IV—
Prohibition and Sexuality in Lucha Corpi's Palabras De Mediodia / Noon Words
1
Unlike the other three poets discussed in this book, who were born and socialized in the United States, Lucha Corpi's socialization as a woman took place in Mexico. In 1965, a short time after her marriage in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, Corpi emigrated with her husband to the San Francisco Bay area.[1] Five years later she and her husband were divorced, a difficult and painful experience. Her son Arturo was born in Oakland, California, where they have lived ever since. Lucha Corpi obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's in comparative literature from San Francisco State University. She has served on the board of Aztlán Cultural, a Chicano organization. In 1970–71 she was vice-chairwoman of the Chicano Studies Executive Committee, and from 1970 to 1972 she served as coordinator of the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Chicano journals, such as Fuego de Aztlán , published in Berkeley, and De Colores , published by Pajarito Publications in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Chicano poet Tino Villanueva selected a few of her poems for Chicanos , an anthology compiled in Spanish and published in Mexico. Corpi has taught English as a second language in the Oakland Adult Education program since 1973.
The emigration and the divorce, two central events in Corpi's
life, ruptured to some extent her identification with the values that define the status of women in Mexico. Life in the United States led her to question her culture's definition of woman as man's property, with little or no freedom to choose her own feminine and sexual destiny. Although United States culture inspired her to seek freedom from the constraints on women's sexual expression in Mexico, Corpi could not fully embrace the options open to women in the United States, such as the possibility of remarriage after divorce or sex without marriage. Neither could she return to her country of origin, for there she would bear the stigma of having transgressed two taboos of her culture: she would be perceived by her family and her society as a woman who had abandoned her country and who had been abandoned by her husband.
Given these circumstances, Corpi chose to identify herself as a Chicana. As noted above, she became involved in a Chicano community. Another indication of her Chicana identity is the publication by Fuego de Aztlán of a bilingual edition of her collection of poems, Palabras de Mediodía / Noon Words , in 1980.[2] Furthermore, she has presented readings of her poetry to audiences composed of Anglos as well as Chicanos in various places in the Southwest. In 1982 Corpi was one of the key speakers at the Tenth Annual National Association of Chicano Studies Conference in Tempe, Arizona. She has thus been accepted by the poetic circles of the Chicano community with which she has chosen to associate.
Written in Spanish and translated into English by Corpi's friend, Catherine Rodríguez-Nieto, the poems of Palabras de Mediodía are indirect expressions of the conflicts that followed from Corpi's ambivalence about crossing the boundaries between Anglo-American and Mexican cultures. Although the poems do not overtly manifest those conflicts, they are nonetheless shaped and influenced by specific biographical and cultural pressures. Corpi's poetry also reflects her life in a modern culture that permits women to express themselves in writing. It is noteworthy that she did not write until she began living in the Chicano community. Although living, writing, and publishing in the United States, socially and culturally Corpi remains a Mexican woman in her poetry, where she orders relationships between men and women according to traditional Mexican values. Her decision to identify herself as a Chicana in the United States
manifests her desire to fuse two distinct cultural experiences, which in a sense she both accepts and rejects.
In Palabras de Mediodía , Corpi makes a conscious attempt to dramatize a woman's search for passionate love free of the constraints placed on female sexual desires in her culture. One rule of sexual behavior prescribed by traditional Mexican culture is that a woman must be a virgin and must find sexual fulfillment in marriage. Corpi's poetic world, then, is conditioned by the tension between a woman's desire for passionate love and the restrictions that limit her freedom to choose her sexual future. Ironically, the same conflict is embodied in her name: the word lucha means "struggle" and corpi ("corpus," "corps") suggests "body"; hence "the struggle of the body" (la lucha del cuerpo ). Corpi's poetic works imply that sexual gratification is a model against which to judge the fulfillment of a human being; yet they contain no overt references to sexual activity. Instead, Corpi's poems allude to sexual activity by means of the erotic codes and conventions of a Mexican romantic, lyrical tradition. For example, the image of a seed fertilized by the sun and rain suggests the insemination of the ovum by the sperm; the cutting (cortar ) of a fruit or a flower from the vine suggests the action of a man possessing a woman.[3] Read from the perspective of a modern culture with fewer sexual restrictions on women, Corpi's erotic passages seem to manifest an unconsciously sublimated or displaced desire. In her poetry the object longed for but never defined in explicit terms is a sublimated wish for sexual gratification. Paradoxically, these erotic codes and conventions derive from a literary tradition whose values imply the very constraints on women which Corpi would like to eradicate.
In Corpi's poetry the expressive features of language are more prominent than the communicative features. Her poems progress by way of images that evoke meaning rather than by statements that make logical connections. The lyrical metaphors that imply sexual activity, the rhetorical arguments that suggest a tragic mood instead of addressing the heart of the problem, and the use of ellipses imbue her poetry with a dimension of "silence," as she attempts to inject a female emotional consciousness into a male literary tradition that has not permitted women to speak.
Yet the unconscious fantasy of Corpi's poetic persona in Palabras de Mediodía is a dream impossible to realize. In the United States she cannot transform herself into a new and liber-
ated woman without surrendering the values that defined, and repressed, a woman in Mexico. I see her pulling between the two opposing pressures of a desire for sexual liberation and a knowledge of cultural prohibition on several levels. In the first part of this chapter I analyze Corpi's autobiographical and allegorical short story, "Tres Mujeres,"[4] in order to establish the cultural constraints imposed upon her as a Mexican woman, constraints primarily related to issues of nationality and gender. In the second part of the chapter I elucidate the pervasive imaginative structure of Corpi's poetic universe through a discussion of poems in various categories. In a set of landscape poems Corpi reflects upon her childhood and adolescence in Mexico in order to show that her poetic universe is split between a desire for sexual experience (rebellion, expression) and a knowledge of prohibition (repression, silence). Next I address the poems that talk about the prohibition, the frustrated desire of the poetic persona, and show how unrealized desire leads to sublimation. The next category comprises poems that enact the process of sublimation. They are important because they reveal Corpi's identification with the erotic codes and conventions of a romantic and lyrical tradition. The last group of poems reveal traces of Corpi's attempt to challenge the social laws of her culture which limit women's freedom to choose for themselves. My analysis of them shows that the erotic codes and conventions through which Corpi sublimates her desire for sexual liberation are the same as those that reinforce the values of the society that represses women's freedom. This contradiction mitigates and diffuses her criticism of that society.
"Tres Mujeres" / "Three Women"
"Tres Mujeres," Lucha Corpi's first attempt at writing, appeared in La Cosecha , a special edition of De Colores devoted to creative expression by Chicanas. Written in 1970 and published in 1977, approximately three years before Corpi's poetry appeared, the story is significant because it addresses the lacunae that characterize her poetry. "Tres Mujeres" is a direct revelation of what can only be inferred from the poetry: Corpi's inability to embrace
fully either the culture she had known in Mexico or the culture she had to live within the United States.
The bridge (el puente ) is a recurrent image in Palabras de Mediodía . One one level this bridge is, of course, the historical border between Mexico and the United States which Corpi crossed with her husband in 1965. Her description of the crossing in "Tres Mujeres" suggests that the couple entered the United States with proper documentation and left Mexico because the husband, dissatisfied with life there, sought better economic and educational opportunities. Symbolically, he looks beyond the bridge: "El veía hacia adelante, hacia aquella cuidad . . . más allá del puente" (p. 81). ("He looked ahead, toward that city . . . beyond the bridge.") Corpi's protagonist and double, Juana María, on the other hand, is not so eager to leave her native land: "Ella volteaba hacia . . . atrás . . . y silenciosamente dos gotas de despedida rodaban y caían" (p. 81). ("She looked . . . back . . . and, silently, two teardrops rolled down and fell.") On a higher level the bridge is a metaphorical border between two identities: Corpi's already internalized identity in Mexico and the new identity she once sought in the United States. Her ambivalent attitude toward both countries forced her to live, whether in the United States or in Mexico, always on the bridge, always in a space between. As a work dramatizing Corpi's dilemma, "Tres Mujeres" clarifies her relationship to the two cultures.
In "Tres Mujeres" Juana María must decide between the two histories she perceives are available to her: "pertenezco a la historia ya escrita y a la que vendrá" (p. 75). ("I belong to a history already written as well as to one yet to be written.") Juana María sees a clearly defined past and looks to an imprecise future. Corpi's technique of creating an ambiguous geographical location helps to dramatize a liminal space, in both a temporal and a spatial dimension. Like most traditional allegories, "Tres Mujeres" is based on the convention of a journey. Juana María is a traveler in search of her destiny. On the advice of her grandmother, she follows the flow of a river that leads to a house where the three women of the title await her. Although the river and the house are never precisely located in either Mexico or the United States, the description specifies that the river divides the territory into two sections ("el río . . . divide en dos las tierras morenas") and that the northern part of the river is preferred by
the birds that are searching for food. In the context of the story, a river dividing a northern land from a southern land suggests Mexico and the United States, and yet the two lands are "tierras morenas" ("brown lands").
Corpi enhances the illusion of a border location by introducing objects and people connected with both countries. For example, the house the granddaughter is to find is associated with her future destiny. When Juana María arrives at the house, she is surprised to meet Daniel, a character we later learn is her son: "¿Qúe hace él aquí? Con seguridad se le escapó a la abuela y me siguío" (p. 75). ("What is he doing here? For certain he snuck out on his grandmother and followed me.") Corpi's account of the border crossing by Juana María and her husband suggests that Daniel was born in the United States, for he did not participate in the emigration. By juxtaposing an ancestral Mexican grandmother and a great-grandson whose life is linked to the United States, Corpi mixes past and present, life in Mexico with life in the United States.
A second example concerns Rosa Catalina, who welcomes Juana María before her meeting with the three women. Rosa Catalina reminds the protagonist of the circumstances of their initial meeting (p. 76):
—Como le iba diciendo, nos conocimos hace mucho tiempo.
Quizá recuerde a aquel estudiante, Juan Ramón
Gómez, que mató a otro campañero de escuela con una
navaja por accidente. Era mi hijo. A pesar de los
esfuerzos de usted y de otros de sus compañeros el juez lo
condenó a prisión perpetua.
—As I was saying, we met long ago. Perhaps you'll remember
that student, Juan Ramón Gómez, who accidentally killed
another boy in school with a knife. He was my son. In
spite of your efforts and those of his friends, the judge
sentenced him to life in prison.
This passage describes a familiar event in working-class Chicano barrios in the United States. It helps to create cultural ambiguity because it suggests a character who in the past knew life in the United States and who is presently on a journey that seems to be taking place in Mexico. This temporal and spatial ambiguity underscores Juana María's state of mind: Is she here or there? Is she in the past or the present?
On entering the house Juana María confronts the two histories defining the extremities of her existence. They are embodied in the allegorical figures of Guadalupe for Mexico and Amerina for the United States. The third woman is Justina, a double image of the woman Juana María now is and the woman she seeks to become. While Guadalupe urges Juana María to return to her original homeland, Amerina tries to persuade her to settle in the United States. Justina, on the other hand, simply tells Juana María that she will have to decide for herself.
Guadalupe embodies the ideal of the mujer sufrida ,[5] the long-suffering Mexican woman who fulfills herself by sacrificing for others, usually men. As the story makes clear that Juana María has already left Mexico, Guadalupe may be seen as the fulfillment of the woman she might have been had she never left Mexico: "Soy consuelo del que sufre y anhelo del que ama; la columna íntegra en donde descansa la familia. . . . Regresa a mí, hija" (p. 81). ("I am the solace of he who suffers and the desire of he who loves; the pillar where the family rests. . . . Return to me, daughter.") Guadalupe awakens within Juana María feelings of guilt about leaving Mexico as well as nostalgia for the security of her former way of life: "a ese regazo tibio de donde quizá nunca debería haber salido . . . volver a ser . . . la joven que sabía su lugar y desempeñaba su papel entre su gente" (p. 82). ("to that warm breast that I, perhaps, should never have left . . . to be once again . . . the young girl who knew her place and performed her role among her people.") Although Juana María would like to accept the identity offered by Guadalupe ("Hubiera querido regresar a Guadalupe"), she knows it is impossible: "ya no soy ésa de entonces. . . . No puedo dejar de llorar" (ibid.). ("I am no longer the one I was then. . . . I cannot stop crying.")
Her Mexican dream now dead, Juana María looks to Amerina: "Amerina se levanta y desde su pedestal me mira poderosa" (ibid.). ("Amerina gets up and from her pedestal, looking powerful; she sees me.") Although Juana María notes how different she and Amerina are, "Somos tan extrañas la una a la otra" (ibid.), she recognizes that Amerina offers her the opportunity not only to question the life of self-effacement that Guadalupe represents but also to choose her own destiny: "Lo que yo te ofrezco es una vida rica y libre; eso no es lo que tenías antes. Siempre has vivido por o para alguien más. Nunca para tí misma" (p. 83). ("What I offer you is a rich and free life that you did not have before. You have
always lived through or for someone else. Never for yourself.") Juana María accepts this criticism: "Cuanto de cierto hay en sus palabras. No puedo desmentirla" (ibid.). ("How true are her words. I cannot deny them.") The tête-a-tête with Amerina discloses that Juana María's ambivalence about accepting the United States as her new cultural homeland is rooted in reasons that are as much sociopolitical as sexual. Confessing to having once believed in Amerina's promise of liberty and equality (p. 82), "He aquí mi tesoro—el poder, la igualdad, la felicidad, la libertad" ("Here is my treasure—power, equality, happiness, and liberty"), Juana María now knows it to be mere empty words (p. 83):
Su oferta atrae, pero he visto la mirada demudada
en algunos de sus hijos prendidos siempre a la
esperanza de algún día poder alcanzar esa
libertad y felicidad. Sólo los escogidos pueden
disfrutar de ello. Aquellos encerrados en cortezas
encaneladas, ojos cubiertos por el polvo de sus
tierras, esos se requiebran sobre la tierra y la
humedecen con sus gotas salinas hasta que la sangre
se les agolpa en los corazones y surge violenta como
torbellino. Ellos no son los escogidos. Desde su
pedestal Amerina los mira y sonríe. Esa poderosa
visión, seductora; lo ofrece todo pero lo absorbe todo.
Her offer attracts me, but I have seen the distraught
look in some of her children, always hoping for the
day when they can have liberty and happiness. Only
the chosen can enjoy the dream. Those who are imprisoned
in dark skins and whose eyes are covered by the dust of
her lands break their backs on it, wetting it with their
salty sweat until their blood beats in their hearts and
surges violently like a whirlwind. They are not among
the chosen. From her pedestal Amerina sees them and
smiles. Her powerful vision is seductive; she offers
everything but she absorbs everything she offers.
Corpi, aware of a Latino community's situation in the United States, fears that by accepting the United States she too would be considered among those "encerrados en cortezas encaneladas."
Juana María also has personal and dramatic reasons for finding fault with Amerina. Ironically, she reaches the epitome of happiness with her husband in the United States: "Era marzo y ya no llovía. Y lo anaranjado de los ocasos de invierno iba dejando paso al dorado. El sol brillaba con una intensidad mágica.
Eramos felices" (pp. 82–83). ("It was March and it didn't rain anymore. The orange of winter sunsets was becoming a golden color. The sun shone with a magical intensity. We were happy.") Juana María believes she can realize her dream of fulfilling herself as a woman in the United States: "Amerina me dejó jugar con la esperanza" (p. 83). ("Amerina let me play with hope.") The rupture of the marriage brought disappointment. Juana María questions to Amerina suggest that she blames her for the unwanted divorce, possible in the United States and far more unlikely in Mexico: "¿Quién entonces se llevó el fuego? ¿Quién sacudió las flores del cerezo antes de tiempo y lo dejó todo desnud? ¿Quién se bebió toda su savia? Y ahora en medio del campo yermo sus ramas desnudas gritan y nadie escucha" (ibid.). ("Who then took the fire? Who shook the flowers from the cherry tree before its time and left it naked? Who drank its sap? And now in the midst of a dry field its naked branches shout and no one hears.") In this extended metaphor the fire is the passion of the marriage, the tree is Mexican tradition, and the flower is the woman. Juana María's point is that by making the divorce possible, the United States took from the Mexican tradition its romance and passion before she could fully realize her dream.
