El muerto

The well-known Borges story ("The Dead Man").  You can read the original here.

That a man from the suburbs of Buenos Aires, a sad upstart with no virtue save an infatuation with courage, would break through the equestrian deserts of the Brazilian border and reach the head of a group of smugglers initially seemed impossible. To those who see it that way I would like to relate the destiny of a certain Benjamín Otálora, of whom perhaps no memory is lost in Balvanera and who died on his own terms, from a bullet, in the confines of the Rio Grande do Sul. The details of his adventure are not known to me; once they are revealed I will have to correct and expand these pages. For the time being this summary may prove useful.

By 1891 Benjamín Otálora was nineteen years old. He was a big lad with a small forehead, light-colored, sincere eyes, and typically Basque brawn; a felicitous knife fight revealed that he was a brave man; the death of his opponent did not bother him, nor did his immediate need to flee the Republic. The leader of the parish gave him a letter for a certain Azevedo Bandeira, of Uruguay. Otálora set out, the crossing torturous and oppressive; the next day he was wandering through the streets of Montevideo in unconfessed and perhaps unexplained sadness. He did not find Azevedo Bandeira; towards midnight in a warehouse in Paso del Molino, he was present for an altercation among some cattle ranchers. A blade flashed; Otálora was not sure who was in the right, but he was attracted by the pure scent of danger like others were drawn to cards or music. During the brawl, one of the laborers stabbed a man in a poncho and dark hat below the belt; this turned out to be Azevedo Bandeira (upon learning this, Otálora ripped up the letter, preferring to keep it all to himself). However robust he may have been, Azevedo Bandeira gave the unjustifiable impression of being deformed. In his face, always a bit round, were the faces of the Jew, the African, and the Indian; in his demeanor, that of the monkey and the tiger; the scar across his face was one more adornment, just like his swinish black whiskers.

Projection or illusion of drink, the altercation ended as quickly as it had begun. Otálora tippled with the ranchers and walked them first to a party and then a large house in the Old City, the sun now quite high. In the last courtyard, which was of earth, all the men set up their things to go to sleep. Darkly, Otálora compared this night to the previous night. Now he was already walking on solid ground with friends. If he had any regrets it was that he didn't miss Buenos Aires. He slept until prayers, when he was woken up by the rancher who attacked Bandeira drunk (Otálora remembered that this man had shared in the night of tumult and jubilation and that Bandeira had sat him to his right and obliged him to keep drinking). The man said that he had been sent by the boss to look for him. At a sort of desk which led out to the hallway (Otálora had never seen a hallway with side doors) Azevedo Bandeira was waiting for him, with a thin and disdainful woman with reddish hair. Bandeira sized him up, offered him a dish of sugar cane, repeated that he seemed to him to be an enthusiastic fellow, and then proposed going north with the rest of the troops. Otálora accepted; until the early morning they were on the road heading for Tacuarembó.

It was here that a different life began for Otálora, a life of wide, almost endless dawns and workdays that had the smell of horses. This was a new life for him, and at times atrocious, but it was in his blood. For as men of other nations venerate and have presentiments about the sea, so do we (as well as the man who weaves these symbols) yearn for the endless prairie that resonates below our hooves. Otálora had grown up in the neighborhoods of drivers and landlords; a year ago he became a gaucho. He learned how to ride, get the horses accustomed to living in herds, slaughter cows, master the lasso and the ranchers who lasso, resist sleep, storms, ice, and the sun, urge on the cattle with whistles and shouts. Only one time during this whole period of apprenticeship did he see Azevedo Bandeira, but he was always present, because to be a man of Bandeira was to be respected and feared. And because, before any man, the gauchos said that Bandeira would make him better. Someone thought that Bandeira was born on the other side of the Cuareim, in the Rio Grande do Sul. This, which should have lowered him, obscurely enriched him with populous forests, with swamps, with inextricable and almost infinite distances. Gradually Otálora came to see that Bandeira had many different businesses and that the lifeblood of his operations was smuggling. To be a rancher was to be a servant; Otálora suggested that he be made a smuggler. Two members of the company were going to cross the frontier one night and return with some batches of sugar cane; Otálora provoked one of them, injured him and took his place. He was moved by ambition and also by some dark loyalty. May the man (he thought) come to understand that I am worth more than all his easterners put together.

