Fifth Story' — decries both mimesis and genealogy. The crucial question, perhaps, is not that of the origins of the gesture but the uses to which it may be put, and is continually being put: a way of being that is a way of speaking, or not speaking, or writing, but which always involves the informed interaction of the reader.
The novella 'Fourth Version,' from Argentine Luisa Valenzuela's Cambio de armas (1982; Other Weapons, 1985), enacts another version of this displacement. The narrator, a frustrated co-author and editor of Bella's scattered papers, organizes the fourth fac-simile of the story of the actress and the ambassador. At each step the attempt at a rational restructuralization of key elements fails. Materials at hand are scarce, key elements are silenced or lost, and what remains seems more appropriate for another genre. The editor, faced with the impossibility of constructing a traditional narrative according to conventional formal properties, eventually breaks down into a fac- simile of a critic: 'The papers tell her story of love, not her story of death' — either an indecipherable code or, worse, an incomprehensi-637- ble reversal of priorities. Later, disgruntled, the editor-critic complains about the difficulty of assigning a genre to the papers: 'Verbose Pedro, respecting a certain kind of silence which ended up spreading to Bella too, to the extent that her alleged indirect autobiography, her confessional novel, ended up deflating itself in certain parts,' and, finally, acknowledges that her preferred reading of events stumbles against a lack of supporting materials: 'I don't understand why the crucial information has been omitted regarding this key encounter.' Each version — the internal author's, the fourth; the critic's, the fifth; this one, the sixth — carries its own preassumptions and presuppositions, each writes the text as a variation of self-writing (of the critic, not of either Bella or Pedro), each limns another portion of the appropriative field, works another inversion/subversion of the writing of the fac-simile.
In one such variation, 'Fourth Version' reenacts in a fictional setting one of the critical moments of Valenzuela's own political activism during the Videla regime. It has as its counterpart the final story of the collection, the title story 'Other Weapons,' a story told from the point of view of one of those to whom the protective net did not extend. 'Other Weapons,' like 'Fourth Version,' projects the limit case of society's censorship of women through the unexpected metaphor of a traditional middle-class marriage. For 'Other Weapons''s 'so- called Laura,' all of her past life is an ellipsis. Nouns are particularly elusive: 'the so-called anguish,' 'the so-called love,' or 'What might the prohibited (repressed) be?'; as are verbs: the meanings of verbs like 'to love' and 'to hate,' 'to make love' and 'to torture,' slip indistinguishably into each other. Her experience is conditional, hypothetical, based on a series of subordinate clauses responding to the main clause, the spoken orders of the man: her lover, her torturer, her one friend, the enemy she must assassinate. Her touchstone is her own wounded body — 'una espalda azotada' (a wounded back) — which is continuous with her wounded mind, her aphasia: 'la palabra azotada,' in which the weight of reference falls not on the noun but on the adjective, 'azotada.' The nameless protagonist, for convenience 'the so-called Laura,' tastes the bittersweet of her blood in the slash on her back, the shattered words on her tongue; denied refuge, she has no place to treasure up her scattered bits, no force to bring them together out of their fragmentation. Her -638- story is that of a veiled and unspeakable pornography, rescued through the tentative workings of the subjunctive.