The more reticent Justina simply points to a gruta ("grotto") that Juana María must enter: "En esa gruta . . . hay un camino escondido. Búscalo" (p. 86). ("In that grotto . . . there is a hidden road. Find it.") In the end the woman enters the gruta , which I take to be Corpi's symbolic representation of her acceptance of an uncertain future. Left without external models of authority and faced with her own breakdown, Corpi presents through Justina the identity she seeks but cannot as yet obtain. She is still the empty space between the rejected alternatives of Guadalupe and Amerina.
The images associated with each woman help to highlight the protagonist's ambivalence toward the two cultures. Each woman is linked with a specific color. Guadalupe has black eyes and hair, dresses in black, and sits on a black bench. The blue-eyed, blond Amerina dresses in white and sits on a white bench. Between the two extremes of a "black" Guadalupe and a "white" Amerina is the "gray" Justina: "Justina es una mujer triste" (p. 75). ("Justina is a sad woman.") The color gray in Corpi's poetry means sadness, absence, and silence.
The details about Guadalupe suggest that she stands for the
historical succession of three cultures: pre-Columbian, European, and Mexican. Juana María remembers Guadalupe when she dressed in white and when (p. 75) "un guerrero velaba su historia. Era la princesa que dormía en el volcán" ("a warrior guarded her story. She was the princess who slept in the volcano"). This description presupposes the popular Mexican legend about a pre-Columbian woman, Iztaccíhuatl (íztac means "white"; cíhuatl means "woman"),[6] whose name also identifies one of Mexico's highest volcanoes. Woman and mountain are thus locked together as one in the Mexican popular imagination. Iztaccíhuatl is a sleeping princess because the outline of her reclining body is, even today, imaginatively traced in the physical form of the mountain. The warrior guarding her, according to the legend, is Popocatépetl (popoca means "smoked"; tépetl means "mountain"), the name of another volcano situated beside Iztaccíhuatl. Juana María next recalls: "Después su imagen resurgió vestida de azul y con rosas en las manos" (p. 75). ("Later, her image was reborn, dressed in blue and with roses in her hands.") The princess in this context is the European Virgin Mary introduced into Mexico by the Spaniards. The Mexican context, which synthesizes the two images, is suggested by the name "Guadalupe." Indigenous to the Americas and typically Mexican, this name invokes the legend of the Virgen de Guadalupe who appeared at Tepeyac to Juan Diego, a young Indian, and thus fuses pre-Columbian and Catholic elements. The context in which Guadalupe is presented also includes the legendary and phantasmic figure of the Wailing Woman, who searches by night for her lost children. Commonly known in Mexico and the Southwest as La Llorona, the Wailing Woman may also represent the fusion of Aztec and Spanish elements in Mexican culture. Her origin may date back to pre-Columbian times.[7] Certainly her legend has existed since the time of the Spaniards and is still alive today in Mexico and the Southwest. Juana María associates with Guadalupe some verses that her grandmother taught her as a child, which connect the name with the figure of the mourning mother (p. 80):
¿Guadalupe, Guadalupe
A dónde vas?
—Voy a buscar a mis hijos
Los que dejé en el lugar
Donde el río arrulla a las garzas
En su camino hacia el mar (p. 80).
Guadalupe, Guadalupe
Where are you going?
—I am going to search for my children
whom I left there
where the river lulls the herons
on their way to the sea.
The three cultures—pre-Columbian, Spanish, and Mexican—represented in the name Guadalupe highlight the various transformations of a woman as symbol of purity, virginity, and motherhood from one cultural context to another.
Guadalupe's farewell gesture is to offer Juana María a ring (una sortija ): "Tómala, Juana María, llévala siempre contigo" (p. 82). Juana María finally envisions Guadalupe as the sleeping princess: "La princesa viste de blanco una vez más: su imagen se pierde entre las cimas nevadas de dos gigantes" (ibid.). ("The princess dresses in white once again: her image is lost between the snowy peaks of two giants.") This vision of Guadalupe refers back to the pre-Columbian context or Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl. It also implies, albeit indirectly, the male as a warrior. Together these images—"princess," "white dress," "warrior"—conjure up a scene of innocence, chivalry, and romance. Because the pre-Columbian period predates the European and Mexican periods embodied in the figure of Guadalupe, these images also suggest nostalgia for a former, and supposedly a purer, existence. The portrayal of pre-Columbian culture in mythic terms as an uncontaminated stage of Mexican history before the Spaniards introduced corruption has been a literary convention in both Mexican and Chicano literatures.[8] In Corpi's story these images and their connotations, along with that of the ring as a traditional symbol of marriage, suggest Juana María's attraction to the idea of being wedded once again to a romantic image of womanhood. That is, she would like to be the woman she once was ("una vez más") before becoming the woman she now is. Implied is a desire to return to an uncontaminated condition, a desire operative on the levels of both gender and nationality: to be a virgin and an authentic Mexican woman.
The imagery surrounding Amerina relates to a different culture. Juana María imagines Amerina as a Helen of Troy with
crystalline eyes and golden hair: "la poderosa razón por la que los hombres mataron sin titubeos" (p. 75). ("The powerful reason why men killed without vacillation.") She is also the Statue of Liberty: "Flor de Mayo, el velero que surcó los mares y la depositó [Helena de Troya], antorcha en mano, en las playas solitarias de una costa brava. Amerina orgullosa y seductora en su pedestal promete sin intención de dar" (ibid.). ("The Mayflower, the ship that plied the seas and placed her [Helen of Troy], torch in hand, on the solitary beaches of a brave coast. Proud, seductive Amerina, who on her pedestal promises with no intention of giving.") The use of the word seductora within a context of liberty may suggest that Corpi was attracted by the image of a woman radically opposed to the feminine ideal of her own culture. Whereas Corpi's Guadalupe is a woman who realizes herself by sacrificing for others, her Amerina, linked with a mythic Helen of Troy, is a woman who fulfills her desires at any cost.
Although associated in the above passage with the seas of Europe and North America, "Amerina" suggests another name and another context. Similar in sound in Spanish to Amerina is Marina , meaning "sea." Thus the name "Marina" suggests the ocean crossed by Cortés to reach the New World where he met the Indian woman, Malintzin Tenépal, whom the Spaniards renamed Doña Marina. She is now pejoratively called La Malinche by Mexicans for her participation with the Spanish in the conquest.[9] As the woman who favored the foreigner and betrayed her people, Marina became a cultural symbol of treachery. Lucha Corpi has strong objective reasons for identifying with Marina, and that she does so is evident in the four poems in which she purportedly speaks for Marina. The similarity in sound between Amerina and Marina in "Tres Mujeres" suggests that Corpi may see in her allegorical figure of Amerina some trace of Marina, of the woman who, according to the myth, abandoned her people. Amerina-Marina may represent the potential threat of giving up one's original culture to assume a foreign identity.
The "gray" Justina is less clearly drawn than the other two women. The protagonist cannot see her face: "no puedo verle la cara." Her voice is like the murmur of an autumn rain: "como cuando hay que vivir días de callada existencia" (p. 75). ("as when one has to live days of quiet existence.") Justina radiates no sense of history; no cultural associations surround her as they do Guadalupe and Amerina. As her name suggests, she is an abstrac-
tion—the justice and the balance that the protagonist seeks. Justina is both Guadalupe and Amerina without being either one: "Justina se aleja de mí, una ráfaga de aire la envuelve. Gira alrededor de sí misma y al encontrarme con su cara es Guadalupe; una vez más y es Amerina" (p. 86). ("Justina distances herself from me, a gust of wind surrounds her. She swirls around and on seeing her face she is Guadalupe; another swirl and she is Amerina.") Compared with the other two women, who make long speeches to Juana María, Justina hardly speaks. She and Juana María communicate, instead, by way of gestures and sensations (p. 84):
Justina me da su mano y salimos a un patio
interior. . . . Pone su otra mano en mis cabellos y
los acaricia. Y poco a poco recorre con ella toda mi cara.
La detiene en mis ojos, en mi nariz, en la boca. Y la
regresa hasta mi sien y ahí la deja.
Justina gives me her hand and we go out to an interior
patio. . . . She puts her other hand in my hair and caresses
it. Little by little she touches my entire face. She holds her
hand on my eyes, my nose, my mouth. She returns it to my
forehead where it remains.
With Justina's hand on her head and as though in a mystical trance, Juana María sees a transfigured Justina (pp. 84–85):
Sus ojos que antes carecían de color se transforman en color
de miel ante mi incrédula mirada. Cae el manto que cubre
su cabeza y sus cabellos se descrubren de color jengibre
obscuro. Toda ella resplandece con una hermosura
insuperable.
Her eyes once lacking color are transformed to the color of
honey before my unbelieving eyes. The cloak that covered
her head falls and her hair is a dark ginger color. Her
beauty is unsurpassable.
In a vision that foreshadows the story's ending, Juana María sees an immense grotto (una gruta inmensa ) open in front of her. From the grotto she hears music and a child's voice reciting verses of poetry. The child in the cave represents the rebirth of a new identity that Juana María must now confront.
Without actually saying so, Corpi suggests that Juana María's new identity is to be a blend of the two alternative cultures she
knows but cannot fully embrace. To understand the significance of the imagery, which suggests a blend of the United States and Mexico, it is necessary first to summarize Juana María's discussion with her grandmother in Mexico before her marriage and subsequent departure. The story's events move forward in a linear pattern interspersed with a series of flashbacks. The story traces Juana María's arrival at the house, her conversation with the three women, and the ensuing events. The flashbacks proceed from the earliest to the most recent events in the heroine's past: the heroine's conversation with her grandmother, the border crossing, and conversations between Juana María and her husband in the United States. The grandmother appears in both the ongoing story line and in the first flashback.
From the dialogue recounted in the first flashback, the grandmother clearly recognizes that the norms of Mexican society give the man final authority in marriage. Her own experience has led her to conclude that for a woman marriage is a prison. Given these circumstances, the grandmother advises Juana María never to marry. Although marriage will provide her with the illusion that her husband and children are hers, in truth she will be alone. In accepting marriage Juana María would accept the role designed for the woman, the role of living completely for her husband. If the marriage succeeds, she may find happiness. If not, she will be forced to break with the role and make her life alone: "Pero recuerda que una vez que des un paso fuera de ese camino, tendrás que seguir adelante y no es facil" (p. 77). ("But remember that once you set foot outside this path, you will have to go on and it won't be easy.") Instead of marrying, the grandmother counsels, Juana María should live with her lover.
In having her propose this option, Corpi presents the grandmother as a character who knows that her granddaughter's life will be different from her own. The prescient grandmother already sees Juana María odyssey beginning. She believes that Juana María will preserve her freedom of choice by living with her lover. That way she will keep her self-autonomy and her lover will remember her as the woman who offered him freedom. The grandmother states the ancestral taboos that Juana María will in due time break: "Casarse es malo; pero casarse e irse lejos de su patria de uno es sacrilegio. No te cases, Juana María, no te cases" (p. 77). ("To marry is bad but to marry and go far away from one's country is sacrilege. Don't marry, Juana María, don't marry.")
Juana María's answer to this advice assures her grandmother that her marriage will be a satisfying one. To Juana María's "Adiós Abuela," the grandmother responds: "No adiós, Juana María, nos volveremos a ver. Adiós se dice sólo cuando ya no hay remedio" (p. 77). ("No, not farewell, Juana María, we'll see each other again. Farewell is said only when there is no more hope.")
In the forward-moving plot the grandmother arrives at the house before the heroine does and leaves with Justina a gift for her granddaughter. The gift is a paliacate rojo ("red handkerchief"). Juana María opens the handkerchief and finds a chain and a medallion (p. 86):
En él [el medallón] un sol y tres caminos que
convergen en uno hacia una gruta. La figura de
una niña triste y pensativa en espera a la entrada
En la mano izquierda una pluma de águila y en la
derecha una ramita de albahaca. En el borde del
pañuelo hay cinco letras grabadas: ADIOS.
On the medallion one sun and three roads converging
into one leading to a grotto. The image of a sad
and pensive little girl waiting at the entrance.
In her left hand a feather of an eagle and in her
right a small branch of basil. Five letters are
engraved on the border of the handkerchief: ADIOS.
The three roads leading into the grotto seem to represent the three women who reflect the choices open to the heroine. The grotto represents the convergence of these identities, or the point at which the protagonist can no longer postpone a decision. She is, therefore, sad and pensive because she faces the unknown and must decide. The eagle's feather in her left hand evokes simultaneously the United States and Mexico, as both countries use the eagle as a symbol. According to an ancient myth, the Aztecs were told by their gods that they would find Mexico-Tenochtitlán, their city, where they would see an eagle spreading its wings upon a cactus and devouring a serpent.[10] The image of the pluma (meaning both "feather" and "pen") may be seen as an integrating symbol, standing for the writing the woman will do in the United States which will reflect her life in Mexico. The little branch of basil in the girl's right hand represents a plant historically acclimated to Mexican soil and used traditionally by Mexican people as a seasoning in popular dishes. Thus it may be
thought of as prefiguring the presence of Mexican traditions and customs in Corpi's poetry. The separation of the two—the pen (for writing) in the left hand and the basil (for tradition) in the right hand—foreshadows the fragmentation of the self in Corpi's writing. The edges (el borde ) of the handkerchief are emblematic of the boundary between her past life in Mexico and her future life in the United States. It must be remembered that Corpi, in choosing to live in the United States, moved into a community whose linguistic resources allow el borde to designate not only the edges of something (in this instance a handkerchief) but also the international border between the United States and Mexico. In the Southwest, owing to the influence of the English language, el borde is "the border." The grandmother's ADIOS engraved on el borde (the edges) is synonymous in this context with el borde (the border), because, in the grandmother's view, once Juana María crosses the international boundary all hope of returning is lost: "Adiós se dice sólo cuando ya no hay esperanza."
The woman's entrance into the grotto marks the end of the story. From the beginning the woman has feared the arrival of what she refers to la bestia nocturna : "Prefiero . . . que nunca llegue la hora de la bestia nocturna" (p. 74). ("I prefer that the hour of the nocturnal beast never arrive.") The nocturnal beast may represent a variety of states: silence, darkness, physical or spiritual decay. Essentially, it represents the paradoxical notion of "the core of a void" to which the protagonist feels herself condemned. The hour of the nocturnal beast arrives when Juana María enters the grotto. When associated with the contours and the shape of a grotto, the image of the bestia nocturna suggests that Juana María is entering the "belly of the beast," an action that satisfies physical hunger but nothing else: "La bestia nocturna mata para saciar el hambre, nada más" (p. 88). ("The nocturnal beast kills to satisfy hunger, nothing else.") The "belly of the beast," especially when associated with a Latin American, is a symbolic reference to the United States[11] and has both spiritual and political implications.
The word "grotto," however, also connotes "shrine," for the Catholic Virgin often appeared in a cave. The image of "shrine" is congruent with the historical context of Guadalupe as virgin and mother. The image of gruta in a Mexican context suggests such notions as mother, virgin, and womb. In entering the gruta , Juana María accepts her confrontation with the void that may
lead to new life. The tripartite image of mother, virgin, and womb is appropriate to Juana María. First, she affirms her role as mother to her son Daniel, who accompanies her into the grotto: "Nos detenemos a la entrada de la gruta. Daniel me da su mano. Le doy la mía" (p. 89). ("We wait at the grotto's entrance. Daniel gives me his hand. I give him mine.") Second, Juana María is symbolically virgin because she searches for a new identity. Third, the grotto serves as a symbolic womb from which a new life will evolve. These mixed impulses of desire and terror associated with the grotto or cavern image reveal Juana María's ambivalence about forging a new identity in a foreign territory that historically is hostile to Mexican people. The story ends with the single word, Entramos ("We enter").