A year passed before Otálora returned to Montevideo. They passed along the shores then the city (which seemed to Otálora to be very large), and arrived at the boss's house. The men had their equipment in the last courtyard. Days passed and Otálora did not see Bandeira. They said, fearfully, that he was sick. A dark-skinned man would go up to his bedroom with a boiler and with mate. One evening, this task was entrusted to Otálora. He felt vaguely humiliated but satisfied at the same time.

The bedroom was stripped bare and dark. There was a balcony with a view of the west wind, a large table with a dazzling mountain of Talers, bullwhips, belts, firearms, and knives, and a distant mirror fogged up by moonlight. Bandeira was lying there face up, dreaming and complaining, and the sun's persistence ultimately betrayed his contours. As Otálora noticed the grey hair, the fatigue, the cracks of age, the vast white bed seemed to diminish and obscure him. It infuriated him that this old man was their leader; he began to think that one good smash would do him in. Still immersed in thought, he saw by the mirror that someone had entered the room: it was, he observed, the red-haired woman. She was half-dressed and barefoot and was looking at him with aloof interest. Bandeira sat up. While he was prattling on about the campaign and downing mate after mate, his fingers played with the woman's braids. Finally, he allowed Otálora to leave.

Days later came the order to head north. They arrived at an abandoned outpost which was like any other place on the endless prairie. No trees, not even a stream was there to relieve them, and first light and last struck them in equal force. Quarries belonged to the farm which was horned and indigent, the name of this poor establishment being The Sigh.

Otálora heard from among the laborers that Bandeira would not be making it to Montevideo. He asked why; someone explained to him that there was a foreign gaucho who wanted a little too much power. Otálora understood this as a joke, but it flattered him anyway that this joke might indeed be possible. He later ascertained that Bandeira had made an enemy of one of the political chiefs and that the latter had rescinded his support. This news pleased him.

Then long weapons arrived in boxes; they were followed by a tankard and washbowl of silver for the woman's chamber, baskets of woven damask, baskets of knives, morning, and a cheerless horseman with a sharply clipped beard and a poncho. His name was Ulpiano Suárez and he was the capanga or bodyguard of Azevedo Bandeira. He was a man of few words and a very Brazilian manner. Otálora did not know whether to impute his reserve to hostility, disdain, or mere barbarism; what he did know was that according to the plan he was hatching, he would have to gain his friendship.

Then there entered into the destiny of Benjamín Otálora a brownish-red black-tailed horse from the Rio Grande do Sul that Azevedo Bandeira rode, and which shined from its plated tack with tiger skin trim. This unbridled steed was a symbol of the boss's authority, and for that reason the boy coveted it. He also came to desire, perhaps with some resentment, the woman with the dazzling hair. The woman, the tack, and the brownish-red steed were all attributes of the man he sought to destroy.

And here is where the story becomes more complicated and profound. Azevedo Bandeira was skilled in the art of progressive intimidation, in the Satanic maneuver of humiliating his interlocutor gradually, combining truth and jokes. Otálora decided to apply this ambiguous method to the laborious task which he gave himself. He resolved to supplant, slowly, Azevedo Bandeira. He managed, during workdays of common danger, to gain Juárez's friendship. He confided to him his plan and Suárez pledged his support. Many things would happen thereafter of which I only know a few. Otálora did not obey Bandeira; in fact, he tried to forget, correct, and reverse his orders. The universe seemed to be conspiring with him and accelerating the events. One day around noon in the fields of Tacuarembó there was a gunfight with some locals from the Rio Grande do Sul. Otálora usurped the place of Bandeira and took command of the easterners. A bullet hit him in the shoulder, but that afternoon Otálora returned to The Sigh on the chief's brownish-red horse, and that afternoon a few drops of blood stained the tiger skin, and that night he slept with the woman with the refulgent hair. Other versions changed the order of these facts and denied that they all took place in the course of a single day.

Bandeira, however, was still nominally the chief. He gave orders that were not carried out; Benjamín Otálora did not touch him out of a mix of routine and pity.

