioned, there are several interpretations of the significance and importance of the cemis. Some believe that “cada indígena tenía su propio cemí, pudiendo vérselo como espíritus protectores del individuo e incluso como un desdoblamiento espiritual del mismo” (Cassá 152). Each creator of a cemi could thus be envisioning said creation as a replica of his or her personality, soul and/or spiritual essence. In the eyes of her family, the aunt must have appeared to be an eccentric old woman, living out her maternal inclinations through her nieces and the construction of their likenesses. It should be remembered, however, that as each niece married and left home she was handed her wedding doll with the words “Aquí tienes tu Pascua de Resurrección.” As we near the conclusion of the story, witnessing the gradual transformation of the youngest daughter, we begin to suspect that what will resurrect will be the aunt; when the unscrupulous doctor is confronted by the furious chágaras emerging from the youngest daughter's wedding doll, there is little doubt that this supposition is confirmed. The chágara had, throughout the story, been associated with the aunt, as had the dolls; the juxtaposition of chágaras and the doll in the final scene of the story can only be the spiritual doubling of the aunt emerging to exact revenge on the doctor's father for his failure to cure her, and on him for the liberties taken with her niece.

Cemis were said to serve and maintain the social equilibrium of the individual and his or her group, along with protecting the prestige of the community. They were also thought to guarantee the position of the chiefs or caciques of the populace (Cassá 155). The aunt's dolls were perceived in much the same way by her family, and later by the younger doctor, although to a different degree. The aunt, who constructed dolls for every niece for the first eighteen years of their lives, would have eventually made 162 dolls. Although the family fell on hard times, the aunt did not cease the practice, nor did the family sell off the dolls, which would have been of some value, particularly the wedding dolls, which had “skin” of Mikado porcelain and fine embroidered clothing. The presence of the dolls in the house enabled the family to maintain a semblance of its former aristocratic position and overlook its present dilapidated surroundings, as they were “rodeada de un pasado que dejaba desintegrar a su alrededor con la misma impasible musicalidad con que la lámpara de cristal del comedor se desgranaba a pedazos sobre el mantel raído de la mesa” (10).

While the dolls stood in marked contrast to the family's fall from its former splendor, they, or rather it—the youngest daughter's wedding doll—represented just the opposite for the younger doctor. The doll, particularly its jewel-encrusted eyes, facilitated his rise in station within the community, and the presence of the doll reminded all who saw it that he had married into society. It is evident that the dolls were to be considered in the same way as the cemis—as a measure of security for the individual and a means of protection for his or her own social status and that of their family.

Finally, there is a conspicuous similarity between the placement and upkeep of the cemis and that of the dolls. While commoners housed their cemis in their own dwellings, the chiefs kept theirs in special temples outside the village (Steward and Faron 250). Therefore the more important cemis were allocated their own particular space or realm. The same holds true for the dolls. As the number of dolls increased over the years (9 nieces x 1 doll/year), “hubo que separar una pieza de la casa para que la habitasen exclusivamente las munecas” (10). The room's sacrosanct function—safeguarding the past of each member of the family and of the clan as a whole—is akin to the cemis' role as protectors of the well-being and survival of the community.

Ferré confers a certain degree of importance on the aunt's chair, and mentions it repeatedly throughout the text, usually in relation to the fabrication of dolls (“La tía vieja había sacado desde muy temprano el sillón al balcón … como hacía siempre que se despertaba con ganas de hacer una muneca” 9). While the chair may be perceived as a throne, as is generally the case with, for example, García Márquez's matriarchs, it may also correspond to a duho, described by Fernández Méndez as the benches of the chief citizens. It would appear that Ferré has attributed a greater importance to this chair than that of a mere ceremonial resting place. Her three principal female characters—the aunt, the youngest daughter, and the wedding doll—are presented only in a seated position. While critics have interpreted this as indicative of women's [imposed] passivity, this may be only partially correct (See Yvette López, Explicación de Textos Literarios 11.1; Lucía Guerra-Cunningham, Chasqui 13.2–3; Margarita Fernández Olmos, Homines 8.2; Jean Franco, The Minnesota Review 22). Upon examining Oviedo's interpretation (found in the Historia General vol. 1, p. 125) of the significance of the duho—“que no está solo él que se sienta, sino él su adversario”—Fernando Ortiz expands Oviedo's definition:

