The Lizard's Tail by Luisa Valenzuela

First published:Cola de lagartija, 1983 (English translation, 1983)

Type of plot: Social morality

Time of work: The reign of José López Rega, 1975

Locale: Argentina

Principal Characters:

• The Sorcerer, based on José López Rega, also referred to as Eulalito, Lord of the Black Lagoon, Master of the Black Lagoon, and Thousandmen Flower
• Estrella, the twin sister of the Sorcerer, his third testicle
• Generalissimo, based on Juan Perón
• Madam President, the Intruder, based on Isabel Perón
• Egret, the aide-de-camp of the Sorcerer, a eunuch
• Dead Woman, based on Eva Perón
• Alfredo Navoni, a revolutionary, the leader of the people of Umbanda
• Luisa, the narrator of portions of the novel, the voice of the author

The Novel

The Lizard’s Tail is divided into three parts. The first hundred pages of the novel are narrated by an enigmatic figure known as the Sorcerer, with interruptions by unidentified characters in the capital and an omniscient narrator. The Sorcerer claims to be indispensable to the government; it is clear from the beginning, however, that this is not a realistic political novel but rather a symbolic, mythic, and at times deliberately cryptic allegory of modern Argentina.

The novel opens with a prophecy about a river of blood which will bring twenty years of peace. The first part relates the Sorcerer’s childhood in the land of the ants. (He amused himself by sitting on anthills.) Expelled from the anthills at age two, the Sorcerer is taken by Don Ciriaco to Doña Rosa, who rears the orphaned boy. Later, Dona Rosa is raped by the police, who are searching for the Sorcerer. In the capital, two observers decide that the Marshland, both a swamp and a “representation of the human unconscious,” must be conceived of as a metaphor: The surface represents the repressive superego/government while the swamp represents the inverted-image underground of the Sorcerer. The Sorcerer says that he is writing a novel in which the present day will take place at all times. The Intruder, Isabel Perón, organizes a group to determine with certainty that the corpse thought to be that of Eva Perón is in fact Eva’s. A reference is made to the burial of Eva by Perón and the disappearance of her body: The Sorcerer says that he and others hid the body after a coup and after the “cult” was forbidden. The Sorcerer says that he is bringing Eva back to life. The Generalissimo, Perón, dies. The Sorcerer decides to make Isabel, Perón’s wife, his ally. He makes plans to create a new kingdom which he will rule, the Kingdom of the Black Lagoon. The government begins to persecute him. Rather than fight them, he decides to build a pyramid. In his pyramid, he will have his wedding with his sister, and together they will have a son. In the capital, a plan for National Reconstruction is formulated to counter the negative images in the foreign press, which include accusations of torture and disappearances condoned by the government. The Sorcerer suggests a masked ball as a preparation for the government’s campaign of disinformation. He prepares for the Grand Ball of the Full Moon and plans to invite government officials and journalists.

The second part of the novel, narrated by Luisa, is a declaration of her intention to be a politically committed writer and an examination of the compromised position in which she finds herself while trying to write a biography of the Sorcerer. At the time she receives an invitation to his masked ball, she herself has been planning a party, where she wants to introduce certain guests to the ambassador of a foreign country. Her friend Alfredo Navoni, a revolutionary, tells her to continue to write her biography of the Sorcerer. At the Sorcerer’s party, guests are to be given terra-cotta masks, which will be broken with clubs distributed among the guests. Meanwhile, a counterceremony is being planned by Navoni’s followers. At his own ball, the Sorcerer wears the mask of an ant. Crop-dusting planes cover the area with locally processed cocaine. At dawn, all masks have been broken and the guests are bloody and beaten. Luisa is advised to get rid of her devil and devil paraphernalia, which she does. In preparation for their imitation of the masked ball, the Popular Festival, the people of the town of Capivari build a pyramid and a representation of the Sorcerer.