The story's final scene corresponded to the agitation on the last night of 1894. That night, the men of The Sigh ate some recently slaughtered pork and drank some troublesome liquor; someone strummed a milonga with great effort. At the head of the table and drunk, Otálora raised exultation after exultation, cheer after cheer, and this vertiginous tower was the symbol of his irresistible destiny. Bandeira, taciturn among those shouting, let the night flow along in riot. When the clock struck twelve he got up like someone who remembered an obligation. He got up and knocked softly on the woman's door. She opened immediately as if expecting his visit. She walked out half-dressed and barefoot. With a voice both feminine and groveling, the chief commanded her:

"If you and the fellow from Buenos Aires love each other so much, it's about time you gave him a kiss in front of everyone."

And here came a rather brutal twist. The woman wanted no part of this plan, but two men took her by the arm and threw her atop of Otálora. Devastated and in tears, she kissed his face and chest. Ulpiano Suárez had already taken out his revolver. Before dying, Otálora understood that they had betrayed him from the very beginning, that he had been condemned to death, that they had allowed him love, power, and triumph, because they had already taken him for dead, because for Bandeira he was already dead.

Suárez, almost with disdain, opened fire.

La escritura del dios

A short story ("The God's Inscription") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

The prison was deep and made of stone; its form, that of an almost perfect hemisphere, as well as the floor (likewise of stone) measure somewhat less than a full circle, made in such a way as to aggravate the feelings of oppression and vastness. A median wall cuts through it; this wall, although extremely high, does not touch the farthest part of the vault. On one side am I, Tzinacán, magus of the pyramid of Qaholom which Pedro de Alvarado set to flame; on the other is a jaguar, measuring with even and secret steps the dimensions and date of capture. Level with the floor, a long barred window cuts through the central wall. At the hour without shadow (midday) a trap opens above and a jailer whom the years have erased operates an iron pulley and lowers down to us, on the tip of the rope, jugs with water and pieces of meat. Light enters the vault, and at this moment I can see the jaguar.

I lost track of the number of years I lay in the darkness; I, who once was young and able to walk through this prison, do nothing but maintain, in my death pose, the end that the gods have planned for me. With the deep flint knife I opened the chests of the victims and now would not be capable of raising myself from the dust without magic.

On the evening of the burning of the Pyramid, the men who descended from towering steeds punished me with burning metals so that I would tell them the location of the hidden treasure. Before my very eyes they knocked over the idol of my god, but my god did not abandon me and I remained silent between each set of torments. I was lacerated, beaten, deformed, and then I awoke in this jail which I shall not leave for the rest of my mortal life.

Urged on by the fatality of doing something, of populating the hours in some fashion, I sought to recall in these shadows everything I had ever known. Entire nights were wasted in remembering the order and number of certain stone serpents or the shape of a medicinal tree. In this way I conquered the years; in this way I entered into the possession of that which was mine. Before catching sight of the ocean, the passenger senses an agitation in his blood; and one night I felt that a precise memory was approaching. Hours later I began to perceive the memory: it was one of the traditions of my god. Foreseeing that at the end of all ages there would occur countless misfortunes and ruin, he wrote on that first day of Creation a magic sentence for conjuring up evil. He wrote it in such a way that it befell the most distant of generations and was untouched by chance. No one knows how much he wrote nor what characters he used, but we have evidence that the sentence persists in secret and one chosen person will read it. As always, I thought that we were already at the end of all ages and that my destiny as last priest of my god would give me access to the privilege of intuiting this writing. The fact that I was surrounded by a jail did not deprive me of such a hope; perhaps I had seen the inscription of Qaholom thousands of times and simply failed to divine its meaning.

This thought gave me strength which later turned into a type of vertigo. In the ambit of the soil there were old forms, incorruptible and eternal forms; any of them could have been the symbol so desired. A mountain could have been the word of god, or a river or the empire or the configuration of the stars. But in the course of the centuries the mountains level out, and the path of a river tends to deviate; empires are bound to encounter mutations and havoc and the configuration and shape of the stars vary. There is movement in the firmament. The mountain and the star are individuals and individuals expire. I searched for something more tenacious, more invulnerable. I thought of the generations of grains, of pastures, of birds, of men. Perhaps this magic was written on my face, perhaps it was I who was the completion of my search. It was when I was immersed in such zeal that I remembered that the jaguar was one of the attributes of my god.