With these details in mind, we can better understand the biographical and cultural constraints that made it impossible for Juana María/Lucha Corpi either fully to accept or reject an identity as a Mexican or an Anglo-American woman. "Tres Mujeres" dramatizes the moment between past and present, between Mexico and the United States. In that historical moment Corpi found herself living in the United States after her separation and divorce. In actuality she could not return to Mexico, because she would bear the double stigma of divorce and emigration, the first bringing more social ostracism to a woman than the second. Another constraint was imposed by the birth of her son, for a return to Mexico would mean separating father and son. "Tres Mujeres" makes it clear that the husband, who appears in flashback, was committed to his decision to live in the United States. Furthermore, the grandmother's advice to Juana María to remain in Mexico suggests that Corpi felt guilty about leaving her homeland and therefore would want to spare her son the same kind of suffering. These biographical details help to explain why Corpi would prefer the United States.
Nevertheless, Corpi, though choosing to live in the United States, could not fully accept Anglo-American culture. Attracted by the identities of both Guadalupe and Amerina but unable to embrace either one, her only option is to accept Justina as her model. The character of Justina gives Corpi the opportunity to blend what she retains of her own Mexican culture with what she gains from her experience in the United States, that is, to blend the ideals of womanhood instilled by her own culture with the desire inspired by United States society for freedom from the
old cultural restrictions. The blending is implied in Corpi's conscious decision to identify herself as a Chicana. "Tres Mujeres" reveals her alienation from both the Mexican and Anglo worlds while at the same time indicating her attraction to both. The poems in palabras de Mediodía make clear her wish to integrate the twin desires: to enjoy sexual gratification and to choose her own sexual destiny. Yet, as analysis of the poetry reveals, Corpi's adherence to the erotic codes and conventions of a literary tradition denying women sexual freedom prevents her from fully achieving the smooth integration of her desires.
2
The recurrent images making up the imaginative structure of Corpi's poetic universe in Palabras de Mediodía fall into four basic categories or areas of human experience: (1) the natural world of trees, fruits, rocks, sea, earth, and wind; (2) the cultural traditions of Mexico, both pre-Columbian and Catholic-European; (3) the pagan world in both its European and its Mexican contexts; and (4) the world of artistic expression, or poetry and writing. The images associated with these geographical and cultural landscapes reveal the tensions between a desire for sexuality and a knowledge of strict prohibition. The tensions dramatize Corpi's self-division into the open, free woman she desires to be (future) and the closed, repressed woman she was socialized to become (present). The motifs of opening and closing which characterize the poems here discussed are pervasive throughout Palabras de Mediodía .[12]
The natural world emerges from two different geographical terrains Corpi knew as a child and an adolescent in Mexico. At one pole is the tropical, sunny, green environment of Jáltipan, Veracruz; at the other is the dry, arid, rocky environment of San Luis Potosí. Jáltipan, in the middle of the jungle, is the land of Corpi's birth and early childhood. Corpi's family moved to San Luis Potosí, a city in central Mexico in the state of San Luis Potosí which adjoins Veracruz, when she was nine years old. There she lived until her marriage at the age of nineteen and her emigration to the United States. To Corpi, the people of Jáltipan
are lighthearted, carefree, and frank; those of San Luis Potosí are conservative, hyper-Catholic, critical, and suspicious of one another. She notes that in San Luis Potosí grillwork protects the windows of houses, and doors are closed all the time.[13]
These two geographical landscapes generate the next group of images. Corpi uses the tangible products of a pre-Columbian cultural tradition to weave the world of Jáltipan and those of a Judeo-Christian tradition to weave that of San Luis Potosí. The third set of images consists of references to mythical women—some explicit, some implicit—taken from both classical Western and popular Mexican contexts. Figures from the classical tradition are vestal virgins: the prophetess Sibyl who wrote her divine intuitions on leaves and on fragments of bark;[14] the phoenix, symbol of death and rebirth; and the mute Philomela who wove her tragic story of rape into a tapestry. In Corpi's allusions to popular Mexican tradition, two figures recur in her poetry: La Chaneca (a Veracruz variant of La Llorona) and la lechuza (the owl), a companion of witches in Mexican folklore. The point of intersection between these two worlds—pre-Columbian and Catholic Mexico, classical and popular Mexico—is embodied in the powerful image of Doña Marina, the historical character who symbolically fuses the encounter between the two civilizations in the conquest of Mexico.
The fourth set of images, concerning writing and poetry, confirm the identification of Corpi's poetic persona with the passive rather than the active artifacts involved in the process of writing. For example, in the Marina poems, a woman's name is represented as the object written and not as the agent writing. In "Quedarse Quito" / "Keeping Still," the second poem in Palabras de Mediodía , Corpi identifies herself with a blank page, thirsty for a drop of ink, as it pleads with the pen to write on it.
Y por segundos
todo se vuelve
a la primera página
innumerada
blanca
sedienta
de una gota de tinta
que le recuerde
la impureza
del tiempo viviente
y que parece murmurar
"Escribe en mí
escribe
Qué terrible
morir limpia!"
And for an instant
everything turns back
to the first page
unnumbered
blank
thirsty
for a drop of ink
to remind it
of the impurity
of living time
it seems to whisper
"Write on me
write
How horrible
To die clean!
This metaphor has sexual implications: the blank page is the woman as virgin, the pen is the metaphorical penis, and the drop of ink is the semen or creative fluid. Writing, according to this sexual metaphor, is the activity of sexual penetration.[15] Corpi's persona as a blank page pleads with the phallic pen to write on it so that she will not die a virgin (limpia ["clean"]). The irony is that Lucha Corpi, simply by writing, is violating the traditional codes and conventions that she ultimately defends in her poetry.
The topography of Veracruz and San Luis Potosí is the nexus of images that establish the metaphors for the conflicting pressures between sexuality and prohibition. Corpi divides her inner landscape into two, linking her desire to be open and free (sexuality) with Veracruz, and her awareness of closure and repression (prohibition) with San Luis Potosí. She employs a predominantly imagistic mode to explore her past experiences in order to understand how she has been socialized. The poems "Lluvia" and "Solario" are set in Jáltipan; "San Luis" is set in San Luis Potosí.
Veracruz and San Luis Potosí:
Landscapes Revisited
Images of prole de Tlaloc ("people of Tlaloc") and canción de Teponaztle ("song of Teponaztle") appear in "Lluvia" / "Rain,"
set in Jáltipan. Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, and teponaztle , an indigenous musical instrument,[16] give the poem a pre-Columbian flavor. La Chaneca appears in "Solario," a poem of nine vignettes. The fifth vignette describes the open plazas of Veracruz where the Tehuana women (from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, taking in parts of Veracruz and Oaxaca) meet to sell their goods. They call to their prospective buyers with "marimba voices." The marimba, a kind of xylophone indigenous to Veracruz, suggests pleasure and joy. It is also an indicator of Veracruz's African cultural roots, since the marimba was introduced to the New World by African slaves the Spanish imported into Mexico by way of the port of Veracruz. The eighth vignette tells of Jarocho, the generic name for the campesino of Veracruz, to whom, so the poet confesses, she never wrote a note of love. The sunlit houses of Jáltipan with their large, wide patios are full of musical sounds and noises: outside, the loud screams of parrots (la gritería de los loros ), the sounds of flute, marimba, and harp (el arpa ), the ringing of bells in the plaza; inside, the voice of Francisco Gabilondo Soler, the singing cricket who sang to children on the radio on Sunday afternoons.
The smells of flowers and the tastes of foods contribute to the tropical jungle setting: orange, mango, ceiba, and cashew trees, thin reeds (juncos delgados ) and cornfields (los maizales ). Afternoons of rain bring the aromas of "dulce de calabaza y atole caliente" ("squash cooked with sugar and hot atole ").[17] In the seventh vignette, visual and gustatory sensations become mixed because the sensual delights of the cashew tree are so intense in this jungle that even the eyes "taste" the sweetness of its fruit:
La exquisita y sensual
esencia del marañón
cuando los ojos apenas
si saborean la delicia
de una primer mordida
que se ha dado mil veces
antes de darse entera.
The exquisite, sensual
essence of the marañón
when one's eyes barely
tasted the delight
of the first mouthful
given a thousand times
before the whole giving.
The synesthesia of eyes tasting is important because it foreshadows the dominance of the visual over the other senses. In the context of childhood, these lines suggest the small "bites" of life taken by a child (de una primer mordida ) without yet having to assume the responsibilities of adulthood (antes de darse entera ). In the context of sexuality they highlight the poet's method of coping with sexual desire. She has tasted the delicia a thousand times (mil veces ) but has never experienced it to its fullest (antes de darse entera ).
The opening lines of "Solario" imbue the secular landscape with a liturgical quality: orange trees put away their bridal gowns for morning; mango trees stretch like green cupolas of jungle cathedrals; crickets sing the ritual of their divine office:
SOLARIO
I
Anochecía
Ya los naranjos habían guardado
sus trajes de boda para mañana
los mangos como cúpulas verdes
de catedrales selváticas
solemnemente presidían
el oficio nocturno de los grillos.
Me senté junto al arroyo
y me lavé los pies enlodados
mientras La Chaneca desde
el fondo de la noche
me observaba cavilante,
sus largas trenzas de azabache
prendidas sobre el pecho
con la Cruz del Sur.
Seguí camino del olvido
y sorprendí al tecolote
en la ceiba dormido
con los ojos abiertos.
A quién buscas hoy?
El rayo en el poniente
me preguntó.
Busco un solario de amor.
Amor . . . El viento repitió.
SUNSCAPE
I
Night Was Falling
The orange trees had put away
their bridal gowns for morning.
Mango trees like the green cupolas
of jungle cathedrals
presided in solemnity
over the night ritual of crickets.
I sat down beside the creek
and washed the mud from my feet
while Chaneca watched
hesitant
from the depths of the night
her long, jet-black braids
pinned across her breast
with the Southern Cross.
I went on toward oblivion
and surprised an owl
sleeping wide-eyed
in the ceiba tree.
The last ray of the setting sun asked:
What are you searching for today?
I am looking for a place
filled with sunlight and love.
Love . . . echoed the wind.
The introduction of La Chaneca (ll. 10–15) contributes more secular magic to the scene. Presented as the constellation Canis Major, her braids are the lines connecting each star in the north with Sirius in the south. Like a shadow at night in the astral landscape, she watches as the speaker sits by the stream to wash her muddied feet. The poet, like La Chaneca, wanders at night. La Llorona, a figure reminiscent of Medea, was cursed to roam at night in search of the children she killed to prevent her Spanish husband from taking them away. When the sun's ray asks, "¿A quién buscas hoy?" ("What are you searching for today?"), the implication is that the woman's night wanderings in search of someone or something are a familiar sight. Like her symbolic, cultural ancestor, the poet too is restless, searching for something to complete her. The sun asks, "Whom do you search for?" but the poet's
answer reframes the question in terms of a place: un solario de amor ("a sunscape of love").
In several key places Corpi uses ellipses as linguistic devices to mark meaningful silences that cannot be filled with words. In this instance an ellipsis follows the word Amor , significant because love is simultaneously everything and nothing for the poet: everything, because it is what she most desires; nothing, because she can never obtain it. Here, as elsewhere, the ellipsis signals a point of extreme emotion. It creates the effect of suspension, as the echo of the wind's voice lingers before vanishing into the landscape.
In the third vignette of "Solario" the poet recalls Tirso, her family's water carrier (el aguador ), who taught her to swear when she was three years old. By repeating the curses in the company of others she delighted Tirso and his people but outraged her family who washed her mouth out with laundry soap.
III
Tirso se llamaba
el aguador.
Me enseñó a mal decir
cuando apenas tres años
angostos pero hondos
se abrían paso
entre el verde añejo
de las sabanas.
al oirme decir aquello
que era extraño
a mis labios
la mitad del mundo
lo celebró con risas
y la otra mitad
me podó la selva
de la lengua
con navaja de lejía.
III
Tirso
was the water-carrier's name.
He taught me to swear
when barely three years
(narrow but deep)
were opening their way
between the ancient greens
of the savannahs.
When I said those things
so strange to my lips
in company
half my hearers
laughed;
the other half
pruned the jungle
on my tongue
with the razor
of laundry soap.
In this episode the world divides into two social groups: one that enjoys the child's blasphemies and one that punishes her naive spontaneity. Tirso has contaminated the child by teaching her words that the family castigates her for uttering. We obtain an image of a proper, decent family that prohibits its little girl from cursing and swearing. The poetic consciousness pinpoints an early experience that introduces the counterpressures of expression and repression.
The fourth vignette, about the poet's grandmother, is significant precisely because there is no speech between poet and grandmother. Although the grandmother plays a key role in "Tres Mujeres," even uttering the words that constitute a central taboo broken by the granddaughter, she is, except for this passage, absent from Palabras de Mediodía .
IV
Voy mirando sus manos y su boca
tranquilos los ojos que me miran
como faroles al final de la vereda
de un bosque de mechones y sonrisas.
Mi abuela junto al fogón viejo
trenzándose el cabello.
IV
I watch her hands and mouth,
her eyes watching me, tranquil
as lamps at the end of the path
through a forest of hair and smiles
My grandmother, sitting beside the stove,
braiding her hair.
While the poet observes her grandmother's gestures, the two women seem to communicate by way of their eyes. The grandmother's action of braiding her hair introduces an important motif in Corpi's collection. Corpi's women characters are silent, without words. Like their creator, they are cultivators of the unsayable,[18] communicating feelings with their eyes or by gestures. In this vignette the poetic consciousness attempts to "read" her grandmother's eyes or gestures, as if the grandmother by braiding her hair was "weaving" a message for the poet.
Corpi suggests a link between the actions of braiding and weaving in the second vignette. Her poetic consciousness desires to find the thread (un hilo ) or the strand of hair (un cabello ) which ties up all those small things heaped up inside herself from years ago, discarded as one might consign useless objects to the attic. Her poetic goal is to find this thread, this hair, and untie the knot of all those things piled up inside the "attic" of her spirit:
Hay un hilo, un cabello
quizá, de tan delgado
imperceptible que ata
las mil cosas pequeñas
que en alguna edad
del espíritu
quedaron arrumbadas
en el desván
de la conciencia.
A thread, a hair perhaps,
so thin as to be
imperceptible
ties together
a thousand things
left heaped
during some age of the spirit
in the attic
of the mind.
"Solario" builds up to a key statement in which Corpi links the image of the seas of Veracruz with a restlessness that may lead to freedom. She closes "Solario" with images of inquietude (las aguas inquietas ), bitterness (salada ), and rebellion (emancipación ), thus intimating that she retains something (Algo ) from a childhood experience which moves her to rebel and to search for a more open life.
IX
Algo del mar
se me quedó en las venas:
La salada emancipación
de las aguas inquietas.
IX
Something of the sea
stayed in my veins:
The salty freedom
of restless water.
The image of salt, recurring often in Corpi's poetry, suggests that her search for liberation will be neither sweet nor easy.
In "Solario Nocturno" Corpi articulates the images that describe the side of her that mourns, the melancholy and silent side. In this poem, in contrast with the Veracruz poems, Catholicism and its Lenten rites submerge Corpi's retrospective look at the region:
SOLARIO NOCTURNO
I
San Luis
con su alma de piedra
cincelada
por los cascos indómitos
del sol
tenía
la hipnotizante
melancolía
de un tambor de cuaresma
y el misterio enlutado
del violeta
bordado en el sayal
del corazón.
II
Buscaba el verde
entre las grietas
de las canteras
y sólo encontraba
el gris del futuro
enclaustrado
por los altos muros
coloniales.
III
Era la hora extendida
del oficio vespertino,
lisa, lisa, alisada,
monótona y ténebre,
con sus diálogos
letánicos y fríos.
Las torres caían
consecutivas,
las azucenas
se desplomaban
en cadena
sobre las cabezas
de los pobres
que seguían siendo
pobres a la salida.
Y yo me preguntaba
si éste era el misterio
que guardaba el cielo.
IV
El campesino hurgaba
la tierra
con sus manos
de cuero deslustrado
y ella dura y seca
lo burlaba de su amor.
V
Ahí conocí
por primera vez
el terrible pecado
del silencio.