It is said that the Sorcerer’s power has grown while Luisa has written about him, which causes her great concern. The Sorcerer decides to annex Capivari into his kingdom and to cut off its water supply if the townspeople do not agree. Navoni tells Luisa that she should kill the Sorcerer in her novel. She believes that it is impossible to do this, although she thinks it would be a good idea to kill the military in her writing, since they use the Sorcerer as a shield. The Sorcerer commands that all photographic equipment and mirrors be confiscated. He covers the inside of the pyramid with the mirrors. Luisa’s ambivalence about her role finally leads her to make the decision to stop writing altogether: Fearing that even writing about the Sorcerer will increase his power, she erases herself and, thereby, him. In the third and final part of the novel, the Sorcerer believes that someone has stopped writing about him. After a ritual with the Egret in which his body is covered with mud and he becomes a woman, he has the pyramid’s mirrors covered with white cloth by workers, men blind from birth.

Meanwhile, three mysterious characters move up the river, a teacher who participated in the imitation of the Sorcerer’s ball, Luisa, and Navoni. The Sorcerer consummates his marriage to Estrella by injecting his third testicle with sperm and impregnating his sister (himself). In his delirium, he feels the tent closing in on him. Once his protection, he says it is now his torture chamber. The Egret travels to the foot of the pyramid and collapses, exhausted. Something explodes and blood appears. The woman with curly hair (Luisa) says it must be the sign of the twenty years of peace promised by the prophecy. The heavyset man, Navoni, disagrees and says that once one president falls, another is ready to take over, and that the little thread of blood is not the one mentioned in the prophecy.

The Characters

The characters double one another and historical figures. There are two writers, Luisa and the Sorcerer, as well as two witches, Machi and Caboclo de Mar. After Juan Perón’s death, in 1974, Isabel Perón ruled the country with José López Rega, leader of a conservative Peronist faction and Minister of Social Welfare. He was forced into hiding, and Isabel was overthrown a year later. A minor police official during the first Peronist regime, he later offered his services to the exiled president and became Perón’s personal secretary during his last years in Spain. Though he occupied the post of secretary of welfare, he was a close personal adviser to Perón and his wife during and after their return to Argentina and was relied upon heavily by the latter after her husband’s death. He received much attention in the foreign press for his devotion to astrology and the occult, but it was his ruthless power struggle within the Peronist movement that concerned Argentines. He attacked both moderate and left-wing movements.

The Dead Woman is based on Eva Perón, who was born to an unwed mother with the help of an Indian midwife in the pampas near Los Toldos. Eva met Perón and married him in 1945. Perón ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and from 1973 to 1974. Isabel, Juan Perón’s wife after Eva’s death, was selected as his running mate in 1973. Valenzuela parodies Isabel’s conscious imitation of Eva’s style as she attempted to evoke the myth of Eva after Perón’s return to power. Navoni is a composite of various revolutionaries Valenzuela has known. Although the generals and other political figures are depicted in detail to make them recognizable to an Argentine audience, what is more essential are the metaphors.

Critical Context

The critical context for Luisa Valenzuela’s work must be defined to include the political situation in Argentina in addition to works of other writers. In France, Valenzuela came into contact with the group of poststructuralist critics associated with the avant-garde literary journal Tel quel. Poststructuralists in France were critical of orthodox Marxism and its failures. The rise of French feminism coincided with the breaking away from orthodoxy on the Left. In Argentina, women made gains in terms of working conditions and democratic rights during the Perón period. Ideological contradictions in the movement allowed a broad spectrum of women, from traditional to radical, to call themselves Peronists. At the time Valenzuela wrote The Lizard’s Tail, Argentine women were engaged in political struggle not only as family members of revolutionaries in the home, but also as an integral part of the struggle. The military government did not make allowances for gender in its torture of women.

In an interview in 1983, Valenzuela mentioned that Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes had been her colleagues at the New York Institute for the Humanities. It is within this context of postmodernist debates about language and the political situation in Argentina that Valenzuela chooses to situate herself as a writer.

Valenzuela’s work is also grounded in the contemporary writing of Argentina, including the work of such writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. These writers also incorporate the themes of dream, death, magic, and desire. In fact, it was not until Aquí pasan cosas raras (1975; Strange Things Happen Here, 1979) and Como en la guerra (1977; He Who Searches, 1979) that Valenzuela began to address political issues in her work. Existentialism and psychoanalysis have become woven into the fabric of contemporary letters in Argentina. Valenzuela’s attitude toward these traditions is irreverent on occasion, and at least equally informed by feminism and a belief that only truth and justice can exorcise the phantasms in her country. Several critics have noted that it is very important that one not read Latin American literature as merely symbolic or magic; Latin American writers are faced with the problem of conveying a political reality that is frequently “unbelievable,” especially to readers from another culture. Nevertheless, Valenzuela wishes her work to be read for its metaphors, as literature, not only as political commentary.