And so did piety fill my soul. I imagined the first morning of time; I imagined my god confiding the message in the live skin of jaguars who would copulate and breed their species endlessly in caves, in reed-beds, on islands, so that the last men would receive that message. I imagined a web of tigers, a hot labyrinth of tigers terrorizing the fields and flocks, all in order to conserve a sketch. There was a jaguar in the other cell; in his vicinity I espied a confirmation of my conjecture and a secret favor.

Long years did I devote to learning the order and configuration of its spots. Every blind day conceded a moment of light, and so my mind became able to discern the black forms which smeared its gilded fur. Some were circular dots; others were transverse stripes on the inner part of its legs; others were rings repeating themselves. Perhaps they were all the same sound or the same word. Many were trimmed in red.

I will not mention the fatigues of my labor. More than once I screamed at the vault that it was impossible to decipher any text. Gradually the concrete enigma with which I had tasked myself began to bother me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence, I asked myself, would constitute an absolute mind? I mused that even in the human languages there was no proposition that did not imply the entire universe; saying tiger meant the tigers that bred him, the deer and turtles that he devoured, the field on which the deer grazed, the land which was the mother of this field, the sky which shone upon this land. I mused that in the language of a god every word would announce this infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but rather an explicit way, and not progressively but immediately. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I thought, only needs to say one word and in this word resides the plenitude. No voice articulated by him could be inferior to the universe or less than the sum of all ages. Shadows and simulacra of this voice which equates to a language and how much one can understand a language are the ambitions and poor human voices, everything, world, universe.

One day or one night – what difference was there then between my days and nights? – I dreamt that the floor of my prison had a grain of sand. Indifferent, I went back to sleep; then I dreamt that I had woken up and that there were now two grains of sand. I went back to sleep; and I dreamt that the grains of sand had become three. They multiplied in this way until the prison was brimming and I was dying beneath this hemisphere of sand. I understood that I was dreaming; with supreme effort I woke myself up. Waking up was useless; the swarm of sand was suffocating me. Someone said: "You have not opened your eyes to wakefulness, but to your previous dream. This dream is within you, and will go on in infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path you will have to retrace is interminable and you will die before you really wake."

I felt lost. Sand was penetrating my mouth, and yet I cried: "Not a single dreamed grain can kill me nor are there dreams within dreams." A flash woke me. In the upper darkness a circle of light threatened to break. I saw the face and hands of my jailer, the pulley, the meat and the jugs.

A man gradually becomes commingled with the signature of his destiny; over time a man becomes his circumstances. More than a decipherer or avenger, more than a priest of the god, I was a prisoner. I returned from the tireless labyrinth of dreams to the hard prison as if I were returning home. I gave thanks for the humidity, its tiger, the tiny hole of light; I gave thanks for my old pain-ridden body; I gave thanks for the darkness and the stone.

Then something occurred which I cannot forget nor communicate. What occurred was the union with the divinity, with the universe (I don't know whether these words contain any difference). The ecstasy did not repeat its symbols; there was someone who saw God in a flash; there was someone who saw Him in a sword or the spirals of a rose. I saw the highest Wheel, which was not before my eyes nor behind them, not at their sides, but everywhere all at once. This Wheel was made of water but also of fire, and was (although its edge was visible) infinite. Interwoven, it formed all things that could be, are and were, and I was one of the strands of this long thread, and Pedro de Alvarado who had tormented me was another. Here were the causes and effects and it was enough for me to see this Wheel to understand everything, everything without end. O serendipity of understanding, so much greater than that of imagining or sensing! I saw the universe and the intimate designs of the universe. I saw the origins which the Popol Vuh narrates. I saw the mountains which surged from the water, I saw the first tree men, I saw the earthenware jars that turned against men, I saw the dogs that destroyed their faces. I saw the god without a face who sat behind all the other gods. I saw infinite processes which formed one single happiness, and understanding all of this, I also came to understand the writing of the tiger.

