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.