Inés Arredondo (1928 – 1989)
(The bibliographic citations were translated from Spanish into English.)
Arredondo (1928 – 1989) is one of Mexico’s most outstanding short story writers and essayists. As part of the so–called “Generation of the Half Century”, her short stories deal with topics that were hitherto censored in Mexico, such as sexual abuse, incest, abortion and mistreatment, seen from the point of view of sinister, madness and perversion.[1]
“It is well known that the work of […] Arredondo began to spread in the 1960s, and that shortly before that, two crucial books were published: El arco y la lira (1956) by Octavio Paz and Eroticism (1957) by Georges Bataille. In this context, Mexican literature was investigating its poetic being: the sacred, love and eroticism were established as vehicles for the expression of a new literary offering”. [2]
Silence is known to be a literary quality, and Inés Arredondo was aware of this. Belonging to a time when women lay under the shadow of language, in a context still marked by religion, an inner voice resonated within her being and needed to be expressed stridently from silence.
A voice that has been snatched away and shut down, ends up generating silences so deep that they express more than a thousand words. Maurice Blanchot mentions: better to be silent than to reveal too much, because when everything has been said, what remains to be said is disaster.
“Critics often point to her as an exceptional writer for her approach to the perverse, the sinister, the grotesque, the monstrous, through suggestive and accurate writing […]. Behind all these adjectives there is undoubtedly something that his readers are unable to name. […] The unnamed, the unnameable. The desire behind the prohibition of the taboo. The horror of the fascination that its blurred limits provoke in us. The impulse not only of life and death, but of transgression that Inés Arredondo’s unfathomable stories make us glimpse close, tantalisingly possible”.[3]
Reading Arredondo’s works shows us something unique and special where silence is the perfect accomplice of perversion, what could be so perverse as not to talk about it? This is what the story Shadow in the shadows is about.
Close to the narrative of Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski, Laura, the protagonist of Sombra entre sombras (Shadow in the shadows), marries Ermilo, a forty–seven–year–old man, well known in the village for having a good economic status, tenderly seduces Laura’s mother, so that she will give her daughter to the matrimonial property.
At fifteen years of age, with well–established religious values, exceptional morality and above all purity, she is offered to a man who is rumoured to be perverse when it comes to love affairs.
Disgusted and horrified by a myriad of perverse acts that would be performed in the future, she has no choice but to obey the rules that have been imposed on her, both by her mother and her husband.
What Arredondo exposes in this story is a reflection of what Mexican society accepted by nature, women as objects to be oppressed and silenced. However, although these characteristics are immoral, Arredondo’s narrative turns that evil into good. Or at least that can be seen with her female characters who offer themselves even knowing the consequences.
The protagonist of this story fearlessly surrenders to the horror and fascination of her husband’s perversions, an aspect that will gradually crumble Laura’s morality and values. As she describes it shortly after a violent and bloody fight between Ermilo and Laura: “From that day on we made a silent pact in which I agreed to be fantasy from time to time and he obeyed my prohibitions, and it can be said that we were happy for more than twenty years”. [4]
Over time, the pact became a sexual ritual close to klossowskian erotica, which gives way to the second part of the story: The laws of Hospitality.
Laura, now an older woman, meets a man thirteen years her junior: Samuel Simpson, with whom she falls deeply in love at one of the many parties organised by her husband Ermilo. This leads her to reflect on her married life: “I was an innocent woman, but was i pure?”[5] To which, shortly afterwards, she mentions in relation to Samuel: “if he came and awakened the demon in all of us, it’s not his fault”.[6]
Samuel is a man with whom Laura feels attracted and with whom she gives herself without pretext, while Ermilo is a man with whom she feels deep disgust.
“It should not be forgotten that the sacred incorporates two movements: terror and fascination, that of the impure and the pure.” [7]
In this sense terror is the pure (Ermilo) and fascination is the impure (Samuel Simpson). Which would lead to the development of Hospitality.