It was a formula of fourteen unadorned words (at least they seemed unadorned) and I would only need to say them aloud to become omnipotent. I would only need to say them for this stone prison to be obliterated, for day to enter into my night, for me to be young, for me to be immortal, for the tiger to destroy Alvarado, for the sacred knife to plunge into Spanish chests, for the pyramid and empire to be reconstructed. Forty syllables, fourteen words and I, Tzinacán, would rule the lands that Moctezuma ruled. But I know that I will never utter these words because I no longer remember Tzinacán.

May the mystery that is written in the tigers perish with me. He who has seen through the universe, he who has seen through the ardent designs of the universe cannot think of a man, of his trivial joys and misfortunes, even if he is that same man. This man has been this man and now it no longer matters. What does he care about any other's luck and happiness, what does he care about any other's nation if he, now, is no one? For that reason I do not utter the formula, for that reason I allow my days to be forgotten, laid to rest in the darkness.

Vallejo, "Confianza en el anteojo, no en el ojo"

A poem ("Trust then the glasses, yet trust not the eye") by this Peruvian poet.  You can read the original in this collection.

Trust then the glasses, yet trust not the eye;
Trust but the stairway, never trust the stair;
Trust in the wing, not in the birds to fly,
And trust in you alone, in you alone.

Trust then in evils, not evildoers;
Trust but the cup, but never trust the wine;
Trust in the corpse, not in the man in time;
And trust in you alone, in you alone.

Trust then in many, never in the one;
Trust in the riverbed, never in the tide; 
Trust in the pants, not in the legs to run,
And trust in you alone, in you alone.

Trust in the window, but trust not the door;
Trust in the mother, not in months nine;
Trust destiny, and not the golden die,
And trust in you alone, in you alone.

Antiguas literaturas germánicas

Given the ingenuity and thoroughness of Northern European philologists, it seems odd that anyone might consider a Spanish study of ancient Germanic texts to be a relevant groundswell of information – but then again not every book is authored by this Argentine. The imagination and style necessary for great fiction comprise the acme of literary artistic talent. So it is a great pleasure when such a mind does us the favor of expressing his or her views on the content and history of texts often reserved for more obscure interpreters. If you are familiar with Borges’s oeuvre, you are aware that his learning is not only breathtaking, it is systematic, a fortress built on a million precisely positioned bricks that render the whole formidable, impenetrable and, with the exception of this poet, unparalleled in the history of modern letters. To create a story, or poem, or essay, one of these bricks is taken and examined as closely as one can without letting it slip into the woeful chasm of triviality. This one brick then reminds its builder of other bricks, some of which may sit next to the one he is examining, others of which might be located on the farthest end of his battlements. But only one base is required to build his structures, one beach-found pebble, one flickering amidst the “heaventree of stars” (a metaphor proposed in this novel) to re-imagine an entire realm of gods, of giants, of dwarfs, and their interaction with us mere humans. And the brick for this book is a runic drawing of something that terrified generations of coastal dwellers, a Viking longship.

We begin with ancient Britain and conclude with ancient Germany, but in between we find the richest of all long-gone Germanic traditions: the Scandinavian. Students of that beautiful incantation, Old Norse, will not only be quick to point out that modern Icelandic is this tongue’s direct and close descendant, they will also invoke the primacy of this tradition as the most remarkable in Europe at the time. Now, as much as I am captivated by Norse mythology and most things Nordic, we must be fair in stating that Greek and Latin mythology, reinforced by the Christian credos that were spreading at the time of the composition of some of these epics, were primary sources for their structure, and to a lesser degree, their content. This notwithstanding, Borges reiterates one facet of this literary development that makes it unique:

In Iceland, the new Christian faith was not hostile to the old. In contrast to what occurred in Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, and Denmark, conversions here were bloodless. Those Norwegians who had settled in Iceland displayed the religious indifference of aristocrats; their descendants looked back upon the pagan faith with nostalgia, just like other old things lost over time. What happened to Germanic mythology was exactly what had happened earlier to the myths of the Greeks: no one believed in them anymore, but a firm knowledge of their stories was indispensable for learned persons.

