Milton Loayza
CUNY
E-mail: mil54@yahoo.com

The Immaculate Constitution of the Perceptible Mestizo in Monti's Asuncion.

The category of the mestizo race (in conjunction with that of "criollo") has dominated the notion of a Latin American "post-colonial identity" and is often seen as a trope of Latin American destiny, one that must incorporate both Spanish and Indian genetic input in the new breed of American population as well as the Spanish colonization of the Indian culture. This seems to be a retrospective view which takes the mestizo category as a given, yet is dependent on both notions of race and hybridity. One may ask then how the notion of mestizo came to be constituted--through what kind of perceptible negotiation, during the early colonial years, while considering the bodies of "Spanish," and "black" blood, entering the American continent already populated by "Indians." I will not try to answer these questions historically, in this paper, but look at the metatheatrical staging of these issues in Monti's play Asunción. The play, written in 1993, forms part of a group of plays that includes Una pasión sudamericana (1989) and La oscuridad de la razón (1994), all of which deal with questions of origin of a Latin American, and/or Argentine identity. The question of origin, appears already loaded with the institution of a destiny, based on the essentialist definition of a Latin American "nature," wherefore our origin and/or our nature has made us what we are. These categories [of origin, nature, destiny and identity] seem to form a cluster that expresses a certain anxiety about the materiality of our own bodies. Therefore, rather than dispute these categories on the basis of its "essentialism" I will show how Asunción plays with the notions of engendering and generation to deconstruct the racial and "Latin American" constitution of the mestizo identity.
Like Monti's other plays, Asunción has a metatheatrical quality that could well be described in this case as a "spectacle of religiosity. " The conjunction of these last two terms accentuates the suggestion of scandal already present in "spectacle" as well as its deliberate staging. I will then, first introduce the play in its condition of scandal, emphasizing thus the materiality of its mise-en-scene-its theatrical display, thrown, so to speak, in the face of the audience.
The presence of the scandalous in the play begins in the title itself which appends a performative, or illocutionary statement, in the sense given by Austin , that orders not only the mise-en-scene of the play, arbitrarily placing the characters of Blanca and Asuncion next to each other, but also the nature, meaning and ending of the play. It reads : "Delirio místico, pasión y muerte de Doña Blanca, manceba de don Pedro de Mendoza, que también, sifilítica agoniza en la inmóvil noche paraguaya, mientras a su lado Asunción, niña indigena, pare el primer mestizo de la tierra, en el año del Señor de 1537. "(249) The authorial intervention, or rather the admission of an author's doing of the play, is characteristic of all metatheatrical strategies, yet Monti is particularly insistent in making explicit the ideological violence of such intervention on the reader or audience. The extended title also makes clear the function of a title (all titles, I must say) in the process by which the text becomes performance. The omission of the author as creative agent of the text allows the author to transfer his doing to a new subject-in this case, Dona Blanca, who embodies the text's performativity as 'delirium, passion and death." This predetermined sequence spectacularizes Blanca's melodramatic narrative with the sacred mantle of the Christ's passion and the religious institution of the sacrament, as commemoration of Christ's act of salvation. A metatheatrical tension is created here, when Blanca's act may be perceived as a ritual within the stage frame, a ceremonial performance for a virtual theatre audience, as well as a theatrical representation of a biographical, historical or mythical narrative. This tension has a phenomenological effect, since the audience is confronted with the materiality of the performer's body as it tries to negotiate between the different frames of reception. In relation to this effect, I am interested in its significance in terms of the constitution of meaning, as well as to where to the perceptible shifts in the phenomenological perception by the audience. I will argue that these shifts are provoked by the text and its performance and are consequently predetermined.
The title, one suspects, is infecting Blanca's narrative the way she has been infected with the disease by her lover, in a manner that demands a spectacularized embodiment of a "passion" to which she appears destined. I say destined, both because of the violence with which the disease and the "religious" delirium attack the body and spirit of the character, and because the body is made to display its symbolic (Christian) meaning through a complete embodiment of its futurity. The embodiment of destiny and the condition of spectacle seem to be here intimately related, and may help to answer the question of whether the melodramatic display of Blanca's diseased body, though concealed under the excess of jewelry and make up, is dramatically justified. We, as an audience, may find an answer, first, in the presence of Asunción, who becomes Blanca's virtual audience (a metatheatrical plot) and, second, in the baroque wooden crucifix and Blanca's throne (made both of the same stock, according to the text). The almost didactic display of a hierarchy of spirit and culture--of the seats of power (the cross and the throne)-- over the "natural" sites of the earthly process of reproduction embodied in the presence of the laboring Asunción is adamantly disturbed by the somatic intensity of Blanca (and Asuncion's) bodily experience.