NOCTURNAL SUNSCAPE
I
San Luis
with its soul of stone
chiseled
by the untamed hoofs
of the sun
possessed
the hypnotic
melancholy
of a Lenten drum
and the somber mystery
of violet
enbroidered on the sackcloth
of its heart.
II
I searched for green
in the cracks
of quarried hillsides
and found only
the gray of the future
enclosed
in high colonial
walls.
III
The hour of Vespers
was lengthening,
smooth, smooth, polished,
tenebrous, monotonous,
with the cold responses
of its litanies.
Towers fell
in sequence
lilies
dropped chains
of petals
on the heads
of the poor
who left
poor as they had come.
I wondered
if this was the mystery
guarded by heaven.
IV
The peasant dug
at the earth
with his scuffed
leather hands
and the earth, hard and cold,
gave him nothing for his love.
V
It was there
I first discovered
the terrible sin
of silence.
The San Luis landscape is dry, hard rock, with no greenery. The Lenten season, with its violet colors and its rituals of mourning, sacrifice, and self-effacement, pervades the atmosphere. San Luis, the saint, functions as metaphor for the external landscape, which is a reflection of the poet's inner state. A "mystery draped in mourning" (el misterio enlutado ) has been embroidered, not on the saint's cassock (el sayal ), but rather on the "cassock" of the saint's heart. The word enlutado , from en luto , literally means "in mourning." By extension it is "embroidered" in the heart of the landscape and by implication in the heart of the poetic self.
San Luis, a center of mining since the colonial era, does not offer the speaker the fertile, tropical lands of Veracruz. She searches for greenery in the spaces between the rocks on the hillsides but finds only the "gray of the future" (recall Justina of "Tres Mujeres"). The tedious litanies (diálogos ) of the long hour of Vespers go back and forth in a monotonous question-and-answer pattern. The land is silent, making no response to the laborer's efforts. In the closing statement, parallel to the one at the end of the Jáltipan poems, the poet, from a perspective of achieved knowledge, remembers learning the "terrible sin / of silence." Only the vague deictic Ahí ("there") pinpoints this experience. The deictic itself confirms a "silence" because it fails to specify where in exact terms. Corpi uses the adverb "there" again and again to refer to physical and spiritual places that have to do with emptiness and loss.
"Cofradía De Inservibles" and "La Ciega":
Prohibition of Sexuality
Both "Cofradía de Inservibles" and "La Ciega" are meditations on desire and the failure to fulfill it. In "Cofradía de Inservibles" Corpi attempts to define an internal room where she has stored "things" that remain unfulfilled, unexpressed, or incomplete, which are las mil cosas pequeñas ("the thousand small things") mentioned in "Solario." "La Ciega," a parable, dramatizes the process of self-fragmentation. Paradoxically, both poems affirm and deny the visual sense as the center of activity.
COFRADÍA DE INSERVIBLES
En la vastedad
del estrecho espacio
entre espíritu y mente
he formado una cofradía
de inservibles
fantasías fragmentadas
poemas inconclusos
rituales interrumpidos
hazañas que no llevé a cabo
deseos de marinera frustrada 10
estrías de luz color música
diálogos monolingües
viceversas de una sola dirección
recuerdos de la hija que no tuve
pequeños pedazos de muerte
De vez en cuando
me refugio ahí
ausente de mí misma
como una mancha de tinta en el papel indiferente
como una estrella atrapada en un gran hueco sideral 20
sin manos sin piel sorda
y muda
y presido sacerdotisa
nocturna
la ceremonia diabólica
de todas las cosas rotas
e inconclusas de mi vida
SECRET SOCIETY OF FAILURES
In the vastness
of the narrow space
between spirit and mind
I have formed a secret society
of failures
fragmented fantasies
unfinished poems
interrupted rites
deeds undone
desires of a land-bound sailor 10
strips of light color music
monolingual dialogues
one-way vice versas
memories of a daughter never born
little pieces of death
From time to time
I take refuge there
absent from myself
like an ink-stain on indifferent paper
like a star trapped in a great sidereal hole 20
without hands without skin deaf
mute
and I preside, nocturnal
priestess
over the diabolic ceremony
of all the broken, unfinished
things in my life.
Corpi's society of failures is made up of shadows, of dreams that might have been but never were. Desires are dismembered, interrupted, unfinished, fragmented. The poet catalogues her ruptured fantasies, a strategy that emphasizes the pointing and listing of experience instead of conveying a participation in unity and wholeness. She has stored her "fragmented fantasies" (ll. 7–15) between mind and spirit, a reference to "el desván / de la conciencia" ("the attic / of the mind") in "Solario." At the beginning of the poem the reader confronts "En la vastedad" ("In the vastness") but then is immediately forced to take in "del estrecho espacio" ("of the narrow space"). The deflation from vastness to narrowness is one manifestation of Corpi's poetic strategy: from everything to nothing, from promise to loss, from abundance to emptiness.
The poet's self-fragmentation is evident when she says (ll. 16–18) that she finds sanctuary within this internal room, "absent from myself." Ironically, she finds a haven in the very place (ahí ) where all her broken dreams are. The word misma in Spanish is an intensifier. The phrase mi misma here (literally, "me myself") suggests that the speaker separates herself from the person she feels herself to be. She describes the separation in terms of two entities that should enjoy cohesion and harmony: the paper is indifferent to a blot of ink; a huge astral hole traps a star. In her internal room she lacks corporeal presence, alienated from her physical body, its sensations and passions. The lines that follow
deny touch (sin manos ), feeling (sin piel ), hearing (sorda ), and speech (muda ), thus alluding to the repression of speech and all senses except the visual. The physical energy and sensation lost in olfactory, auditory, kinesthetic, and speaking realms are sublimated in a visual experience. Sight is the only sense affirmed: "y presido sacerdotisa / nocturna."
The poet's image of herself as priestess of the night recalls the night owl in the ceiba tree in the first vignette of "Solario":
Seguí camino del olvido
y sorprendí al tecolote
en la ceiba dormido
con los ojos abiertos.
I followed the road to oblivion
and surprised an owl
sleeping wide-eyed
in the ceiba tree.
The juxtaposition of the two images—the owl in the ceiba tree and the poet as a nocturnal priestess—produces an ironic effect. Like her friend the owl, the speaker is all eyes; but like the owl that, even with eyes open, is really asleep, she too is asleep because she presides over basic voids or lacks: "todas las cosas rotas / e inconclusas de mi vida" (ll. 26–27).
The image of the priestess of the night also strengthens the religious connotations of the word cofradía , a community or brotherhood sharing common spiritual goals. The speaker's rituals, however, are diabolical because they celebrate the horror of dismemberment rather than the beauty of wholeness. The irony of the religious connotation is reinforced by the placement of the words on the page, which seem to establish the contour of an altar or a temple, with lines 1–6 the raised platform and lines 7–15 the foundation. The remaining lines repeat the shape with variations. A further irony is that the priestess, who should be in front of the altar, is down below, as though supporting the dead weight of her broken dreams. The "diabolic ceremony" refers to Corpi's writing as a ritual that again and again makes the memory of failure one of its primary subjects.
Whereas Corpi presents herself in "Cofradía" as a subject who is speaking, in "La Ciega" she speaks about herself as a subject. The poem thus reveals her own fragmentation. She di-
vides herself into narrator, character (ella ), the character's reflection (la sombra ), and the character as "other" (la otra ). "La Ciega" is a concatenation of reflections:
LA CIEGA
A mediodía anticipaba la redacción de su sombra
sobre el pavimento. Todo oscilaba, se mutaba
mientras el sol acumulaba sus granos de luz.
Mas ella fija esperaba a la otra.
Las dos de la tarde consumieron su propio fuego.
Y al mirar al suelo el deslinde de la sombra ya
no era ella.
Levantó entonces los ojos. Del racimo se
desprendieron dos gotas de sangre. Y quedó ahí
fija y ciega.
El viento murmuró: "Ciega, la sombra es una ilusión,
una ilusión . . ."
THE BLIND WOMAN
At noon she waited for her shadow
to be composed on the pavement. Everything wavered,
changing, while the sun accumulated grains
of light. But she remained fixed, waiting for the other.
Two o'clock consumed its own fire.
And when she looked at the ground the border of the shadow
was no longer herself.
Then she raised her eyes. Two drops of blood
fell from the cluster. And she stayed there
fixed and blind.
The wind murmured: "Woman, the shadow
is a lie, a lie . . ."
At the height of the day (mediodía , "noon") a woman anticipates the reflection of her shadow on the street. The shimmering, vibrating setting ("Todo oscilaba, se mutaba") suggests an open future, full of potential. The verb anticipar connotes hope and expectation. The sun, now gathering its "grains of light," will write (redacción ) her shadow on the pavement. The mas ("except" or "but") of line 4 introduces a shift away from a vibrating
environment to a protagonist who is "fixed," in the sense of being rigid or unbending. The verb esperar expresses a sense of something the woman knows is coming but without the attitude implicit in anticipar of looking forward to it. These lines imply that the narrating consciousness and the woman (ella ) know already that one shadow is anticipated but another will appear.
Within several hours the day's fire has come and gone. The statement in line 5 is somewhat ambiguous because grammatically the possessive pronoun su must refer back to "Las dos de la tarde." Yet the woman is also its referent. The su therefore functions as a marker for both the subject of the sentence ("dos de la tarde") and the woman about whom the narrator is speaking. Before the woman even knows what has befallen her, her passion (fuego ) is consumed. Upon looking down and seeing a shadow different from the one she expected to see, the woman encounters la otra . By noting that "el deslinde de la sombra ya / no era ella," the narrator is really saying that ella has become la otra . With a twist similar to those found in a cuento fantástico by Borges or Cortázar, Corpi denies that ella is la otra , since ella was the shadow that the sun wrote and the afternoon consumed, but she also affirms that ella is la otra . The reflection the woman desired to see is lost in space and time.
The woman now turns to look in the opposite direction where she sees a racimo ("cluster"). The word racimo presupposes a tree or a vine with clusters of fruit or flowers from which one might extract sweet juices or smell sweet perfumes: "un racimo de uvas" ("grapes") or "un racimo de flores" ("flowers"), for example. Instead, the cluster releases two drops of blood, one for each eye, which cause the woman's blindness. She is now not only fija but ciega too. The two drops of blood are a sign of extreme suffering and pain. In the last sentence of stanza 3 Corpi reinforces the impression of stasis and fixity three times, as though the woman were nailed to the ground: quedó, ahí, fija . The wind, which now speaks, represents an inner voice belonging to the character. In addressing, or naming, the woman as ciega , the wind confirms that she is "La Ciega." Corpi divides her narrator into a character who is ciega and externalizes an inner voice that knows better, that sees beyond the endless turnings of the mind which lead nowhere, as in "Cofradía" (ll. 12–13): "diálogos monolingües / viceversas de una sola dirección" ("monolingual dialogues / one-way vice versas." The wind, associated with pas-
sion and love in Corpi's poetry, is wise, functioning as an agent with powers to see the situation from the outside.
"La Ciega" is a parable for the pattern of events that characterize women's lives in Corpi's poems: promise, tragedy, and ultimate loss. Corpi's aspirations as a woman from "Tres Mujeres" suggest that the sombra of line 1 may refer to the glorified image about womanhood her culture instilled in her. The image is apt for a woman taught to become a reflection of her husband. Socialized in such a culture she would probably see the woman as the mirror of the man, who is the ideal. Given the ruptures in Corpi's life, this woman came and vanished before she could develop and mature. The reflection of la otra is the woman she did become, but whom she denies as real. The "drops of blood" or the pain may refer to the mujer sufrida , epitomized by Guadalupe in "Tres Mujeres." Pain blinds the woman who suffers for others and never considers her own wishes. She suffers in the name of an ideal: the perfect wife, woman, and mother prescribed by her culture.
The moral that the sombra is an illusion (a deception, a falsity) has a double meaning. If the sombra of the penultimate line is the same as the sombra of line 1, the moral is that the woman should not accept as valid her culture's traditional values about women. But if it means the sombra of line 6, the moral is that the woman she did become is unreal and she, in turn, must not interpret this image as a reflection of her authentic self. The irony is that the image she refuses to recognize as authentic is really herself. The paradox, according to the wind's words, is that this reality is an illusion. The ellipsis ending the poem points to an unfinished story, or to a story yet to be written. For if the woman is fixed because she believes in the shadow and if something within tells her that the shadow is an illusion, then where or to whom does the poetic consciousness turn? The next two poems attempt to fill the silence.
"Puente De Cristal" and "Pasión Sin Nombre":
Sexual Desire Sublimated
"Puente de Cristal" ("Crystal Bridge") and "Pasión sin Nombre" ("Passion Without a Name") present two different views of the
persona's sublimation of sexual desire. They create an inner vitality in order to compensate for an essentially lonely and empty life. In "Puente de Cristal" the sexual act is consummated, whereas in "Pasión sin Nombre" it never takes place. The creative energy impelling these poems comes from the erotic codes and conventions of a Mexican lyrical tradition. In "Puente de Cristal" the natural cycle of a larva becoming a caterpillar and then a butterfly implicitly denotes the sexual growth and maturation of a woman; the night succumbing to the sieges of war is a metaphor for a woman surrendering herself to a male lover. In "Pasión sin Nombre" the image of the potro (a young horse) is a metaphor for the wild, unbridled passion of the lover.
In "Puente de Cristal" Corpi disguises a story about sexual liberation with a story about political liberation. Codes of social struggle intersect with codes of sexual struggle to create ambiguity. The struggle (la lucha ), however, is more sexual than political. "Pasión sin Nombre" contains less displacement of sexual desire because Corpi represents the object of desire as a man.
PUENTE DE CRISTAL
Caminábamos dóciles
en un puente de cristal
y la lucha nos encontró.
Se desgarró el capullo
y a punto cero calculado
el ojo sibílico apuntó.
Grito de lucha
en el campo
en la fábrica
en mi yo
en el tuyo
al extraño
al compañero
Sólo entre el silencio
preciso de dos puertas
pueden mantenerse
crisálidas eternas.
Caminábamos dolientes
en un puente de cristal
entre dos puertos.
Abrió sus piernas la noche
El arco ofendido cedió
y se fertilizó
la semilla guerrillera
entre el abrir y cerrar.
Giró el humo rojo
en la médula del viento
formando punto a punto
el fénix dialéctico.
Y yo por primera vez
dejé que mi palabra
apuntara hacia esenciales.
THE CRYSTAL BRIDGE
Obediently we walked
over a crystal bridge
and discord found us.
The bud tore loose
and the sybil's eye
aimed at zero.
Battle cry
in the fields
in the factory
in my self
in yours
to the stranger
to the friend
Only in the precise
silence of two doors
can the chrysalis
sleep forever.
Painfully we walked
over a crystal bridge
between two doors.
Night opened her legs
The wounded arch gave way
and the seed of war
quickened
between the opening and the shutting.
Red smoke whirled
in the medulla of the wind
forming, point by point,
the dialectic phoenix.
And for the first time
I allowed my word
to turn to essentials.
The first stanza of "Puente de Cristal" establishes the setting. The plural verb caminábamos suggests a group of two or more travelers, but it may also point to a speaker who travels in the community of her dreams and illusions. Since the bridge is "crystal," it represents a tenuous boundary that can break at any moment. At a metaphoric level it has two possible readings: in images of war, we may read a sexual struggle; in images of sex, we may read a political struggle. The word docíles ("soft") suggests travelers who are easily led, who are even unaware of their surroundings. The travelers are confronted by la lucha , taken as a reference to social struggle until the reader remembers that Lucha is the poet's name. The poet is playing with her name for the ambiguities it allows. If indeed we take la lucha to designate the poet, then the poem is a metaphoric description of an encounter with herself. The poet's strategy of punning on her name is also a convention of a popular lyrical tradition.[19]
The second stanza shifts from descriptive language to a language that is more metaphoric and lyrical. It also shifts from an "I" that speaks of itself as subject (caminábamos ) to an "I" that speaks of itself as object, or the capullo . The reader's attention is deflected from the real subject of the discourse to something else. The shift from an "I" as subject to an "I" as object is a recurrent strategy employed by Corpi. The capullo , a metaphor for the bud of a flower or the cocoon of a butterfly, becomes the vehicle for describing the result of the encounter with la lucha . Essentially, a silky tissue or covering is torn. Our attention is directed to the natural process of the ripping of the cocoon in order to describe a woman's entrance into physical sexuality. These lines are prophetic of the events described in stanza 6. The sibylline eye points with a calculated aim to the target (punto cero ). The commotion and confusion of struggle are felt by everyone in the fields and factories. The line Grito de lucha again plays with the ambiguity of the poet's name: the cry of a community's struggle or
the cry of a woman who encounters her sexuality for the first time. The shift from en to al in stanza 3 suggests that the cry reaches the extraño ("stranger") and the compañero ("brother"). Since both are preceded by the preposition al , they would seem to be regarded as equal. In a political context it makes no sense to equate "stranger" or "enemy" with "brother" because they take different sides in the struggle. In a sexual context the male lover may be a stranger or an enemy if he is feared, or a compañero if he is loved. Depending on the context, the word compañero means either a comrade or a lover/husband. The context here suggests the latter.