There are other reasons for the survival of Norse traditions that in some countries have now been transformed into modern paganism, and no reason is more significant than the gods’ mortality. You will have heard about Ragnarök (Götterdämmerung in the Wagnerian cycle), which is traditionally rendered as “twilight of the Gods,” a German mistranslation akin to what Herder did with ellerkonge. Scholars of Scandinavian languages will tell you, however, that it really means the “fate of those who reign,” which could be gods, or lords, or run-of-the-Althing despots. It is this eschatological feature that separates the Norse tradition from the Greek and Latin, and makes it more palatable to the martyrdom of Christianity in which a God, only one in this case, knows his end in his beginning.

That Antiguas literaturas germánicas is primarily designed as a survey for Spanish speakers of a hitherto little-researched field for Latin Americans is a correct supposition. But Borges could not possibly have written something simply for pragmatic purposes.  We must consider, therefore, the investigation’s poetic value, and most relevant to his works are the kennings, the famed Scandinavian metaphors with which Borges is more than a little enamored, and which he lists with relish in the middle of his work. Among many others, he includes: “the battle ice,” “the wrath stick,” “the helmets’ fire,” “the helmets’ rodent,” “the blood branch,” “the wolf of wounds” (for “sword”); “the whale roof,” “the swan land,” “the waves’ path,” “the Viking field,” “the gulls’ meadow,” “the whale path,” “the islands’ chain” (for “sea”); and “the ravens’ delight,” “the raven beak’s reddener,” “the eagle gladdener,” “the helmet tree,” “the sword tree,” and “the swords’ dyer” (for “warrior”). Here was an endless font of poetry for a bilingual English-Spanish speaker who many feel wrote with a surfeit of adjectives placed before nouns.  Borges, his vision fading, slowly became so taken by these sagas that he began to believe they had all actually happened. He even confessed in an interview that, while he might not be a Christian in the strict sense of the word, he “believed in the Norse gods,” a response that did not surprise the interviewer and should not surprise us. The advent of Christianity did change something in the tone of these sagas. As Borges laments:

The saga, like all novelistic works, is nourished on the richness and complexity of its characters. The new faith resulted in banning this disinterested contemplation and shoved it out in favor of a dualistic world of virtues and vices, of punishments for some and rewards for others …. From these awful syntactical equivalences …. it should be noted that the movement from a ‘storm of arrows’ [for ‘battle’] to a ‘firebrand of a storm of arrows’ comprises the degeneration of the poetry of Iceland.

Thus the violent and mystic images of the Vikings, above all for kinship and military terms, were replaced by the black-and-white simplicity of good versus evil. But much more than that, a whole world was submerged beneath frozen waters for the good of mankind, which had the remarkable foresight not to forget about it. Perhaps, for this reason, you will be stunned at the coherence of such an endeavor, of the revivification of the invaders, their hymns and dirges, their macabre prophecies and sayings. And in the end, through several centuries of asides and esoteric learning, we picture quite clearly Bede, Snorri Sturluson, and Otfried of Weissenburg under one bright Northern sky. That is, a “cloud house and the sister of the moon.”

La niña santa

One critic was so strikingly wrong about this film that we shudder to think what other pleasant, quiet, and infinitely introspective cinematic works he has demoted to the rank of unwatchable – but now I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Its motifs, he claims, are merely grazed but never explored in depth and the whole affair turns out to be quite a bore; he adds insult to such lesions by dismissing the characters as equally shallow and unfocused. Now, one would not insist that the film submerges the viewer in emotion and thought – it is far too subtle for that. But the sad thing about the remark is how often we as living beings eschew profundity for the bare essentials of survival. We make hasty choices about getting to know certain people, certain books, certain places, and some of us decide that only a few such acquisitions are necessary for the human experience. Those some of us (I gleefully exclude myself) would also have nothing to say about a film like La niña santa.