In 'Other Weapons' the colonel reminds the so-called Laura, 'I've got my weapons, too,' and in 'Fourth Version' the narrator muses: 'And I, who am putting all of this back together now [Y yo, quien ahora esto arma], why do I try to find certain keys to the whole affair when those being handed to me are quite different keys?' 'Armar' (to put together) is always a model for potential violence, intuitively pointing toward its opposite: the revolutionary blowing apart of a system or a text. Fellow Argentinian Julio Cortázar's novel 62: Modelo para armar (1971; 62: A Model Kit, 1972) stands as a precursor text for this double meaning of the verb. To write (rewrite) this story is to give it a particular construction, to appropriate its multiplicity for a single point of view, to aim the weapon in a particular direction: 'There is no author [autor] and now I am the author [autora], appropriating this text that generates the desperation of writing.' The too-easy slippage between masculine 'autor' and feminine 'autora' is in itself reason for despair, one of the reasons, perhaps, that this markedly feminine author insists upon the multiplicity of stories, as if the repeated reminder of the absence of a claim of authority and the admittedly incomplete nature of the editorial enterprise are enough to deflect the critical weapons that may be aimed at it. 'Stop talking to me in capital letters,' Bella complains to Pedro; the crystallization of role and function — the Ambassador, the Actress, the Messengers, the Great Writer — refracts in the multiple mirrors of the layered text as frivolously parodic emblems: arms perhaps, but either sinisterly distanced or singularly ineffective ones. To identify too closely with them would be to lose the freedom to escape behind the mask, to play with the roles while enacting a subtle 'apropriamiento.' What the 'autora' fears is the danger of falling into the text, one of a chorus of 'las mujeres escritoras' (note redundancy) to whom 'they have sold the idea of transexuality,' in the words of Monserrat Ordóñez. Most critically, she rejects the pompous and self-congratulatory 'Great Writer,' who arrives all unaware in the midst of an all-too-real revolution, only to find himself weaponless.
There is, we begin to suspect, an element of the theatrical in all of this emphasis on mirrors and masks and bodies that react with the -639- discipline of trained mimes. There is, particularly in Bella's repertoire of practiced gestures, the highly overdetermined artificiality of the woman often dismissed as merely decorative. Women, apparently, demonstrate naturalness through well-defined and highly conventionalized artifices of mock-spontaneity. Even more strikingly, this development is defined, albeit condescendingly, with a military metaphor: 'her weapons, her arsenal.' This is, of course, precisely the first image we have of Bella. The actress is depicted behind the scenes, 'sharpening her weapons, her arsenal of grace,' readying herself for the battle, practicing her lines, putting on her makeup for that night's performance on the stage, for the self-representation that is her personal/political weapon in the undeclared war on the streets, declaiming, 'My role is to be alive' while 'she made herself up carefully to go to the party.' For Bella, maintenance of a superficial frivolity is a radical and rigorous form of work. It is, in fact, her life work, preserving her life to protect others. For Bella, the distance professionally enforced between representation and reality constitutes a shadowy revolutionary praxis. She knows all too well that at any moment the stage set could easily give way to the torture chamber, the theatrical gesture of faked beating might seamlessly merge with the drama of questioning and of pain maliciously inflicted, politically compromised roles could become political reality, the almost pain of self-erasing could slip into the unendurable pain of a reality that recreates the body in destroying it:
From performance to truth, from simulation to fact. One step. The one we take when we step from the imagination over to this side — what side? — of so-called reality…. If I go back to my country and they torture me, it will hurt. If it hurts I'll know that this is my body (on stage I shake, I squirm under the supposed blows that almost really hurt — is it my body?). It will be my body if I go back…. When they pull a piece off, it will be my whole body…. And thus I perform it; and performing I am. Torture on stage.
On the one hand, in her imagination, Bella's body will become her own on participating in real terror. Paradoxically, she also knows that she is only insofar as she represents, that her whole being is absorbed in a scene of torture/a drama about torture, that she is herself an embodiment of 'torture on stage.' To the degree that she enforces this perception she openly identifies herself as literary rather than corporeal. Thus, the fragmentation of her text enacts the scene -640- of physical dismemberment. On the other hand, like the so-called Laura, Bella knows that reality has at least two sides, that in leaping from imagination to the torture chamber she has only crossed the first of the border lines. Laura would remind her that the second door, the one with the peephole, represents the most ambiguous and dangerous transgression of all, and requires another arsenal of weapons to vanquish.
Still another variety of 'transa' is involved in the appropriation of the traditional means of expression for nontraditional purposes. It is perhaps to be expected that much of contemporary Latin American writing specifically constitutes itself as a refusal of traditional restrictions and customary censorship. When Valenzuela in one of her essays speaks specifically of the need for women to engage in 'a slow and tireless task of appropriation [apropriamiento] of transformation,' she speaks of the important task of taking back the use of the language that uses them. She calls for an appropriation of language that not only
