Carmen's Rust, and: An Empty House (review)

Post-dictatorial Chilean literature cannot escape a political reading: in response to the totalizing discourse of the military, linear readings have become, as Nelly Richard would say, "des-narraciones," or narratives that untie hegemonic, official discourses that have shaped post-coup Latin American societies. These two novels are no exception. Both use a central metaphor to subvert and reterritorialize the specific political context of repression. Ultimately both raise questions of Chilean historical context and political interpretation, but also universalize them to include more fundamental themes of sensuality, family, memory, and self.

As with Cerda's earlier work, An Empty House reflects on fear and memory in Chile, on questions that go beyond state terrorism and violence, and poses serious philosophical questions. Faced with an all-encompassing, unexplained and silent fear, his characters are in a constant state of self-reflexivity, which they try to mask with mundane, everyday conversation. An understanding of this culture of fear is paramount to understanding Cerda's work. In An Empty House, a father gifts an old house to his daughter in the hopes of saving her marriage. The mysterious house gradually begins to speak its past—there are chilling howls and moans at night coming from the roof and windows—until it is revealed that the house was in fact used as a torture chamber, as evidenced by the unexplainable physical marks on the floors, and the recollections of victims' accounts of the rooms in which they were tortured, told to one of the characters. As the secrets of the house are revealed, all of the characters' personal secrets are also unearthed, expelling them from carefully constructed safety, and forcing them to confront their past. Cerda's "empty house" announces both the hope of the middle class for a better future, and a historically colonized and contested territory, both problematizing issues of memory, denial, and complicity.

In contrast with Cerda's complacent and inwardly conflicted characters, Del Río's tragic, fiery young heroine in Carmen's Rust and her incestuous relationship with her half-brother directly contest the space of power, represented by her insular, parochial aunts who try to control her by locking her in the attic. Del Río uses incest and taboo as a strategy for addressing the power structure, as well as vivid, caricaturesque descriptions of the stifling relatives who try to mold the heroine into conformity, ultimately isolating her from the outside world and from her own body, as she literally starves to death in the attic.

Carmen's politically inscribed body narrates her opposition to her aunts' and grandmother's repression, and is at once a subtext and the novel itself: it is the terrain on which the conflict between the Church (an old priest is brought in to mend Carmen's ways) and society (the aunts have an important family name to live up to) is played out. The central character's reaction to the repression by her relatives is extreme: she internalizes the readings of a bible-like "little black book of rules" imposed on her and, believing she is in penance for her "dirty" deeds and thoughts, refuses to eat and starves to death. The boy's description of her starved, lifeless body in the final scenes is juxtaposed with that of "the old order," the women who taunted her until the end: "I entered the room…separating the old flesh of sour women who were hunched over the thinnest, most beautiful body of a threadlike girl, a body that rose in a spiral toward the lamp of ten-thousand tears, not one tear broken, crystalline-Carmen" (pp. 81-82).

Carmen's striking sensuality pervades throughout most of the novel: she and her young lover hunger for each other, for example, and instead of...