Laura discovers the following scene by accident: “I walk through the corridors like a sleepwalker. I open the door […]. What I see leaves me petrified: Simpson and Ermilo are making love”. [8]
As if it were the voyeur myth of Diana and Actaeon, in which Diana creates the moment to be seen by Actaeon’s eyes. Ermilo creates the exact moment to be discovered by his wife’s eyes. After this discovery, Ermilo offers his wife to Samuel: “You’ll see how beautiful she is, this daughter of… you’ll see how beautiful”.[9] A climactic moment in which Laura’s morality completely collapses and she gives herself over to evil.
This will be triggered for many years in parties and orgies in which Laura describes: “What bothers me is sharing my pleasure with Ermilo, who from that moment on I hate. And sharing my body between two men makes me deeply ashamed: whoever those men are. But the pleasure with Samuel, and the hidden but loving caresses I received from him while we were with Ermilo… my flesh hides again with desire and I feel I would do it all over again a thousand times, just to be in Samuel’s arms for a moment”.[10]
Shortly before the end of the story, Ermilo dies, leaving in his place the lover Samuel, with whom Laura will continue to maintain an intimate and possibly more passionate relationship. But sooner rather than later, Laura recognises that she misses Ermilo, since, thanks to him, she had the opportunity to meet Samuel.
As the years go by, Laura’s house is in poor condition, the curtains torn, the furniture broken, destroyed and smelling of semen. Arredondo masterfully manages to create a reflection of Laura’s interior as much as her exterior, her physical condition is bad, a decaying body, without teeth. At the beginning she was a beautiful and pure girl, that’d been transformed over the years into an immoral, decadent and impure woman.
And a house that is now known to be a house of orgies in which she is the centre of attention because she is the only woman. And in which every man is—in simulacrum—Ermilo.
However, there is a more subterranean reason within the story, not that Laura deserved to be treated and used solely as a sexual object, she was given away in the first instance by her mother—something very common in those days—leaving her a prisoner of her husband’s perversion.
Inés Arredondo has given herself the task of showing realities, intensely abrupt and abnormal, narrated from a female perspective, giving it a woman’s voice, and in this way she manages to recreate a world full of extravagance and strangeness, showing a feminine vision of these situations.
Showing perversion is a way of recognising the rules, which brings us closer to Bataille’s dialectic of prohibition–transgression or as Juan García Ponce describes it: “if the pleasure of the flesh is related to evil, that pleasure is no longer natural but spiritual”. [11]
Finally, we could say that Laura is a woman who understands the evil in which she participates, who, although she does not accept it at first, finds in perversion a way of erotic–transgressive freedom, where through evil she reaches divinity and in this way turns it into a sacred act, turning evil into a spiritual goodness.
“Arredondo succeeds in erasing and reconfiguring moral boundaries through a discursive technique of silence and the revelation of taboo”. [12]
This short story ends with a great dialogue: “God understands me, that’s why I have no fear of death”. [13]
[1] Her narrative is made up of thirty-four short stories published in three books: La señal (1965), Río subterráneo (1979), with which she won the Villaurrutia Prize, and Los espejos (1988). These and other unpublished texts have been brought together by the FCE in Cuentos completos.
[2] Maritza M. Buendía. Poética del amor: Juan García Ponce e Inés Arredondo. México, Molinos de viento, 2013, pág. 11.
[3] Inés Arredondo, Estío: Las mariposas nocturnas. México, UNAM, Dirección General de Publicaciones y Fomento Editorial. pág. VIII.
[4] Inés Arredondo, De amores y otros cuentos, México, Asociación nacional del libro, 2019, pág. 207.
[5] Ibídem, pág. 193.
[6] Ídem.
[7] Maritza M. Buendía. Poética del amor… op.cit, pág. 82.
[8] Inés Arredondo, De amores… op.cit, pág. 215.
[9] Ídem.
[10] Ibídem, pág. 217.
[11] Juan García Ponce, “La carne del espíritu”, en Apariciones. Antología de ensayo, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987, p.48.
[12] Inés Arredondo, Estío: Las mariposas nocturnas, op.cit, pág. X.
[13] Inés Arredondo, De amores, op.cit, pág.224.