The excessive materiality of the bodies on the stage is a sort of scandal in theatrical representation that is foregrounded by Monti by a clear demarcation (in the title) of discursive frames which are forced into a violent fusion in their stage embodiment, where the bodies' materiality has to "fit" the various discourses. What this fusion performs is consolidation of the illusion of agency offered by the ideological naturalization of various discourses into a seamless continuum of bodies. In Asunción, it is the religiosity emanating from Blanca's discourse that consistently acts as the fusing agent in her connected narratives and is able to absorb this excess materiality. This suggests a necessary relationship between religion and spectacle, both of which have a function in the absorption of excessive materiality. One may ask, with respect to this function of spectacle and religion, if power, the institution and its representation, rely on their absorption of materiality? I will show how Asunción, in its condition of theatrical spectacle, displaying its excess materiality through the bodies of its female characters, lays bare in its staging and its discourse, the mechanics of their own absorption into the representation.
Blanca appears as a spectral figure, transplanted to the poor habitation of Asuncion, who is mumbling a prayer in Guaraní during her labor pain. The weight of materiality seems to shift unto the Indian woman, contradicting the weight given to the hierarchy of Blanca in the title. But, as was suggested before, the ideological power of culture and spirit, represented by Blanca, virtually crushes the significance of the Indian's body under its weight at which point the materiality of her body becomes excessive. I would define this excessiveness as phenomenological since it is the result of a discursive pointing to it, attracting our gaze, without offering a name, or meaning for it. There is another reading suggested by Blanca's spectral appearance, that would take the point of view of Asunción, who seems to be the victim of her own vision of Blanca-a spectral apparition that comes to haunt her. Or is this vision rather constituted in the theatrical frame, with the audience as privileged witnesses of the grotesque presence of Blanca? The ideological separation of Asuncion from Blanca, because of a difference in power and status and the obvious "otherness" of Asunción's speech, would lead us to take the second option as more valid. Yet, as we will see, the melodramatic narrative establishes a dramatic connection, if not bond, between the two characters that complicates the perception of the hierarchical representation of the two bodies. What is significant in this power relation is the apparent ambiguity of what is at stake-is it the cosmic justice demanded by the suffering Blanca, the fallen woman betrayed by a man and a woman of lesser status? Or is the real stake, as the long title suggests, the "issue" from Asunción's body and its meaning? I am suggesting here that there is a close relationship between the two stakes: the issue from Asunción has to be cosmically justified and this is accomplished through Blanca's melodramatic "delirium."
The introduction of the two male characters through the narrative that Blanca single handedly delivers, establishes a link between the religiosity of her discourse and the social hierarchy invoked in her sentimental narrative. Blanca shares her high social status with don Pedro, of whom she was a mistress and who also was the man who infected her with Syphilis. Irala, the object of Blanca's unconsummated passion as well as Asuncion's lover, is clearly subordinated to don Pedro. Therefore Irala's taking of Asunción may be interpreted as a patriarchal negotiation where the possession of the "other" woman falls unto the man with lesser status, yet is kept within the higher jurisdiction. This is relevant to the way Blanca legitimizes her discourse as she curses the rejection of Irala, whom, because of Blanca's higher status, he had not the right to refuse. But Blanca's act of seduction, because of the acknowledged danger of infection that her disease carried is presented as a challenge that carries mythological, even religious dimensions. Blanca's protest against Irala reveals that she demanded his surrender in spite of the fatal risk of the act. She declares: "Porque sabías/ que si en la nave/ tocabas/ a la que se ofrecía,/ tu vida/ no valía nada/ en manos del Magnifico Señor que me guardaba./, Y valía más tu vida, cobarde, que la mía? (259) Two mysterious elements in this declaration are performative, in the sense of placing her outrage at the religious level: the invocation of the Lord (ambiguously referring to don Pedro but also to God) as her protector, and the implication, confirmed by a previous statement, that she will be unprotected once off the boat. The previous statement reads "Porque bastó,/ Asunción, que pusiera un pie/ en la ribera/ para que mi carne/ unida/ se desuniera/ y estallara/ en fuegos pálidos,/ y en llagas terribles,/ encarnadas…(257) The two statements give definition to Blanca's destiny within the narrative of the Spanish journeys of exploration, conquest and colonization, where she functions as a protector of the Spaniard's journey which carries on a religious ,as well as a conquering, colonial mission.