Stanza 4 shifts back into the more contemplative mode of stanza 2. Now the poetic consciousness realizes that only in some utopian realm ("entre el silencio / preciso de dos puertas" ["the precise / silence of two doors"]) can "chrysalis," or a condition of purity, exist. Stanza 5 reflects a change in consciousness because now the travelers are dolientes instead of dóciles . They experience the pain that awareness brings. The bridge they travel connects two ports or places of safety; it is the position between, emphasizing the peril of the journey.
The next stanza describes the consummation of the sexual act through images of war. The stanza also has a political connotation: the arch under attack (ofendido ) surrenders to the enemy and under cover of night the seeds of guerrilla warfare or of revolution are sown. The erotic images suggest that the sexual struggle is more intensive than the political one.[20] The night serves as a metaphor for the woman surrendering to her lover. The arco ("arch") is traced by the position of the woman's legs which open to receive the sperm. The arch, a metonymy for the woman's sexual organ, is ofendido in the sense of "offended" or "hurt." There is another disguise in that arco as a masculine noun requires a masculine adjective: ofendido instead of ofendida .[21] The verb cedió , the preterit of ceder , is more appropriate in a context of a town under siege which ultimately surrenders. The sound of cedió , however, suggests se dió ("to give oneself"), from the reflexive darse , a more suitable verb when a woman gives herself to a man. Sexual codes are couched in political terms. The semilla guerrillera in a sexual context is the poet's impulse (fertilizó ) to rebel and seek her sexual liberation.
The result of the sexual act in the following stanza is the "Red smoke," or the passion. Now realized, it forms the phoenix.
The phrase "en la médula del viento" ("in the medulla of the wind") points to the core of the passion: médula suggests "core," and "wind" in Corpi's poetry is the epitome of passion or love. The process of death and rebirth evoked by the image of the phoenix reinforces the transformation that has taken place within the poet. The dead embers of her passion have been stirred and transformed into passionate love.
In the final stanza the speaker inserts herself directly into the poetic discourse for the first time. After the sexual experience comes catharsis, and the poet—"por primera vez" ("for the first time")—can speak about essentials. The use of the preterit dejé ("allowed") and of the subjective apuntara ("that my word may point") places the statement at the level of desire rather than of fact. The poet sees herself in an imaginative space speaking directly without disguises. The implication is that the poetic consciousness knows that, until sexual desire is gratified, her words cannot describe things for what they are.
A comparison of "Puente de Cristal" and "Pasión sin Nombre" suggests that the poet can describe the consummation of the sexual act according to romantic conventions when it is presented in figurative terms, but not when it involves the woman's physical body. Although "Pasión sin Nombre" is certainly not free of some disguises Corpi uses to describe the sexual act between a man and a woman, it leaves no doubt that the gratification of sexual desire lies at the center of the poet's quest. The title of "Pasión sin Nombre" is ambiguous, pointing either to a passion so intense that it is impossible to name or to a passion that comes to no fruition (sin Nombre ). A close reading confirms that the poem allows for both possibilities.
PASIÓN SIN NOMBRE
Desdoblé el miedo
y observé al potro
desbocado de tu amor.
Quería que su crin
brillara entre
luciérnagas ocultas;
que tus manos
se cerraran en mi cuerpo
y desataran el nudo
ciego del viento dormido.
Mas no llegó el potro
con su crin brilante,
ni el roce de tu mano,
ni tú, antiguo amante.
Y mi cuerpo se quedó
muy quieto, centrado
en el blanco vestal
del viento huracanado.
PASSION WITHOUT A NAME
I unfolded my fear
and watched
the unbridled horse of your love.
I wanted his mane
to shine with
hidden fireflies;
Your hands to close around my body,
untie the blind knot
of the sleeping storm.
Yet the horse did not arrive
with its shining mane
nor the touch of your hand,
nor you, my love.
And my body became
very quiet, centered
in the vestal robe
of the hurricane.
This poem divides into two parts, with the first three stanzas expressing the speaker's ardent desire and the last two confirming its nonfulfillment. The speaker unfolds (desdoblé ) her fear and dares to see (observé ) the lover's passion. The speaker is a passive participant in the passion; she does not say sentí ("I felt") or me dí ("I gave myself"), for example. Again the focus on the eyes: she observes from a distance. The male lover's wild passion is personified by the potro , a young male horse before its first mating. The second stanza continues to direct the reader's attention to the potro , the object spoken about, rather than to the tú , the person addressed. It concentrates on one aspect of the young horse—su crin ("its mane"). This stanza reveals the woman's
socialization established in "Tres Mujeres," where all the woman's goals and motivations are projected to the male. As Amerina told Juana María, "Siempre has vivido por o para alguien más. Nunca para ti misma" (p. 83). ("You have always lived through or for someone else. Never for yourself.") The speaker in "Pasión sin Nombre" wants the male to shine in glory, to outshine even the luciérnagas ocultas ("hidden fireflies").
The third stanza continues to elaborate on this theme, but now the focus veers from the third person su to the second person tú . The lines "que tus manos / se cerraran en mi cuerpo" marks Corpi's closest approach to expressing an undisguised sexual desire, as her persona now talks directly to the lover, telling him she desires his hands to close within her body (en mi cuerpo ), an especially strong image. The word en in this instance means dentro ("inside"). The poet does not say "around my body" (alrededor de mi cuerpo ), as the English translation has it.[22] The phrase en mi cuerpo obviously suggests "within" or "inside" the body. The next two lines, though advancing the speaker's desire, begin to hint that its realization is impossible. The viento dormido ("sleeping wind") is the latent passion, or "nudo / ciego" ("blind knot"). By saying "el nudo / ciego del viento dormido," Corpi affirms the presence of a "knot" so tight and blind that it is impossible to undo.
Stanza 4 marks the unbridgeable gap between the speaker's desire and its consummation. Corpi's speaker carefully negates each item that functions as an object of desire. Nothing has materialized: the potro did not come; nor did its manifestation (crin ), the lover's manifestation (el roce de tu mano ), or the lover himself (ni tú, antiguo amante ). The addressee is an antiguo amante ("ancient lover") simply because he has been desired for so long. The result is that the speaker's body is left totally immobile, silent, and still. With different words, the poet conveys immobility three times: quedó ("was left"); muy quieto ("very still"); centrado ("centered," "fixed").
The final two lines express the sublimated desire. The word vestal suggests the vestal virgins of classical mythology who vowed to remain chaste and guard the fire of the hearth. The poet, like the vestal virgins, sees herself dedicated to the service of a higher ideal, or, as she puts it, the viento huracanado . The classical virgins guarded a hearth fire; the speaker as vestal virgin guards a hurricane. The hurricane is an energy image highlighting
the intensity of her passion. The irony is that, whereas the vestal virgins chose to remain pure in order to fulfill their vow to the goddess Vesta, the speaker seems to have no choice.
The word blanco , used as an adjective, means "white," hence purity, but as it is preceded by the masculine article el it may also connote the "target" or the "center" of the service. The speaker's passion has been transformed from a viento dormido to a viento huracanado . In the midst of the very passion itself she cannot obtain it. The connotations of "vestal"—fire, hearth, and altar—suggest the sanctity of the home to which the woman may dedicate herself. The poet's writing is also a sublimation of sexual desire because in it she acts out her service to passion, the subject of her poetry.
The focus of "Pasión sin Nombre" is on the speaker's disappointment over the lover's failure to arrive. She is simply left at the altar of a violent wind to soothe and care for her devouring passion.
3
In the next set of poems Corpi embeds her own story in the fictional stories of three women: Marina in the Marina poems, Veronica in "Romance Tejido," and Guadalupe in "Romance Negro." In the guise of an account of their repression, Corpi expresses her desire for sexual fulfillment. The pattern of these women's lives is similar to the pattern of the poet-narrator's life as described in earlier poems: the promise of a full life ends in total loss and deep sorrow. Like the poetic persona in "Puente de Cristal" and "Pasión sin Nombre," these women's lives are structured by the tension between sexuality and prohibition.
The reader is never told in clear, direct terms what tragic events have befallen Marina, Veronica, and Guadalupe to make them so sad and silent. For example, Veronica in "Romance Tejido" mentally weaves her story of passion as she executes a design in an actual embroidery. The audience must disentangle the threads in the warp and the woof of her design in order to decipher her story. As none of these three women ever speaks, and as they are never questioned as to their feelings about them-
selves or as to what has happened to them, the poet-narrator's task is to build a bridge between them and their society.
Corpi metaphorically alludes to the sexual act as the root of these women's problems. The descriptions of the sexual acts are ambiguous, though rape is suggested by adjectives in the Marina poems and verbs in "Romance Negro" connoting violence. Yet the metaphorization of the events in all three poems works against the presentation of the sexual act as rape. The poems all pursue society's reaction to the women's participation in sexual acts. Apparently Corpi wants to protest not so much the sexual act itself as the rejection of the women by their families and their culture.
The Marina Poems
Corpi's poems on Marina tell the story of the young Indian woman who served Hernán Cortés as guide, interpreter, comrade-in-arms, mistress, and mother of his son. Three different forms of her name—Marina, Malintzin, and Malinche—are referred to in the analysis of "Tres Mujeres." Malintzin Tenépal, so named by her parents, was the daughter of a cacique or chief of the province of Coatzacoalcos, where Marina was born. Doña Marina is her Spanish name, the title of respect having been conferred on her by Cortés and other Spaniards who knew her. Marina is the symbolic mother of the Mexican people. Malinche is the name given to Marina by some modern Mexicans and understood by all in Mexico and the Southwest to mean the traitress who knowingly and willingly betrayed her Indian civilization by allying herself with Cortés and the Spaniards. The term is still used in those areas to designate anybody corrupted by foreign influences.[23] To this legacy of names may now be added a fourth, Chingada, the central figure in the writings of Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes in the modern period.[24] Octavio Paz describes the Chingada as the violated native woman and mother, a symbol of the violation of "the very flesh of Indian women."[25] According to Paz, Marina, fascinated by Cortés and, by extension, by the Spanish male, allowed herself to be seduced, giving herself voluntarily. Even so, Paz sees her as a figure representing all Indian women who were not only fascinated or seduced, but also violated
or raped, by the Spaniards. For Paz, "every woman—even when she gives herself willingly—is torn open by the man, is the Chingada."[26] Marina is the symbol of betrayal because she allowed herself to be "opened," or "penetrated," by the Spanish male.
In her four poems about Marina, Corpi attempts to reverse the image given to Marina by modern Mexican writers such as Paz.[27] She presents Marina not as a woman who betrayed (se vendió ), but as a woman who was betrayed (fué vendida ) by husband, lover, and son. Implicitly, she was also betrayed by family, culture, and country. As in Paz's cultural discourse, the focal point of Corpi's poetic discourse is sexual. But unlike Paz, who portrays a Marina eager to jump into bed with the Spaniards, Corpi, in "Marina Madre," the first of the four poems, shows Marina as an unwilling participant. Yet Corpi's Marina does not actively resist the rape. Rather, the reader must presuppose a reluctant Marina who felt she had no other choice but to submit, as men would force sex upon her in spite of her objections.
I. MARINA MADRE
Del barro más húmedo la hicieron,
al rayo del sol tropical la secaron,
con la sangre de un cordero tierno
su nombre escribieron los viejos
en la corteza de ese árbol
tan viejo como ellos.
Húmeda de tradición, mística
y muda fué vendida . . . 8
de mano en mano, noche a noche,
negada y desecrada, esperando el alba
y el canto de la lechuza
que nunca llegaban.
Su vientre robado de su fruto;
hecha un puño de polvo seco su alma.
Tú no la querías ya y él la negaba 15
y aquel que cuando niño ¡mamá! le gritaba
cuando creció le puso por nombre "la chingada."
I. MARINA MOTHER
They made her of the softest clay
and dried her under the rays of the tropical sun.
With the blood of a tender lamb
her name was written by the elders
on the bark of that tree
as old as they.
Steeped in tradition, mystic
and mute she was sold— 8
from hand to hand, night to night,
denied and desecrated, waiting for the dawn
and for the owl's song
that would never come;
her womb sacked of its fruit,
her soul thinned to a handful of dust.
You no longer loved her, the elders denied her, 15
and the child who cried out to her "mamá!"
grew up and called her "whore."
II. MARINA VIRGEN
De su propio pie, junto al altar
del dios crucificado se hincó.
Como ella te amó, veía solamente
al ser sangrante. Y amaba en él
tu recuerdo secreto y enlutado.
Había querido lavar su pecado 6
con agua bendita. Y arropaba
su cuerpo con una manta gruesa y nítida
para que no supieras que su piel
morena estaba maldita.
Alguna vez te detuviste a pensar
en dónde estaba su alma escondida.
No sabías que la había sembrado
en las entrañas de la tierra
que sus manos cultivaban— 15
la tierra negra y húmeda de tu vida.
II. MARINA VIRGIN
Of her own accord, before the altar
of the crucified god she knelt.
Because she loved you, she only saw
the bleeding man, and loved in him
her secret and mourning memory of you.
She tried to wash away her sin 6
with holy water, then covered her body
with a long, thick cloth
so you would never know
her brown skin had been damned.
Once, you stopped to wonder
where her soul was hidden
not knowing she had planted it
in the entrails of that earth
her hands had cultivated— 15
the moist, black earth of your life.
III. LA HIJA DEL DIABLO
Cuando murió, el trueno se reventó en el norte,
y junto al altar de piedra la noche entera
el copal ardió. Su mística pulsación para
siempre calló. Cayó hecho pedazos el ídolo
de barro sucio y viejo, y su nombre se lo llevó
el viento con un solo murmullo ronco:
su nombre tan parecido a la profundidad
salina del mar. Poco quedó. Sólo una semilla
a medio germinar.
III. THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER
When she died, lightning struck in the north,
and on the new stone altar the incense burned
all night long. Her mystic pulsing
silenced, the ancient idol
shattered, her name
devoured by the wind in one deep growl
(her name so like the salt depths of the sea)—
little remained. Only a half-germinated seed.
IV. ELLA (MARINA AUSENTE)
Ella. Una flor quizá, un remanso fresco . . .
una noche tibia, tropical,
o una criatura triste, en una prisión
encerrada: de barro húmedo y suave:
es la sombra enlutada de un recuerdo 5
ancestral que vendrá por la mañana
cruzando el puente con manos llenas—
llenas de sol y de tierra.
IV. SHE (MARINA DISTANT)
She. A flower perhaps, a pool of fresh water . . .
a tropical night,
or a sorrowful child, enclosed
in a prison of the softest clay:
mourning shadow of an ancestral memory, 5
crossing the bridge at daybreak,
her hands full of earth and sun.
In her vision of Marina, Corpi draws on images from the four categories of experience: (1) the natural world; (2) the Judeo-Christian world; (3) popular Mexican myths; and (4) the world of artistic expression (writing/poetry). The first three poems in the series depict the central roles usually contained in the symbolic representation of Marina as woman: (1) mother, (2) virgin, and (3) condemned woman, or whore. The fourth poem signals a new "presence" yet to come.
