Blood Tax: Violence and the Vampirized Body in Impuesto a la carne

La patria se ríe (con carcajadas ominosas) ante nuestras heridas históricas que no cesan de sangrar y la nación no va a reconocer nunca la magnitud de las infecciones que se deslizan por los metales de las camas.

(Impuesto a la carne 186)

La historia nos infligió una puñalada por la espalda.

(9)

Like all of Diamela Eltit’s novels, Impuesto a la carne (2010) bears the author’s signature of the abject body as the site on which history is mercilessly inscribed and, simultaneously, as the organism in which the cells of resistance, impervious to discipline and punishment, are metastasized. Written during Chile’s preparations for its Bicentennial Celebration of September 2010, the novel presents itself as the partial and admittedly disjointed record of a two-hundred-year-old woman who wishes to disclose the phantasmagoric memories of her mother’s and her own medical ordeal on the eve of their demise.¹ As she has done in her best-known novels, the author turns to allegory, hyperbole and hyper-realism as the vehicles for her bitter denunciation of Chile’s (or Latin America’s) failure to protect and defend its exploited and beleaguered underclass. Yet Eltit also turns this novel into a record of the marginal or excluded body in pain. Allegorically, the novel’s hospital saga and/or bitter farce, “gesta hospitalaria” (9), can be read as the story of a nation that, viewing its racially-marked underprivileged classes as chronically ill and regrettably malformed, dictates for them a life of stringent supervision, degradation and even mutilation, all in the name of public health and rehabilitation.² As the journal of the abuses heaped on an ill and aged woman’s body, the novel stages the grisly and Machiavellian medical interventions to which undervalued bodies are increasingly vulnerable in an era where global markets and new technologies view vital fluids (especially blood) and vital organs (kidneys, corneas) as quantifiably more valuable than the disenfranchised organisms from which they are harvested.³ Between these two frames—one allegorical, one literal or hyper-literal—Eltit’s elaborately constructed narrative etches out its opposition to the discriminatory practices inherent in the structures and operations of national and post-national power.⁴ As announced in the novel’s title, it is on the bodies of the underprivileged, the marginalized or the socially undesirable that these discriminatory practices take their most brutal toll.

As is always the case with Eltit’s novels, Impuesto a la carne is impossible to summarize with any degree of precision. The fragments or traces that make up the novel are themselves the “chronicle” of an inhuman or subhuman journey, “nuestro recorrido [humano]” (9), narrated by the daughter-half a two-hundred year old mother and daughter pair.⁵ As the daughter’s gruesome account details the countless medical interventions inflicted on their worse-for-wear bodies, it becomes clear that mother and daughter are alternatively in need of medical care for their survival and rightfully indignant over the way in which indifferent, hurried, or tyrannical medical personnel expose them to endless blood tests, surgeries, and drugs without regard to their growing physical or mental pain. The neglect with which doctors treat the mother’s hemorrhage during labor renders them both chronically predisposed to question doctors’ orders, and they credit their anarchic strain for the suspicious vigilance that has allowed them to outwit nurses and outlive friends and relatives.⁶ Ironically, their longevity, or their bodily resistance, eventually makes them reluctant exhibits of the hospital’s success. As the hospital readies itself to celebrate a major anniversary, the worse-for-wear bi-centenary mother and daughter are to be one of the indispensable exhibits.

This is a novel by Diamela Eltit, so one would not expect the narrator’s “relato o crónica, o . . . apuntes” (31) to end with a celebratory show of anarchic resistance or a conciliatory stance on the state of the nation’s public health—and it doesn’t. For the long-suffering women—and supposedly for the hospital...