dando a entender que en el dujo estaba el demonio, representado de tal manera que quien se acomodara en aquel escabel sagrado lo compartía con el poderoso espíritu invisible; es decir, que el dujo era asiento o habitáculo del ser sobrenatural.

(207)

The aunt's insistence on remaining seated while constructing the dolls, the dolls' seated pose (“sobre la cola del piano” 12), the youngest daughter's years of sitting alone on the balcony (“inmóvil dentro de sus gasas y encajes, siempre con los ojos bajos” 15), and the final revenge on the part of the fused personality of all three, would suggest that there is indeed something diabolical or supernatural in their chairs. The youngest daughter shares the powerful invisible spirit of her aunt and her symbiotic chágara, and also the spirit of the wedding doll with which she would eventually fuse.

The cemis imbued the Tainos with a fundamentally optimistic world view, free from the foreboding and dread which characterized some other indigenous populations (Stevens-Arroyo 60).⁸ They did not perceive an unbridgeable gulf between them and their spirits, because the spirits were thought to be present and accessible within the cemis. The aunt too enjoyed the optimism felt by those who know themselves to be invincible; the resurrection promised to each niece on her wedding day in truth was to be her own. The aunt, in collaboration with the demon spirit in her duho, assured herself of immortality by fashioning dolls which would propagate by means of the chágaras, thereby assuring the proliferation of her own being.

The Tainos placed great importance on their lineage, and venerated their ancestors to the point of conserving their bones (Alegría 150). Pané recalled that this act of preservation dates back to Yaya, the Supreme Spirit, and his son Yayael; upon learning of his son's desire to kill him, “después su padre lo mató, y puso los huesos en una calabaza” (28). Arróm notes that due to a mistranslation on the part of a later transcriber of Pané's text, the Taino word güira was incorrectly identified; instead of a pumpkin, it in fact refers to a fig tree, higüera (Mitología, 65 n. 53). The bark of the fig tree was used to fashion a type of receptacle which would hold the remains of ancestors and community caciques. Pané continues: “Sucedió que un día, con deseo de ver a su hijo, Yaya … bajando la calabaza [higüera], la volcó para ver los huesos de su hijo. De la cual salieron muchos peces grandes y chicos” (28-29). One of the primary materials used in the construction of the aunt's dolls was the fig tree: “Para hacer el cuerpo, la tía enviaba al jardín por veinte higüeras relucientes” (11). And from the repository of the doll's body, filled with the essence of the higüeras, emerged the chágaras, not exactly fish, but nonetheless a water creature and certainly comparable.

The last form of creation intimated by Ferré's text is that of the yucca plant. Yucca or manioc was the principal source of food for the Tainos, as important for them as was maize for Mesoamerican peoples. The yucca, a tuber, reproduces asexually through its stalks, without seeds, bulbs, or runners. The chágara can also be said to have reproduced asexually, creating a colony of like creatures after years of solitude within the aunt's leg. Further evidence of a connection between the yucca and “La muneca menor” is Fray Bartolomé de las Casas' observation that “la yuca se sembraba … siguiendo la técnica de los montones … en cada montón colocaban nueve estacas” (in Cassá 39). Could the nine nieces of the aunt not be the nine yucca stalks, offshoots of the materfamilias who has spurned traditional male-female roles to take matters into her own hands?