As the poet-narrator refrains from directly assuming the consciousness of Marina throughout the four poems, Marina has no power of speech. In this respect Corpi's characterization goes counter to the historical figure of Marina who, in facilitating communication between Moctezuma and Cortés, served as the linguistic bridge between the two cultures. She knew various dialects and was said to have learned Spanish rapidly. To the Spanish chroniclers she was known as la lengua ("the tongue").[28] Corpi's narrator is a mediator between a wordless Marina and an audience that listens to the narrator express and interpret Marina's sentiments.
Once again, Corpi's poetic strategy is to shift from a form of address implying a general audience to one that implies a direct interlocutor, as she does in "Pasión sin Nombre" and other poems. In certain places she makes her audience concrete by shifting to a Tú ("you"). For example, in the final stanza of "Marina Madre" the narrator's audience, familiar with the legend of Marina, yields its privileged position to Hernán Cortés, the referent of Tú , and remains outside the discourse to overhear the rest of the sentence. This time the audience links él with Cortés's lieutenant, Juan Jaramillo, whom Marina married, according to Bernal Díaz, an eyewitness and a chronicler of the conquest.[29] The aquel ("that one") is Martín, Marina's son by Cortés.[30] In "Marina Virgen," the second poem, the narrator shifts from one audience to the other, the first two lines implying a general audience but the next four lines implying the direct interlocutor Tú . In stanza 2 the first three lines again address the general audience, whereas the final two lines address the Tú . The third stanza maintains the focus on Tú . In "La Hija del Diablo" and "Ella," the third and
fourth poems, the narrator speaks once again to her general audience, which thus functions as her direct interlocutor except in those places where its members overhear the words she ostensibly speaks to Cortés.
In "Marina Madre" Corpi uses natural images of an indigenous world to portray Marina's origins. The first stanza evokes a creation story: the human person, here a woman, is created from mud or clay. The clay is a metaphor for Marina, mother and fertile earth. The description seems to suggest Malintzin Tenépal, as she and not Marina comes first in the historical discourse. The image of moist clay seems especially appropriate for Malintzin as she was born in Coatzacoalcos, a tropical region in the state of Veracruz, on the Bay of Campeche. Nevertheless, the poem's title clearly indicates that the protagonist is Marina. The discontinuity of a description that calls to mind Malintzin but really refers to Marina suggests that Corpi identifies not so much with Malintzin as she does with Marina, the woman who knew Cortés and who straddles both cultures and worlds. Marina's name is written in the corteza de ese árbol .
Unlike the pre-Columbian gods represented by figurines of rock and marble, Corpi's Marina is made of a soft, fragile substance. Clay can be shaped according to the maker's will, but once dried it hardens in the form molded. Features of clay suit the image Corpi wants to convey of Marina, who was formed by others according to their design and, once made, had no choice but to live out the roles they assigned to her. For them, Marina was a pliable, purely physical object.
"Marina Madre" recounts a series of actions of which Marina is the recipient rather than the agent: la hicieron ("they made her"); la secaron ("they dried her"); su nombre escribieron ("they wrote her name"); fué vendida ("she was sold"). Line 4 of stanza 1 identifies the agents as the old men (los viejos ) who fashion her of the "softest" clay and dry her in the tropical sun. The relationship between "clay" and "sun" symbolizes the relationship between female and male. The sun acts on the clay by drying it, completing the process of creation. Likewise, the old men "act" on Marina: they give her a name and they write it with the blood of a tender lamb on the bark of a tree. The image of the innocent lamb killed for its blood foreshadows the events in Marina's life described in the next stanza: she too loses her innocence and virginity. The tree represents tradition and history; hence Ma-
rina's name is fixed in writing. Drawing from images of the natural world, Corpi is depicting the creation of a Mexican woman by men and the beginning of a tradition inscribed by men for all time.
The phrase fué vendida echoes the story of Malintzin Tenépal because she was literally sold by her family to itinerant Mayan merchants from Xicalango, an ancient center of coastal trade. The merchants, in turn, traded her to the Indians of Tabasco, who later made a gift of her to Cortés.[31] The phrase "de mano en mano, noche a noche" gives an impression of Marina as a sexual object passed from one man to another. The first part of the phrase is used conversationally in Spanish to designate a woman who engages in sexual activity with many men, as in "esta mujer ha pasado de mano en mano" ("This woman has been with many men"). The presentation of a Marina sexually exploited by men indicates that fué vendida is to be interpreted figuratively, but Corpi makes no absolute distinction between a pre-Columbian and a European usage. In fact, because fué vendida refers to the selling of Marina before she knew Cortés, it suggests that the Spaniards continued rather than began Marina's exploitation by men, sexual or otherwise.
The ellipsis (1.8) produces the effect of a pause. It momentarily diverts attention away from the forward movement of the sentence and thus arouses even more interest in what follows. The ellipsis suggests that the ensuing material is especially difficult for the narrator to put into words. She feels Marina's pain. The repetition in "mano en mano, noche a noche" conveys monotony and routine. Marina endures these sexual nights only because she has to. The consequences are devastating, since her personhood is negated (negada ) and desecrated (desecrada ), stripped of its sanctity. The two words negada and desecrada refer implicitly to Marina's rape. Their rhyme links them to the final word of the poem, "chingada." The fact that they are past participles contributes to the impression of a passive Marina, a victim of men's sexual lust. Each night Marina awaits the morning because it may release her from her obligations: "esperando el alba / y el canto de la lechuza / que nunca llegaban." The belief that the song of the lechuza ("owl") presages death originates in Mexican popular sayings and beliefs. The message is clear that under these circumstances death would be a relief for Corpi's Marina—but death never comes.
Corpi's portrait of Marina makes clear two things: (1) Marina does not choose to engage in sexual activity with the Spaniards; (2) she passively submits to their lust. In fairness to Corpi's Marina, we might assume that Marina submits for one of two possible reasons: (1) she faces the risk of being killed, or (2) the Spaniards will override her objections and force her to submit. Since Corpi also suggests by her reference to the lechuza 's song that Marina would welcome death in this situation, we wonder why Marina does not refuse, even at the risk of incurring death. If death is not a risk, then with even more reason we wonder why she does not refuse. Corpi's cultural paradigm leaves readers no alternative but to accept a passive Marina who can do nothing about her situation.
In line 15 the narrator changes the focus of her narration from a meditative discourse spoken to a general audience to a direct statement to a specific Tú . By so doing, Corpi attributes ambiguity and richness to the Tú . The Tú is more than just Cortés. Implicit in Tú is the Mexican male. As the referents of Tú , él , and aquel are Cortés, his lieutenant, and Marina's son by Cortés, these men's roles correspond to Marina's tripartite role of mistress, wife, and mother. Since all three men negate her, Marina's personhood is negated on all three levels. The import of the final two lines is that Marina's son, sent by Cortés to be educated in Spain, returns and does not recognize her. Instead of calling her "¡mamá!" as he once did as a child, he now sees her as the Indian woman his father had raped, or the Chingada. In the historical context of the conquest of Mexico, the aquel designates a mestizo population, sprung from sexual encounters between Spanish men and Indian women. When the son, and implicitly a mestizo people, call her Chingada, they humiliate their own mother. Marina is once again named and defamed by a man, and thus another layer of definition is imposed upon her. She has not chosen these names for herself.
Rather than capitalizing the words La Chingada, Corpi lowercases them and uses quotation marks ("la chingada"). By so doing she shifts the expression from its place in popular, oral language into written discourse. Although she does not similarly shift the word "mamá," the context indicates that it is also translation from oral speech. Had Corpi used capital letters instead of quotation marks for Chingada, she would have given more emphasis to the word. Her decision to place it within quotation marks, thus
distancing and containing the expression, may suggest her desire to treat this defamation of woman as something "other," something that is foreign to her language. Although Corpi portrays a Marina who is Chingada, she cannot incorporate the word into her poetic discourse. Corpi's phrasing of the two final lines instructs the reader to shout the word "¡mamá!" but the quotation marks and the initial lowercase letters of the defamation instruct the reader to pronounce it softly.
Corpi begins her series of poems with Marina as madre , not with Marina as virgen . The more logical order, however, would be to speak about Marina as virgin first and as mother second. The general assumption in the cultural discourses concerning the figure of Marina, as in those of Paz and Fuentes, is that Marina was a virgin before the conquest. The conquest is Marina's deflowering, and also the land's and the nation's.[32] The discontinuity between Marina the traditional cultural symbol and Corpi's Marina hints that Corpi writes to vindicate herself as well as Marina. Corpi's life fits the pattern of becoming first a mother and then a symbolic virgin, since cultural constraints would prevent her from expressing her sexual self after the breakup of her marriage. Temporal and spatial indicators in "Marina Virgen" point to a Marina already abandoned by Cortés.
"Marina Virgen" expands upon the theme of the Chingada but places it within a Judeo-Christian context. The image of the tree in "Marina Madre" is replaced in the second poem by the Christian cross on which Jesus Christ, the divine Redeemer and Savior, suffered and died. Marina willingly kneels before the cross (De su propio pie ). Stanza l suggests the tableaux of the holy women kneeling and gazing up at the cross. The gesture of kneeling implies the subjugation of the one who kneels to the one who remains standing. Marina Virgen is modeled on the image of the mujer sufrida , or the long-suffering Mexican woman.
Corpi's Marina cannot distinguish between the man she loved and the Catholic religion he imposed on the New World. When Corpi says "Como ella te amó, veía solamente / al ser sangrante," she suggests that Marina sees in Christ the Redeemer only a bleeding and humiliated Christ. And in the victimized Christ she sees a transfigured image of her own identity. Because Cortés has abandoned her, she too is a ser sangrante . Marina's love for Christ is a sublimation of her love for Cortés, for in the service of a higher ideal (Christ) she guards her secret and mourn-
ing memory of Cortés. The suffering Christ mirrors an image of herself as a person who suffers, much as Marina mirrors to Corpi an image of herself.
In the second stanza, the word pecado must be interpreted according to sexual and racial codes. Marina has assimilated the notion of "sin," a Christian, not an Indian, notion. Marina's sin is that she allowed herself to be violated, an event inextricably tied to the fact that she was Indian. Her gesture of covering herself with a thick, clear cloth, which she does to keep Cortés from seeing her dark and damned skin, suggests grieving and self-effacement. Lines 6 and 7 suggest that, had she been able, she would have washed away her sin with the trappings of Western civilization: the agua bendita ("holy water"). Marina's dark skin, or her body, was damned because she was a victim of a violation. But there are also racial overtones: Marina belonged to a race whose skin color condemned it to an inferior social rank.
Stanza 2 is told from Marina's perspective: she believed her sin was her violation. The narrator, however, interprets Marina's reason for wearing the thick shawl: "so you would never know / her brown skin had been damned." Stanza 3, with its sharp turn to the Tú , reveals more clearly the narrator's sentiments. The sin for the narrator is not Marina's violation, but rather the failure of Cortés to acknowledge that Marina had a soul. What bothers the poet-narrator is not so much that Marina was used as a sexual object as that the man she loved abandoned her, never even aware that she sacrificed her life for him. Implicitly, Marina is abandoned by family, culture, and country.
In the first two lines of stanza 3 the narrator is being mildly charitable to Cortés, for she gives him credit for once stopping to wonder where Marina's soul was hidden. As the translator points out, Alguna may mean "Once." This sentence also may ambiguously imply that Cortés never stopped, even once, to wonder about Marina. The ambiguity lies in the absence of a question mark at the end of the sentence. Whichever way we choose to interpret Alguna —as "once" or "never"—the fact remains that both meanings are a negative reflection on the man.
The final four lines of "Marina Virgen" return to images of nature, but they deviate from the cultural myth of Marina as mother earth which began the poem. Marina "plants" her soul in the earth she cultivates, but the black, moist earth is presented as a metaphor for the life of Cortés: "la tierra negra y húmeda de
tu vida." The narrator reproaches Cortés because he never realized how completely Marina loved him. She "cultivated" a life for him and never one for herself. Cortés's life, then, fertilizes her life. The dash ending line 15 indicates a momentary pause before the final line, which repeats the tierra of line 14 in order to make its identity more precise.
In recounting Marina's death, the third poem, "La Hija del Díablo," continues the parallel with Christ's passion, for the setting is the natural landscape: "el trueno se reventó en el norte." Marina is once again the ancient idol (ídolo ) which now falls and breaks into pieces. The barro is Marina's skin, now dirty and old, the same skin that was maldita in "Marina Virgen." The desire here is to undo the image of Marina as a mala mujer , an evil woman ("Hija del Diablo"), so that a new Marina can arise, as the phoenix does in "Puente de Cristal." The wind erases her name, as if to cancel it forever. The phrase salina del mar recalls the bitterness of the restless seas in "Solario" which pointed to rebellion and emancipation. In "Hija del Diablo," to intensify the finality of the events, Corpi uses the technique of accenting the letter o : murió, reventó, ardió, calló, cayó, llevó . Marina disintegrates into the natural elements originally used to compose her. The only sign of a presence to come is a seed half-alive.
The fourth poem, "Ella (Marina Ausente)," prefigures the birth of a new woman, whom Corpi simply calls Ella ("She"). The title captures the paradox of a Marina who is present, in the sense that her remains are in the earth, yet who is also absent because she is dead. The first four lines suggest the possibilities of what "Ella," the half-alive seed of "La Hija del Diablo," may become: a flower, a pool of fresh water, a tepid, tropical night. These images recall Corpi's Veracruz and point to a desire to return to the past and begin anew. On the other hand, "Ella" may be a sad child enclosed in a prison made of wet, smooth clay (de barro húmedo y suave ), suggesting Corpi's San Luis Potosí, the other option available in a return to the past. Corpi has used this image of a prison made of clay to describe Marina's skin and body; the prison is thus a metaphor for Marina's body, or the body of the criatura triste . As the body is made of the natural elements of the Mexican earth, it also suggests Marina's and Corpi's Indianness, their mexicanidad .
Line 5, beginning with es la sombra enlutada , affirms that "Ella" is a shadow of an ancestral memory enshrouded in mourn-
ing. The significant words in Corpi's formulation are "shadow" and "memory." The "new" Marina is a "shadow," but she is not a reflection of a real person. Rather, she is a "shadow" of a "memory" (un recuerdo ). The abstract definition of Marina is twice removed from a concrete order, evoking Corpi as much as it does Marina. It evokes Marina because she is a cultural ancestor of the Mexican people, the word ancestral suggesting a pre-Columbian past. The definition also suggests Corpi because recuerdo ancestral harks back to the words of her grandmother who urged her, in "Tres Mujeres," to remain in Mexico. The ancestral memory is the cultural taboo Corpi violated. The definition projects the desire to get rid of the taboo and find transformation as a new woman.
Implicit in the statement of what the shadow will become is a reference to La Llorona, also a shadow in mourning. Yet these lines point to a transformation. In contrast with the traditional llorona , who in legends usually appears at night, this llorona crosses the bridge in the morning with her hands full of sun and earth, as if relieved of her burdens. We see a glorified llorona , a glorified Marina, and a glorified Lucha. The verb in que vendrá ("that will come") projects the event into the future, emphasizing the notion that this new woman is yet to be born. Marina/Corpi desires a new beginning with abundance (con manos llenas ): no longer a "shadow" (enlutada ) in mourning but a person who comes by morning (por la mañana ). If Marina is a figure parallel to Corpi, the boundary symbolically crossed is that between Mexico and the United States. The new Marina is not the old Marina. Rather, the new Marina signals what is yet to come in a Chicano community.
The images of sol and tierra include Marina as the earth and also Cortés, since he too is equated with the earth that Marina cultivated with her hands ("Marina Virgen"). In herself—the earth—Marina sees only Cortés, as she has no other identity than the one he reflects back to her. In Marina's and Corpi's hands there is now plenitude, or completeness, a sexual desire consummated. The same images (sol and tierra ) also mark another transformation. "Ella" sees herself as a self-sufficient woman with both the sun, the fertilizing agent, and the earth, the substance fertilized, in her possession. The force of this transformation is mitigated, however, by the reader's awareness of the traditional meanings of these words. These images return to the beginning,
when the sun, by drying the clay, completed the process of Marina's creation. Corpi's transformation is still dependent upon the codes that governed the world responsible for Marina's ruin.
