“Eu de noite sou seu cavalo”: Luisa Valenzuela’s Story of Interpretation and Inhabitation

In Luisa Valenzuela’s 1982 short story “De noche soy tu caballo,” the female narrator hears a fragment of a song lyric in Portuguese and interprets it to her male lover, a political dissident, as a reference to a ritual of spirit possession. This idea later helps her to stay strong and spiritually connected to him while she is interrogated and tortured. Critics have debated the nature of the relationship between these two characters in the context of Argentina’s most recent dictatorship, but they have neglected the Brazilian intertext, its cultural context, and the way its meaning is altered in translation. This current study reads Valenzuela’s story in dialogue with Chico Buarque’s song “Sem açúcar” in order to reveal the narrator’s interpretation as inaccurate, having more to do with her own needs and projections of Brazilian culture than with the meaning of the song. It also relates the narrator’s interest to social and political trends in late-1970s Brazil, including increased appreciation for Afro-Brazilian religions and for the role of women in Brazilian music.