The film begins with a healthy dose of self-degradation as a young and rather pretty woman by the name of Inés (Mía Maestro) tells a group of adolescent girls about their role in God's plan – with some added degradation from the onlookers. Amidst the virgin hordes we find Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg), an irreverent tomboy who even goes by José, and the eponymous lass, Amalia (María Alché), who has the type of wan, permanently disappointed face you would normally associate with Goth girls. She smiles occasionally but the smile is still crooked. And when she does in fact scrutinize an object or person she seems quite repulsed by either herself or what she sees. In time we learn why: her life has been resolved spiritually but not in any other way. Although it might be too much to ask of a teenager to have a complete personality, apart from her faith Amalia really has no personality at all. She is nothing more than the epithet foisted upon her by the director. But since faith can assume a host of different forms, she is distinct and original enough – not words commonly applied to teenagers – to stand out from among her classmates. And so, it is of little surprise that she also catches the eye of a prurient doctor named Jano (Carlos Belloso).

Jano finds Amalia at a Theremin street concert and forces some of his manliness upon her in a fashion not really punishable by law. She wonders about the soul of this ugly man, why he would do such a thing, and what if anything she can do to help him. That they come into contact to begin with is one of the film's odd conceits. Jano is attending a medical conference at a hotel, the same “dilapidated family hotel” (a unanimous label among reviewers) in which Amalia lives with her dishy mother Helena (Mercedes Morán) and her pasty, self-hating uncle Freddy. The hotel is accurately described by its inhabitants as being unfit for human residence, but Helena grew up in the hotel and knows no other means of managing the daily grind. There are also a slew of family dramas: Freddy has not seen his children since his Chilean ex-wife got custody of them; Helena’s ex-husband is having twins with his new wife; and Josefina is being pressured into a deflowering by her sex-starved boyfriend (the last not quite family, but you get the idea). If a cultured, middle-aged man, a self-absorbed once-married sexpot and a moody adolescent of budding sexuality all sounds like a familiar plotline, you may expect certain things to happen that simply should not. Instead of satisfying our lascivious urges, which are stroked repeatedly and unabashedly, we get rumors and restraint. With diabolical glee, Josefina reports Inés’s alleged indiscretions (“Yesterday she was kissing a much older man, one with hairy knuckles, with tongues down each other's throats, and she was shaking like an epileptic”) and does nothing but encourage Amalia’s curiosity about Jano. Amalia sees Jano at the hotel pool and starts praying to ward off temptation. But it is not the temptation of a handsome man, despite what Freddy says later, it is the temptation of experience; to wit, the experience of being with someone who has an intimate knowledge of the female body. 

What occurs thereafter will smack of humbug, but it remains true to teenagers and their methods, especially guilt-ridden teenagers. Amalia decides to run at once on two very different tracks: she will follow the otolaryngologist around the hotel yet will not succumb to his urges. She will tempt him, worship him, and giggle in knowing giddiness with Josefina, but nothing more. At least this is the plan. She touches children's heads as they race by in the hotel corridor, and one immediately thinks of a benevolent nun. Then she enters his room, finds his shaving cream and rubs some on the inner lapel of her school uniform shirt. At the same time, of course, Jano finally acts on the stolen glance of a bare back in our fabulous opening scene and ingratiates himself with Helena who, like most attractive women, can still fall for one of the oldest lines in that book that people seem to have stopped reading. Their romance, if one can call it that, is boring because Helena is boring, and Janus – I mean, Jano – has many other things on his mind: the conference, his family, and that girl who keeps hovering in his vicinity, seizing his fingers in the elevator, shooting him that leer that girls give when they are ready to be conquered. Our camera loves necklines, backs, shoulders, and in general disembodied torsos, and we get to behold our characters not as their words match their treacherous lips, but as their words do not correspond to their bodies. This is very true for Helena, who is shown at every possible angle and therefore Jano’s natural choice of patient for the closing panel of the conference. Why? Because she suffers from a form of tinnitus and sleep disturbance, which in the world of otolaryngology is presumably meaty stuff. But this much-belabored skit will come, we understand, only as our curtain falls. And so, as all the perspectives converge into one sensible whole, one could easily argue nothing of any consequence happens and that everything is the product of a dilapidated life in a dilapidated hotel; one may also wonder what staying at such a hotel says about those doctors. And we haven’t even mentioned Jano’s knuckles.