There are objective reasons for identifying Lucha Corpi with Marina. First, as Corpi herself explains, history and popular legend trace Marina's origins to Corpi's hometown: "The town is a few kilometers from Tabasco, and they say Marina was from the tribe of the Tabasqueños. It is possible that the Tabasqueño empire extended to my town, because it is so close. Marina could be from there."[33] Second, Marina lost her son when he was taken by Cortés to Spain; Corpi feared losing her son through the divorce: "With my divorce there was a question of whether my son would live with my ex-husband or with me. For the first time I was confronted with the possibility of my son growing up away from me." A third reason may be added to the two suggested by Corpi. Marina straddles three cultures: Indian, Spanish, and Mexican. Fully accepted by none, the legendary Marina was an outcast in all three cultures. Corpi herself also straddles three cultures: Mexican, Chicano, and United States. To some extent she must feel herself marginal in all three. Her experience in the United States prevents her from regarding herself as an authentic Mexican. In the past, upon reflecting on the possibility of returning to Mexico, Corpi has said: "Things were no longer the same; I couldn't go back to being una hija de familia ["a family's daughter"]." The constraints of her personal Mexican development keep her from embracing the social values of United States culture regarding feminine behavior. Finally, though Corpi embraces a Chicano identity and is active in the Chicano community, she maintains an emotive identification with traditional Mexican culture.
4
"Romance Tejido"
Corpi calls four of her poems romances: "Romance Liso," "Romance de la Niña," "Romance Tejido," and "Romance Negro."[34] They are not classical romances in the technical sense of having
eight syllables in a line with patterns of assonant rhyme falling on the even-numbered lines. Rather, "romance" here refers to the theme of love and its loss. Both "Romance Tejido" and "Romance Negro," the poem most reminiscent of a García-Lorquian mood, relate tragic events in women's lives. Written primarily in lyrical, evocative language, "Romance Tejido" suggests a parallel between Veronica, its fictional protagonist, and the poet-narrator. As Veronica imaginatively weaves her story, so the poet-narrator tells a story by weaving images into a poem.
ROMANCE TEJIDO
Verónica
Rosa de fuego blanco
Qúe brizna astral se oculta
tras el chal negro de tu mirada?
Qué detalle de pasión primera
entretejes en el bordado?
Verónica
Pasión apenas si amante
Qué buscas en los pequeños
momentos del ayer sin tiempo?
Qué diseño dejaste incompleto
en el bastidor del sueño?
Verónica
Vestido de cuaresma
Qué bestia fiera entró de lleno
sin advertir esencia ni presencia?
Qué revolotear de mariposas
pasó de largo hacia la ausencia?
Verónica
Luto azul de rosa blanca
Qué esencia de nardos ahogó
el humo sagrado del hogar?
Quién te dejó el corazón
inundado de olvido y de silencio?
Verónica
Rosa de fuego pálido
Pasión si amante apenas, ya consumida
Luto blanco en el baúl
de la esperanza.
WOVEN ROMANCE
Veronica
Rose of pale fire
What star-splinter hides
behind the black shawl of your gaze?
What detail of first love
is woven into the design?
Veronica
Passion barely loving
What are you looking for in the small
moments of a timeless yesterday?
What design is incomplete
on the frame of your dream?
Veronica
Lenten dress
What fierce beast came bursting in
Ignoring essence and presence?
What butterfly's wing
passed on the way to absence?
Veronica
Blue mourning of a white rose
What spikenard scent was stifled
by the sacred smoke of home-fires?
Who left your heart
flooded with oblivion and silence?
Veronica
Rose of pale fire
Passion barely loving, yet consumed
White mourning
in the hope chest.
The events in "Romance Tejido" are presented in an alternating pattern of statements and questions. In the statements (stanzas 1, 3, 5, and 7) the protagonist's name is followed by an image that describes Veronica. In the even-numbered stanzas (2, 4, 6,
and 8) the poet-narrator addresses two consecutive questions to Veronica, her direct interlocutor. Each statement contributes to our knowledge of Veronica, and each series of questions intensifies the conflict within the poet/narrator. Like "Romance Negro," "Romance Tejido" ends with a statement revising the images already presented.
Implicit in the character of Veronica projected by Corpi's narrator are two other women who come from Catholic and pagan traditions: St. Veronica and Philomela. St. Veronica, one of the women present at Christ's passion, offers Christ her veil to wipe his face. On the veil is left the imprint of his face. The name Veronica connotes the image of a woman who mourns at Calvary. The second woman, Philomela, is raped by a wicked king who cuts off her tongue to keep her from talking about his transgression. For years she perseveringly tells her story without words by weaving an account of her rape into a tapestry. She sends the finished cloth to her sister, the wife of the wicked king, who obtains her own and Philomela's revenge by punishing her husband. Both Veronica and Philomela silently perform acts that result in creative products. Corpi's Veronica recalls both women: the mourning St. Veronica and the mute Philomela.
The oxymoron of Veronica as a "rose of white fire" ( fuego blanco )[35] captures an image of a passion so intense that it is white, and as such it recalls "el blanco vestal / del viento huracanado" in "Pasión sin Nombre." The juxtaposition of these two images, fire for passion and white for purity, suggests their role as twin forces of creation and destruction. Purity is Veronica's essence, and its loss is her undoing. Similarly, her passion is a creative force but its realization is also her undoing. At the beginning of the poem the virginal Veronica is potentiality (fire and passion). The first question (lines 3–4), juxtaposing brizna astral (a small piece of a star) and chal negro (black shawl), recalls the image of the trapped star in the great astral hole of "Cofradía de Inservibles." Veronica's gaze is a black shawl, a sign of prohibition of pleasure which hides a "star splinter," an inner radiance. The next question (lines 5–6) places Veronica within the confines of domesticity. She is embroidering, mentally weaving a dream of passion while she does so. The word bordado refers to an embroidery; entretejes , to the action of weaving or knitting. Because these metaphors refer to two different kinds of sewing—one does not "weave" an embroidery—entretejes here denotes a mental exer-
cise. The young Veronica sublimates her dream of passion by acting it out in the motions of embroidering. The embroidery is the only visible articulation of the dream of passion.
The second image of Veronica (stanza 3) tells us she barely (apenas ) begins to feel sensual passion. The next pair of questions create feelings of anxiety: Veronica is restless, searching. Something as yet unstated has caused her to leave her dream of passion incomplete. The bastidor is the wooden frame tightly holding the embroidery. When the narrator says "bastidor del sueño" ("frame of your dream"), she confirms that Veronica is indeed imaginatively weaving dreams. In the next image Veronica is a purple dress, a sign of Lenten sorrow. Passion or desire is transformed into sorrow or mourning. The set of questions that follow convey that some "wild beast" (bestia fiera ) has descended upon Veronica without taking into account who she is (esencia ) or what her attitude toward the whole event was (presencia ). The only trace of the event is the fluttering of butterflies (mariposas ) as they immediately pass on their "way to absence." The mariposas suggest that Veronica's once bustling imagination is now transformed into absence, into an empty place. The next image (stanza 7) makes Veronica the "Blue mourning of a white rose" instead of the rose of white fire (lines 1–2) she is at the start of the poem. The blue mourning is a middle point between the black (or purple) mourning and the "White mourning" that ends the poem.
The metaphor of the bestia fiera is ambiguous. It creates innuendos of rape, but it could also refer to a man, a ferocious animal, overtaken by passion. In this last sense it recalls the image of the potro , used by Corpi in "Pasión sin Nombre," which contains no hint of rape. In "Romance Tejido" the male expends his passion on the woman's body and exits, leaving only a heart flooded with oblivion and silence.
The final set of questions (stanza 8) mark the climax of the narrator's probing. The nardos are Easter lilies. As the flowers that young Mexican girls carry to the altar when they make their first Holy Communion, they are a conventional symbol of innocence and purity. The English translation distorts the sense. The scent of lilies is the active agent that stifles (ahogar literally means "to drown") the sanctity of the home and family rather than the passive agent stifled by home fires, as the translation indicates. The images and their connotations in the two lines, "Qué esencia de nardos ahogó / el humo sagrado del hogar,"
suggest that someone's obsession with purity (esencia de nardos ) kept Veronica from enjoying her function as mother, wife, and mistress of the home.
The second question in stanza 8 shifts the focus from "qué ," which has so far begun each question, to "quién ." The change suggests a narrator less interested in "what is done" than in "who is responsible." Coming at the end of a series of questions, Quién te dejó communicates a sense of urgency: Who did this to you? The te , a reflexive pronoun, conveys a stronger sense of Veronica as tragic victim than do the previous questions. Stanza 8 introduces ambiguity because it makes us wonder whether the tragic event is the sexual act itself or a family's obsession with virginity which leaves Veronica's heart so empty. This deliberate ambiguity underscores the narrator's indecision about the direction in which the process is moving: Is male desire or the family's excessive preoccupation with virginity responsible for woman's undoing? The narrator can neither identify in precise terms the party responsible nor directly attribute blame where it is due. The fact that the narrator even mentions the sacred fires of the home inclines the answer toward the second possibility. The relationship between Veronica and her implied family is similar to the relationship between Guadalupe and her family in "Romance Negro."
The last stanza of "Romance Tejido" revises the poem's earlier images. No longer a "rose of white fire" ("fuego blanco") but a "rose of pale fire" ("fuego pálido"), Veronica's passion has been dampened. It no sooner barely begins to love when it is consumed. The pattern of a great passion (fuego ) extinguished before its time recalls Juana María's complaint to Amerina in "Tres Mujeres," where Juana María blames Amerina for making a divorce possible, thus extinguishing her passion before it has an opportunity to realize itself. The image of Luto blanco refers to the white matrimonial dress which may connote mourning if a woman has participated in illicit sex or has been sexually violated or raped. The white dress lies useless in the family trunk (baúl ). Ironically, the conventional receptacle for family mementos contains the white dress, now a forbidden item because matrimony is now impossible for Veronica.
The effect of the poem's ending would have been different had Corpi closed it with the questioning attitude of stanza 8 or had she pursued the questioning into further stanzas. We would
thus have been left with the force of the question, "Who is responsible?" though perhaps still without knowing the identity of the one responsible. Instead, Corpi returns once again to images reminiscent of the poem's beginning (Verónica, Rosa, Pasión, Luto ) which convey a desire to tie things up and prevent the poem from ending on a discordant note. Ultimately, the description phrased in terms of statements rather than questions implies a tone of resignation.
"Romance Negro"
"Romance Negro" combines dramatic narrative with lyrical meditation. In the former mode it describes a succession of events related by cause and effect; in the latter mode it establishes a relationship between the events and the narrator. "Romance Negro" describes a sexual event in the life of a young, beautiful girl and its effect on her and her family in a rural Mexican village. Images of luscious fruits, of sweet smells and tastes (oranges, cacao, sugarcane, vanilla, cinnamon), establish a tropical setting and climate in the Americas. The girl's name is Guadalupe. After having a sexual experience while bathing in a stream one Sunday afternoon she has to confront her family. The poem gives no evidence of Guadalupe's voluntary participation, yet it makes no clear statement that her participation was involuntary. "Romance Negro" is unclear about what happens because Corpi excludes the girl's response to the sexual act itself.
ROMANCE NEGRO
Hay sabor de vainilla
en el aire dominical.
Melancolía de la naranja
que aún cuelga de la rama,
brillante y seductora,
sin esperanza de azahar.
Guadalupe se bañaba en el río
muy de tarde en un domingo.
Promesa de leche en los senos
Vainilla el olor de los cabellos 10
Canela molida el sabor de los ojos
Flor de cacao entre las piernas
Ah, la embriaguez de la caña
entre los labios.
El se acercó y la miró así
rodeada del agua
inundada de tarde
Y en un instante arrancó la flor
Estrujó la leche hasta cambiarla
en sangre
Desparramó la vainilla por el 20
silencio de la orilla
Bebióse el candente líquido
de los labios
Y después . . . después desapareció
dejando sólo un rastro de sombra
lánguida al borde del agua.
Su madre la encontró y al verla
sacó de su morral un puño de sal
y se la echó por el hombro.
Y a los pocos días su padre 30
recibió una yegua fina de regalo.
Y Guadalupe . . . Guadalupe colgó
su vida del naranjo del huerto
y se quedó muy quieta ahí
con los ojos al río abiertos.
Hay sabor de vainilla
en el ambiente de la tarde.
Una nostalgia ancestral
se apodera de la mente.
De la rama cuelga una naranja 40
todavía sin promesa de azahar.
DARK ROMANCE
A flavor of vanilla drifts
on the Sunday air.
Melancholy of an orange,
clinging still,
brilliant, seductive,
past the promise of its blooming.
Guadalupe was bathing in the river
that Sunday, late,
a promise of milk in her breasts,
vanilla scent in her hair, 10
cinnamon flavor in her eyes,
cocoa-flower between her legs,
and in her mouth a daze
of sugarcane.
He came upon her there
surrounded by water
in a flood of evening light.
And on the instant cut the flower
wrung blood from the milk
dashed vanilla on the silence 20
of the river bank
drained the burning liquid
of her lips
And then he was gone,
leaving behind him a trail of shadow
drooping at the water's edge.
Her mother found her, and at the sight
took a handful of salt from her pouch
to throw over her shoulder.
A few days later, her father 30
accepted the gift of a fine mare.
And Guadalupe . . . Guadalupe hung her life
from the orange tree in the garden,
and stayed there quietly,
her eyes open to the river.
An orange clings to the branch
the promise lost of its blooming.
Ancestral longing
seizes the mind.
A scent of vanilla drifts 40
on the evening air.
I divide "Romance Negro" into three structural segments: (1) the abstract, or summary, of the general proposition that the narrative develops (ll. 1–6); (2) the narrative proper, describing the main events (ll. 7–36); and the coda, or the section terminating the poem (ll. 37–42).[36] The coda echoes the abstract and recapitulates the ultimate effects of the story's events. The second segment may be divided into three smaller units: (a ) the description of Guadalupe (ll. 7–14); (b ) the entrance of the male, his rape of Guadalupe, and his departure (ll. 15–27); and (c ) the family's reaction to the seduction: mother's, father's, and Guadalupe's, in that order (ll. 28–36).
The poem generates the central oppositions that impel Corpi's poetry: giving-withholding, softness-hardness, opening-closing. The basic tension in these oppositions is seen in the contrasting connotations of the two words in the title; a romance between a man and a woman with the potential for fulfillment leads to darkness and loss.[37] The oppositions may be compressed into the central meaning of Corpi's poetic work. Guadalupe's desire for sexual gratification (giving, softness, opening) is transformed into loss and emptiness (withholding, hardness, closing). The fantasy of sexual gratification is evoked in the poem's abstract: "Hay sabor de vainilla / en el aire dominical." The flavor of vanilla drifting in the Sunday air evokes romance, fullness, and sweetness. The sounds of vainilla and aire dominical are light and airy, intended to suggest promise and hope. Lines 3–6 introduce tension between the promise of a ripe, brilliant orange and its unfruitfulness; the image of a melancholic orange still clinging to the vine initiates the movement away from promise toward
loss, a movement heightened by sin esperanza de azahar ("past the promise of its blossoming").
These lines are spoken by a narrator who in a present moment—Hay ("There is"); cuelga ("hangs")—tastes the sweetness of the Sunday air. A melancholy mood seeps in as the narrator reflects upon a brilliant, seductive orange that, although still (aún ) hanging from the vine, has no hope of blooming. The word azahar is important. If stanza 2 is interpreted according to the laws of nature, seemingly the only paradigm available, it engenders an impossible desire. In a purely natural process an orange cannot return to its flower stage (azahar ), as the orange of this stanza seems to desire. It can do so, however, in a natural process involving humans, if someone plucks it, eats it, and plants its seed in the ground. In time the seed will become a tree and the tree will blossom. The stanza expresses a desire to return to a previous stage and redo a process while at the same time recognizing the impossibility of doing so (sin esperanza de azahar ). The wish to return to an earlier time calls to mind an actual event in "La Hija del Diablo," the third Marina poem: Marina is "erased" and returns to the stage of a "seed half-alive." When the process is resumed in "Ella (Marina Ausente)," Marina/Corpi is a woman reborn.