Finally, as mentioned above, there are various life forms indigenous to Puerto Rico which would appear to lend a touch of local color but which are actually relevant to Taino mythology and the story at hand. The first is the chágara, also called guábara.⁹ While studies have explained the significance and importance of the chágara, no one has stopped to consider the fact that chágaras, small river shrimp or prawns, do not bite.¹⁰ Why, then, a chágara, and not a crab, water snake or some other aggressive and/or venomous water dweller? Eugenio Fernández Méndez's study of the art and mythology of the Tainos offers one possibility. He discusses the guábara, “a small shell fish which lives in burrows in the rivers,” as one of many Taino words containing the morpheme güa, meaning dark, shadowy or related to the night (44). The chágara emerged from its burrow in the river bed to form another in the calf of the aunt's leg, reproduced and flourished within the depths of the wedding doll, all of which are environs without light. The lack of light and the night have always been associated with the negative, the frightening, the menacing, the unknown. The darkness in which the chágara thrives is akin to the blackness of heart of the two doctors who took advantage of the aunt and the youngest daughter, and the blackness of the empty eye sockets out of which the chágaras crawled in search of revenge.

References to the aunt's swollen leg are generally accompanied by a description of the “perfume de guanábana madura que supuraba la pierna en estado de quietud” (10). The youngest daughter/doll who sat motionless on her balcony surrounded her guests with “un perfume particular que les hacía recordar involuntariamente la lenta supuración de una guanábana” (15). One could hardly conceive of a more innocuous fruit, or a more incongruous thought—what harm could a guanábana cause? The answer lies with Pedro Mártir de Angleria, one of the many editors of Pané's manuscripts. He explains that the Tainos “[p]iensan que los muertos vagan de noche y comen la fruta guannaba [sic]” (Pané 96). Therefore the guanábana, today sought after for its appetizing taste, was in the past associated with death, fear, and the living dead. The scent of guanábana emanating from first the aunt and later the youngest daughter is therefore far from a pleasant touch of Caribbean local color.

“La muneca menor” can be seen as a careful and deliberate fusion of traditional Taino imagery and myth with twentieth century concerns and forms. As a story in the fantastic mode, it exemplifies Rosemary Jackson's assertion that the fantastic is an inverted form of myth; it focuses upon the unknown within the present (as opposed to the past), discovering an emptiness inside an apparently full reality (158). The fantastic traces the “unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (Jackson 4). Ferré's portrayal of the silent, passive figure of the youngest daughter/doll corresponds to the traditional image of the submissive woman. This image is then subverted by the chágaras that emerge from the hollow eye sockets of the woman to exact revenge on he who had silenced her. The eyes, notable for their absence throughout the story, first when they are stolen from the doll and sold, and later when they are perpetually downcast by the youngest daughter, now may be seen as channels of aggression and threat. Although lowering the eyes is usually taken as a signal of submission, hostility may also be expressed by looking away when the usual response would be to look at the other person, thereby implying that he or she does not exist (Argyle and Cook 30, 74). The eyes of the youngest daughter which do not see, which do not look at her husband, do not acknowledge his existence, his supposed superiority and the presumed dominance of the cultural and societal forces which he represents. By fusing with the chágara the youngest daughter has entered the “wild zone,” that small zone that is exclusively female outside the boundaries of the dominant culture and reality that women share with men; in “La muneca menor” the zone is made even more wild by the imagery of a simple river crustacean which exposes and takes to task the male population for generations of patriarchal artifice, duplicity and abuse (Showalter 261–63; Bower 19–20).

Notes

1. This is similar to the political slogans of the Partido Popular Democrático in the 1940s. See Raymond Carr's study, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment.

2. Within the poems and short stories of Papeles de Pandora one may find a variety of Afro-Indian references to older, mythical forms of motherhood where the image of “woman” may be seen to occupy a greater cosmic body as evinced by the allusions to legs as tree trunks in “Carta” (“mis piernas macizas troncos de caoba,” 122) or the “cuerpo jardín sellano/cuerpo huerto prometido” of “Eva María” (16).

