Carmen’s Illusive Technicolor Fantasy in Miguel Delibes’s Cinco horas con Mario

In Cinco horas con Mario (1966), Miguel Delibes portrays a widow’s attempt to cope with the recent loss of her husband. During her vigil at the foot of Mario’s coffin, Carmen Sotillo excoriates her late spouse for his progressive views and his inability to accept the totalitarian regime’s official values, which she parrots with an increasing frenzy. The novel possesses many theatrical and cinematic qualities, not the least of which is Carmen’s unrelenting, 250-page soliloquy that monopolizes the text.¹ Gonzalo Sobejano compares this type of objective narrative style to a camera-like eye through which the reader experiences the text (217), and Juli Highfill notes that Carmen displays an acute awareness of her performance, “playing to her audience” (70). These theatrical aspects do more than give the novel a cinematographic texture, however; they thoroughly permeate the discursive level of the novel and highlight several cinematographic trends contemporary to the mid-twentieth century.

For the present study, I will conceptualize the text as a type of cinematic script enacted by the protagonist, Carmen Sotillo, in order to construe her as both auteur and leading actress. By focusing on Carmen, I will explain the ultimate failure of a “movie” whose aspirations collapse into a subverted, contrarian version of the mythic landscape the auteur attempts to create. Her five-hour monologue in the presence of Mario aspires to a grandiosity it will not and cannot achieve. In Carmen’s attempt at authoring a filmic narrative, she performs a script that reflects the regime’s official discourse and follows the stylizations of Hollywood blockbusters. However, by adhering to such models she unwittingly and inescapably produces a cinematographic image that runs counter to the regime’s escapist values. Her failed motion picture-like discourse estranges. Instead of delivering an epic Cruzada or a titillating Maximino Conde-esque love affair as it often promises, Carmen’s performance reveals a low-lit, low-budget examination of the painful social reality it attempts to avoid.

From the outset, Delibes’s novel reads as a type of film script. Several of its formal narrative aspects reproduce cinematographic functions; for example, the third-person narrative voice records only speech and movement. This technique produces an illusion that mimics the mechanical capabilities of a video camera while at the same time minimizing the apparent presence of non-diegetic sound and narration: “Carmen se sienta en el borde de la gran cama y se descalza dócilmente, empujando el zapato del pie derecho con la punta del pie izquierdo y a la inversa” (9). In addition to these ostensible stage directions, Carmen’s ensuing monologue exists as an act of performance; her voice dominates a one-sided dialogue with a voiceless cadaver. Carmen employs language to portray an acute self-awareness of her role in actively forging this cinematographic environment. Throughout her monologue she interlaces an excess of parenthetical, self-referential interjections: “como yo digo” (83), “¡qué sé yo!” (216), and “[t]e digo mi verdad” (162), to name but a few. These parenthetical comments draw attention away from Carmen’s narrated moment, the flashbacks she references, to illuminate instead her narrating moment. She thereby retains the spotlight and dominates the cinematic space during her monologue, a scene seemingly comprised of one extended shot.

While her interjections do present her as a narrating subject, Carmen also self-consciously exhibits her body as the focal point of her performance. Perhaps the most jarring example of her self-examination, tinged with autoeroticism, resides in her repeated allusions to her own oversized breasts:

Carmen baja las piernas de la cama y al hacerlo se la recogen las faldas, y muestra unas rodillas demasiado redondas y acolchadas. [. . .] Luego se atusa la cabeza, introduciendo los dedos de ambas manos abiertos entre los cabellos, ahuecándolos. Al concluir, se estira el suéter bajo las axilas, primero del lado izquierdo; luego, del derecho. Menea la cabeza enérgicamente, denegando:

– No tengo pechos de viuda, ¿verdad que no, Valen?

(33)

Her self-examination (and that of the director-like narrative voice) ultimately ends...