Bibliography

Bach, Caleb. “Metaphors and Magic Unmask the Soul.” Americas (English Edition) 47 (January/February, 1995): 22-27. Offers a fascinating look at Valenzuela’s life and writing career. Briefly explores some of her themes and examines some of the writers who have influenced her, such as Jorge Luis Borges.

Garcia-Pinto, Magdalena. Woman Writers of Latin America. Translated by Karen Parker Lears. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Originally published in Argentina under the title “Intimate Histories” (Historias intimas, 1988), Garcia-Pinto’s interview with Valenzuela traces chronologically the origins and principal thematic concerns of the author’s works: the “mythopoeic thought” of Latin American politics, the “lust for power,” history, the female condition, religion, eroticism, and the role and power of language in the process of creative self-discovery. Includes a primary bibliography and an index.

Garfield, Evelyn P. “Luisa Valenzuela.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers an entry on Valenzuela that covers her life and career. Presents in-depth readings of many of her works and includes a selected bibliography.

Gazarian Gautier, Marie-Lise. Interviews with Latin American Writers. Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1989. Gazarian Gautier’s interview with Valenzuela includes a biographical sketch of the author and the Spanish and English titles of her published prose fiction up to 1989. With much to say about The Lizard’s Tail, the interview also addresses such issues as Valenzuela’s literary preferences and influences, her self-perception as a writer and feminist, her reasons for writing, her relationship to the characters she creates, and the evolution of her narrative style. Of particular interest are the writer’s comments about Argentine identity and the role of magic and sorcery in the novel and in South American societies. Includes primary and secondary bibliographies (English and Spanish).

Kadir, Djelal. “Focus on Luisa Valenzuela.” World Literature Today 69 (Autumn, 1995): 668-670. A revealing profile of Valenzuela that covers her tenure as a Puterbaugh Fellow at the University of Oklahoma, the quality and style of her writing, and her focus on human potential and failures. Although this essay does not address any particular work, it offers interesting background information.

Magnarelli, Sharon. “Framing Power in Luisa Valenzuela’s The Lizard’s Tail and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits.” In Splintering Darkness: Latin American Women Writers in Search of Themselves, edited by Lucia Guerra Cunningham. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1990. Discussing comparatively—from a feminist perspective—the use of framing narrative techniques in these two novels, Magnarelli focuses on the extent to which the modification or reversal of traditional “male-generated discourse” domination by “female-produced discourse” not only influences the ideological level of the narrative’s relation to history and its fictional rewriting but also alters significantly the relationships among political representation, historical interpretation, the rhetoric of narrative distance, and the traditional assumptions underlying the connections between patriarchal power and speech-acts within a discursive mode. This, Magnarelli argues, represents the “originality of both authors”: their fictional framing and reexamination of the historical narrative from a perspective of female subjectivity.

Magnarelli, Sharon. Reflections/Refractions: Reading Luisa Valenzuela. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. The first book-length examination of Valenzuela’s fiction from a poststructuralist and feminist perspective which analyzes themes and stylistic characteristics. Valenzuela has identified Magnarelli as “the most profound and astute” critic of her writings. Nine individual works are discussed in eleven separate chapters (two devoted to The Lizard’s Tail), concluding with an appendix, “Censorship and the Female Writer—an Interview/Dialogue with Luisa Valenzuela.” Includes a list of works cited, including theory, primary and secondary sources, and the essays, story collections and novels of Valenzuela (in Spanish and in English translations). The most comprehensive single critical source available.

Pinto, Magdalena. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. A collection of interviews with Latin American women writers, including one with Luisa Valenzuela. Features helpful bibliographic references for further reading and an index.

Pye, Geralyn. “Political Football: Sports, Power, and Machismo in Luisa Valenzuela’s The Lizard’s Tail.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 13 (1994): 115-127. Pye examines the political aspects of football in Argentina as portrayed in Valenzuela’s novel. She explores the relationship between sports, power, and masculinity; Valenzuela’s use of symbolism in her novel; Argentina’s hosting of the 1978 World Cup Soccer Tournament; and the military government’s use of sports in political affairs.