3. Rosario Ferré explained in an April 1980 letter to Luz María Umpierre that “Las chágaras son unos camarones de río que existen en Puerto Rico, llamados también guábaras, que supongo ser un término de origen indígena. El término se emplea hoy en el campo, y yo lo recogí de esta fuente” (125, n. 9). The Diccionario Enciclopedia “UTEHA” defines it as “el crustáceo Atya scabra, de la familia de los átidos” (Tomo V. p. 848). The átidos, or atydae, are comprised of approximately 138 species, are primarily freshwater dwellers, range from a length of 4–124 mm., live in burrows and have great jumping abilities (Diccionario básico Espasa, Tomo I, p. 593; Parker 301).

4. Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo traces the migratory patterns of the ancestors of the Tainos, who left the Orinoco Basin in 200 B.C., arriving in Puerto Rico approximately 400 years later. This area is presently inhabited by the Yanomami. He further notes linguistic variations, along with cultural and religious traits which “recall the Orinoco Basin origins of the Tainos” (26–27; 31)

5. The construction of a doll was an involved process, starting with a dream of whomever was to be the model, followed by the careful making of a wax life mask. Twenty fig trees were chopped down and their cotton-like insides scraped out, dried, and stuffed into the body of all of the dolls except the one received on the wedding day of the nieces, which was filled with honey.

6. There were also cemis made of wood, bone, cotton, clay and gold, but in general they were constructed of stone (Steward and Faron 250).

7. Ferré is not the only Caribbean author to make use of the cemi. The Cuban writer José Lezama Lima, obviously well-acquainted with indigenous traditions of the Greater Antilles, named the protagonist of his novel Paradiso José Cemí. There was much speculation on the part of critics as to the origin of the term when the book was first published; Haroldo de Campos declared that it was “una voluntaria anagramatización onomástica: Lezama Lima / ez-im / ce-mí (America Latina en su literatura p. 291); Jean Franco decided that cemi “deriva de sema o signo” (Vórtice 1.1); Mario Trajtenberg deduced that José Cemí was “un vasco con nombre yoruba” (Arbol de Letras 2.11). It was not until Juan José Arróm explained that “Al dar Lezama ese apellido al protagonista nos anticipa que no habrá de ser un personaje visto con pupila realista. … Por ello, quien lleva ese apellido es imagen, es mito” that the true significance of Cemí was uncovered (“Lo tradicional” 470). In all fairness to his colleagues. Arróm concedes that “Cemí es una palabra que debiera de haberse registrado desde hace tiempo en el Diccionario de la lengua espanola, pero precisamente es otra de las voces, de hondo arraigo antillano, que allí brillan por su ausencia” (“Lo tradicional” 469).

8. “Tainos found it possible to be intimate with the numinous. Cemies served as sacred mediums allowing the power of the numinous to flow in two directions; from the spirit world out into human experience, and from human need into the cosmos. Intimacy with the numinous contrasts markedly with Aztec fatalism before the unbridgeable gulf that separated them from their spirits. On account of this chasm, the Aztecs had a fundamentally pessimistic world view, full of foreboding and dread. Such was not the case with the Tainos and their cemis” (Stevens-Arroyo 60).

9. Most scientific reference texts prefer the term guábara to chágara. Why then has Ferré opted for the less common term? The answer may lie in some of the secondary meanings for chágara collected by Ulrich Florian and Fernando Martínez (48). Chágara is defined as 1. Schuhmachermesser (a shoemaker's knife, leading to the expression “pasar a algo por la chágara”—über die Klinge springen lassen; literally treating someone to the blade, giving them a going over. 2. abmurksen [to do away with, knock off). 3. vulg. für beischlafen [to make love]. Thus we find a connection between love, death, and a sharp, piercing instrument, akin to a crustacean's pincers. (Trans. Beverly Eddy and Friedemann Eisert)

10. María José Chaves avoids the issue by declaring the chágara a “voz puertorriquena para designar un pequeno cangrejo de río” (66).

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