A second reading of "Romance Negro" helps the reader to understand why the orange has no hope of blooming. The word azahar , designating the flowers that Mexican women carry in their wedding bouquets, may also stand for the promise of marriage. The second reading reveals that Guadalupe is the seductive and alluring orange without hope of marriage, as explained in the narrative proper. On a first reading, however, the phrase sin esperanza de azahar cannot refer to Guadalupe, for the lines that follow make clear that Guadalupe has every hope for marriage. If applied to Guadalupe, the phrase sin esperanza de azahar is directly contradictory to the thrust of the lines that describe Guadalupe (ll. 9–14).
The description of Guadalupe in the first unit of the narrative proper, beginning with stanza 3, effects two shifts, from present to past tense and from an abstract to a concrete setting. These lines follow the literary convention of presenting the woman in a beautiful garden as a luscious fruit to be eaten and enjoyed. The poet does not talk about a real garden but uses natural imagery
to talk about a woman. Just as Marina was the earth, so Guadalupe is this garden. Through a metaphoric elaboration, parts of Guadalupe's body are fused with the smells, tastes, touch, and sights of tropical food: vanilla, cocoa, and sugarcane. Guadalupe delights in these sensual smells of her body. The absence of verbs in these phrases is the poet's strategic device for emphasizing the presence of Guadalupe's body in the plants and fruits. Her hair is vanilla-scented, her eyes are "cinnamon flavor," her lips are the rapture of sugarcane, and so on. In other words, Guadalupe is untrammeled nature.
The poet tries to create an imitative environment of sensual delights through sounds. Clusters of soft, open-ended vowels are repeated: "Pro me sa de le che en los se no s"; "Va ini lla el o lo r de los ca bello s; "Flo r de ca ca o entre las pie rna s." We are invited by reading the lines aloud to imitate with our lips the gestures of kissing, sucking, and blowing, thus participating in the sexual experience. We round our lips to produce the ending sounds of senos , cabellos , ojos , and labios , and open our lips to produce the ending sound of piernas . We do the same with a phrase like Flor de cacao , rounding the mouth on Flor , opening it on the a 's, and then closing it around the final o . The muscular actions in reading the lines match the sensual experience the poet wants to create.
The second unit of narrative proper, beginning with line 15, effects yet another shift, this time to the male's perspective. Having set up the metaphoric equivalence between the girl's body and the perfumes of flowers, spices, and plants, between a human and a natural order, the poet then describes the sexual act in terms of these vehicles rather than in terms of the female body. The male now acts on the flower, the milk, the vanilla, and the sugarcane. As noted earlier, metaphors representing the woman as a fruit, a flower, or a vegetable to be "cut" (cortar ) and hence possessed by the male abound in Mexican songs, sayings, and ballads.
The preceding unit dedicated to Guadalupe is marked by an absence of verbs. The second unit describing the male's actions is replete with strong, active verbs: arrancó , estrujó , desparramó , desapareció . They seem to tell the story of a rape. Within the literary tradition of presenting the woman as a flower, a fruit, or a vegetable to be possessed by the man as the keeper of the garden, the verb arrancar is important: "Y en un instante arrancó la flor" ("And in an instant he plucked the flower"). Arrancar , "to pull
out by the roots," implies force and violence. The verb "cut" used by the translator does not. "Cut" is the equivalent of possession whereas arrancar is the equivalent of rape. Estrujó ("wrung"), when used in the context of a man's "wringing" a woman's breast to the point of drawing blood, connotes force. The verb desparramó ("to scatter in a disorderly fashion") also conveys harshness in an act performed by someone who does not care how or where the scattered object falls. The effect of the accent on the last ó of these verbs is one of closure, indicating the finality of actions in the past. Action is felt as sexualized, but it is also felt as violent and abrupt. If we emphasize the violent aspects of the description, then, we tend to think of the encounter between man and woman, not as a seduction, but as a rape.
Yet if we interpret the lines as a description of rape, another disturbing issue arises. The Guadalupe rejoicing in her body's delights earlier in the poem is noticeably absent in the description of the rape. The male is a full participant in the action; the woman is totally passive. The verb bebióse emphasizes that the man consumes the liquid. Its accented ó is softened by the suffix se , indicating the reflexive nature of the action. The encounter between man and woman is a unilateral contract; only the man enjoys full sensual gratification. Only he is involved in a process that has a beginning and an end. If we contrast this finished process with the one suggested in the abstract, we see that the orange as trope is fixated with no hope of realizing what it desires (azahar ). Guadalupe, too, is also fixated. For just as a real orange in the natural cycle is to be eaten and tasted, so the natural culmination of a woman's development in a society like Guadalupe's is marriage. The event may be intended as a rape, but the description mitigates the effect of rape as event by portraying rape as metaphor.
Since Guadalupe is totally passive and since the entire experience is seen from the man's perspective, we do not know what she feels. The textual indicators suggesting violence might be taken as a statement about a traditional culture, in this instance Mexican, where strict social norms forbid women, especially in rural villages, the freedom to say no to men who want to force their will upon them. A similar ambiguity about rape is seen in Corpi's rendition of Marina. Corpi portrays a Marina who implicitly chooses to submit while at the same time portraying a Marina who thinks death a preferable alternative to the monoto-
nous nights. Even though the connotations surrounding a cultural discourse of the magnitude of the conquest do not appear in "Romance Negro," it seems to me that Guadalupe behaves under the same constraints that condition Marina's response. Guadalupe, like Marina, passively acquiesces because she feels she has no choice. "Romance Negro" describes a social rape, where woman's freedom of choice is severely restricted.
The poem goes on to say that marriage for Guadalupe is impossible. The Y of the final stanza of the second unit connects what follows with what has happened before. The ellipsis in Y después . . . después suggests that the narrating consciousness hesitates, as if to reflect: "And after? What happens after?" The reality is that the male leaves after satiating himself and Guadalupe is faced with the "after." The word sólo communicates that the man has taken everything he wants, leaving only a vestige of a drooping shadow (un rastro de sombra ) at the water's edge. Guadalupe, formerly her family's glory, has become not only a shadow but a "trace of a shadow." She is now potentially the ruin of her family. The promise in Guadalupe's and her family's future are now deflated into a sense of loss, lack, and disturbing quietness.
The third unit of the narrative proper, beginning with line 28, recounts the family's reaction. By dedicating a stanza each to the mother and the father, Corpi reveals her concern with the effects of the rape on Guadalupe's family. The mother's reaction on meeting Guadalupe is to take a handful of salt from her pouch and throw it over her shoulder, an action conveying that she sees in Guadalupe an omen of evil.[38] This gesture implies that the mother is more concerned about consequences than about her daughter's feelings. Metaphorically, the mother is expressing a wish to undo what the male has done, as if trying to wash away the ill deed.
The connector Y in Y a los pocos días again serves as a link between the family reaction and the rape, between the present and the past. Presumably the man who raped Guadalupe sends the father the gift of a fine mare (una yegua fina ) to atone for the insult to the father. In the same literary tradition that portrays the woman as flower or fruit and the man as keeper of the garden, the fine mare metaphorically stands for a woman, connoting her fertility. In a traditional culture the exchange of an animal between a man and a woman's father may be equivalent to a promise
of marriage. As this particular situation seems to concern rape, it is unlikely that the gift of a yegua fina is intended as an offer of marriage. More likely this gift of significant value is intended to make restitution to the father for the loss of his daughter's virginity, a woman's exchange value in a traditional society. That the father accepts the mare is clear from the verb recibió . In contrast, with the English verb "receive," the Spanish recibir carries the implication that one "accepts," say, a person's visit or gift. In this kind of system women are undervalued, considered the equivalent of domestic animals. The rules of the society permit the rapist to offer the animal and the father to accept it. To the father, the fine mare means more than avenging his daughter's honor.
The symbolic connotations of yegua fina in this context, however, must not be ignored. Yegua fina undercuts the need for the parent's worry, as it suggests that the male desires the woman. It also works against the poet's intention to communicate a rape, for rape would make a woman useless, even disgusting, in most traditional communities. The image of yegua fina implies an identification with the very social mores the poet wants to challenge. The words are probably chosen for their melodic, lyrical qualities, but their symbolic connotations hardly fit coherently and smoothly into stanzas that seem designed to communicate the poet's dissatisfaction with the treatment of the woman as object. The image of the yegua fina is the poet-narrator's misplaced sexual desire.
Whether the literal or the figurative meanings are emphasized, yegua fina represents a desire to make restitution. The movement toward restitution is undermined in the following stanza, however, when Guadalupe's reaction expresses loss. Here is the first sign of Guadalupe's response to the rape, in that she performs an action. Lines 25–27, though focused on Guadalupe, are purely descriptive; they make no statement as to her feelings. By placing the stanza describing what Guadalupe does (ll. 33–36) after the one telling about the gift of the mare, the poet suggests that Guadalupe's reaction has more to do with her father's acceptance of the gift than with the rape experience. Guadalupe's reaction also suggests that yegua fina is to be understood in a literal sense, because the symbolic connotations of yegua fina as fertility conflict with her negative reaction. According to the rules of her society, a woman ought to be happy if a man sees her as desirous
and seductive. Guadalupe reacts as she does, colgó su vida ("hung her life"), because her father prefers accepting the gift to avenging her rape. The exchange for restitution takes place between rapist and father, totally excluding Guadalupe.
The description of Guadalupe's reaction is ambiguous. The stanza may give the impression that she commits suicide, since she remains very still with her eyes fixed on the river. Suicide is certainly an understandable alternative if the loss of virginity means the abandonment of all hope for a woman to have a meaningful life. The idea of suicide, however, would be clearer had the poet said, "Guadalupe se colgó / del naranjo del huerto." Because colgar is used as a transitive verb, the phrase colgó / su vida suggests that Guadalupe "hung her hopes," meaning that her aspirations for marriage are destroyed. The popular meaning of the verb colgar is "to be left hanging or suspended." For example, a Spanish speaker could say "me quedé colgado(a)" after trying hard to court someone who never responded. The phrase produces humorous effects in an amorous context. This comic expression, of course, makes Guadalupe's situation all the more tragic because her life has ended.
The semantic relationship between the orange and the tree—naranja denotes the fruit, naranjo the tree—suggests the hierarchy in female-male relationships. The orange is the symbol for Guadalupe who hangs suspended from the tree in her father's garden. Guadalupe is the product of a masculine order that has defined her only value as her virginity. With her virginity lost, Guadalupe is useless. Like the brilliant, seductive orange, she becomes a symbol of fixity and stagnation. Guadalupe is chosen in a way that precludes her own free choice.
The coda, beginning with line 36, shifts back once again to the present tense, repeating the abstract with some modifications.[39] Its first distich replaces the elegant aire dominical with the more mundane ambiente de la tarde . The next distich suggests that the telling of Guadalupe's story has aroused a nostalgia that grips the mind—whose mind, though, is not known. It may be the narrator's, but no conclusive proof exists that it is. The Spanish language allows for the impersonal adjective to be used with certain nouns relating to the body, hence la mente ("the mind") instead of mi mente ("my mind"). Within Corpi's poetic scheme, however, the word ancestral , especially when
associated with nostalgia, here a longing for one's home, evokes memories of her native land.
The final stanza of the poem compresses the four lines of stanza 2 of the abstract into two lines. The main transformation concerns the word todavía ("still," "yet"). Whereas "sin esperanza de azahar" in the abstract gives the impression that hope is definitively impossible, "todavía sin promesa de azahar" in the coda suggests that satisfaction is yet possible. Because the word azahar appears at the end of the story, it may denote marriage as well as a return to the blossom stage. It is unlikely that azahar in the sense of marriage refers to Guadalupe, however, because her final gesture implies that she has abandoned all hope of it. Ironically, she hopes for marriage in the beginning but not at the end. The narrative consciousness, in contrast, speaks of an orange in the beginning with no hope of returning to its blossom stage. At the end it speaks of an orange that yet (todavía ) hopes for azahar , in the sense of both marriage and the blossoming of a flower. Implicit in these lines is the notion that someone has been longing for sexual fulfillment for a very long time, fulfillment that can be obtained only by returning to a purer state, in both a physical and a national context.
"Romance Negro," like "Romance Tejido" and the Marina poems, is characterized by ambiguities and discontinuities. Its various elements do not form a harmonious whole. Read in terms of a romantic, lyrical tradition, the poem wants to communicate a rape, yet the metaphorization of Guadalupe's encounter with the male diffuses the impact of a rape experience. The use of the convention of yegua fina , especially in stanzas that reflect the poet's dissatisfaction with the family's treatment of Guadalupe, does not integrate smoothly with her protest and her intent to communicate a rape. In the context of the other poems discussed here, the use of yegua fina expresses the poet's sublimated desire for sexual gratification.
These discontinuities in the description of Guadalupe's sexual experience and of the family's reaction suggest the fragmentation of the poetic consciousness. They express the poet's horror at a social practice that gives women limited choice in determining their own sexual fulfillment, while they also establish her identification with a literary tradition that legitimates this social system. Corpi's adherence to the codes and conventions of a
Mexican romantic tradition which assumes that women are objects of male desire impedes her from articulating Guadalupe's attitude toward her experience. This gap is ultimately the poem's silence. Implicit in "Romance Negro" is Corpi's unconscious fantasy for women to engage in sexual relationships with the blessing of a traditional social order.
The fragmentation of the poetic self at the level of subject matter—opened versus closed, traditional versus liberated, fulfilled versus lacking—is mirrored at the level of the presentation of the poems in Palabras de Mediodía . As a Chicana poet, Lucha Corpi reveals an awareness of the need to communicate with both Spanish- and English-speaking audiences. She writes her poems in Spanish, but she makes a gesture to her English-reading audience by offering translations of all the poems. The original Spanish and the translation are placed on facing pages, suggesting a juxtaposition rather than a resolution of tensions between two cultures. The two audiences of a society familiar with two languages remain separated rather than integrated within one bilingual audience.
Lucha Corpi's statements about the translations make clear that she works hand in hand with her translator. She discusses with Catherine Rodríguez-Nieto the poems, their translations, and their imagined impact in both languages. So, although Corpi conceptualizes and writes her poems in Spanish, she is not unaware of what the poems, once translated, will communicate to her English-speaking audience. She has in fact indicated that if a poem cannot be translated into English so as to capture the thought of the Spanish original, it is not to be published.[40] Translation, then, is her response to a language difference between the two cultures that compose her audiences.
Lucha Corpi's bilingualism is different from that of Bernice Zamora, who mixes the two languages in her poems. Although some of Zamora's poems presuppose bilingual readers who know the meanings and can understand the implications of words in both languages, Corpi's do not do so in a strict sense. In searching for a broad audience, Corpi is aware of a dual readership, making her poems accessible to an audience that reads Spanish, but not at the expense of her English-reading audience. Her form of bilingualism is realized by her placement of poem and translation on facing pages.
A second point is that Lucha Corpi's poetry presupposes an audience of women, but it does so in a different way from the poems of Villanueva and Zamora, which contain specific textual markers to indicate a female readership. In contrast, Corpi's method of implying an audience of women is more indirect than direct, as are also her poetic strategies: she speaks to and implicitly for her female characters rather than permitting them to speak for themselves. In her poetry she attempts to articulate a woman's personal feelings and to inject these into a literary tradition that conventionally has ignored them. Some of Corpi's poems (not discussed here) establish domestic situations showing how a woman's time is occupied during the hours of the day when the man is usually absent.[41] The imagistic questions of "Romance Tejido" which reveal a woman's state of mind; the imagistic arguments of the Marina poems, whose effect depends more upon our understanding of the metaphors than upon any direct statement; the strongly imagistic progression of most of her poetry—all suggest that Corpi's main concern is to represent the consciousness of women. These features of her poems move toward the delineation of a female consciousness absent in dominant poetic discourse.