There is also a curious, if not abject, metonymic relationship between the figure of conquest, of religious mission, and the morbid spread of the disease in Blanca's body once she reaches the site of colonization. This coincidence is extended in the play to Blanca's self-immolation when she stabs her palm. The release of her blood unto the soil of the new continent is an abject parallel to Christ's earthly sacrifice for the salvation of sinners, at which point one should ask oneself who is being saved by Blanca's act? The words that follow the stabbing suggest an answer to this. She makes two analogies, one between the bleeding and the flowing of rivers and the other between her pain and the labor pains of Asunción. She finally fuses these two turns to suggest the labor pains of nature itself. The seduction of the text, supported by Blanca's melodramatic intensity helps Blanca to reconstitute her body through an identity with the land and to Asunción's body in labor. This is only an apparent surrender of her social being to a "natural state," because the religious discourse of suffering and sacrifice transforms it into a supreme act of spirit, defined more specifically as an engendering that is potentially fatal-she says: "Yo y tú/ dolemos,/todo duele,/ Asunción,/ la Creación entera/ tiene dolores de parto…"(261)
Thus is Blanca being killed by the passion that was born from her, and thus she wishes the death in labor of Asunción. Blanca's rhetorical identification with Asunción does not help define our perception of Asunción bur rather intensifies the phenomenological perception of her presence as a "body in pain" mysteriously related to Blanca's pain and her (Blanca's) wish to keep her body intact for her spiritual ascension. To recapitulate: it is her capacity to seduce and to maintain her social status, that Blanca is safeguarding, by wishing a material continuity with the land that Irala is conquering. Her identification with the pains of labor, help to alleviate the pain of her cursed disease and elevate it the status of sacrifice, not in favor of the syphilitic don Pedro, but of Irala---with whom she lived an unconsumated, that is "virginal" or spiritual passion. In the process, the excessive materiality of Asuncion's body is in part (but not fully) absorbed in her Christening, the name that facilitated Blanca's identification while leaving Asunción's body outside of colonial designs.
Is Blanca, then, rehearsing, so to speak, the colonial destiny of the Spaniard conqueror on the American continent? Or is it being already constituted through the spectacle of her religiosity? It would be fair to assert that, in fact, both Blanca and Asunción are destined to disappear as bodies in the spectacular narrative of the play, and that their performativity acts at the level of language, needing their materiality only for the sake of the melodramatic accent of the narrative. In the end, Blanca dies and is replaced by the appearance of Irala, who comes to certify her death while the body of Asunción becomes increasingly subordinated to the expected birth of the first mestizo. Her figure, seen from the side of colonial history, is an Indian female body, always submitted to the threat of disappearance. Her past is lost in the incomprehensibility of her language. And her engendering of a colonizer's progeny, constitutes the gift of a mystery, determined by the otherness of her "race," her futurity erased by her own offering. The violence of the text's embodiment by both Blanca and Asuncion, bound by the metatheatrical frame, is proportionate to their swift effacement at the play's end. The mestizo is not yet born at the conclusion but announced with perfunctory impatience: "Are you giving birth already?" exclaims Irala. The mestizo, I propose, is ideologically constituted before the phenomenal birth, in the spectacle of Blanca's mystical ascension. In this narrative, Blanca, not the Indian Asunción, becomes the site of birthing as an immaculate patriarchal mother, the carrier of a colonizing passion engendering a colonial culture embodied in the "racially" hybrid mestizo body.
The melodramatic narrative achieves closure, and its self-constituted poetic justice, in Blanca's death and the imminent birth of the mestizo. Blanca's narrative makes a swift turn at the end of the play-after confronting the reality of Asunción's sexuality and the loss of her own, Blanca continues to seek redemption in the violence of her passion of love and outrage. At the end she apparently gives up on her pleas to the Virgin to lift her into Heaven's light and gives herself "to the night," (270) in order to "follow her love along the river banks." Her last words are addressed to Asunción, conflate the reality she leaves behind with Heaven itself, she tells Asunción: "Cuando estés en la luz/ con tu Señor," which can refer to the Light of Heaven along God, but more pertinently to Irala, the father of Asunción's child, and the "light of culture" he brings to her "barbarism." Blanca ends with a rhetorical question to the Indian: "Will you remember me? Will you remember this robber of grace?" The question carries immense semantic tension, but one may resolve the tension in part by looking at the melodramatic narrative.
Blanca considers herself redeemed, she has won the grace of God by saving the journey on the ship and leaving the conqueror free for his colonial mission. Her spectacle of religiosity has also accentuated the perception of the Indian body as culturally irrelevant, "El señor no necesita más que agujeros/ donde regar su simiente, y esta tierra es porosa, llena de agujeros hambrientos" she had said before. Irala's own question, "que saldrá?" referring to the child about to be born, and which ends the play, is practically meaningless without the support of the spectacle that precedes it. In the context of the spectacle, the question is, of course, highly rhetorical, since the issue of the "otherness" of the mestizo, its excessive materiality, has been absorbed by the Christian discourse of suffering and salvation, where the "mestizo" child brings blessings to the colonial land.
In Asunción, the scandal of the spectacle of two suffering female bodies-their excessive materiality-is absorbed by a Christian ideology of salvation embodied in Blanca's melodramatic narrative. The narrative, presented in the metatheatrical frame, conceived by Monti, reduces the presence of Asunción to a "listening" body, receiver of the symbolic violence of a text that robs meaning to her materiality. The issue of this violence is the constituted materiality of the mestizo race, carrier of the destiny of a continent.

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