Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State

4. Totality in Post-Tlatelolco Mexico: Subjectivity and Interpellation in Jorge Aguilar Mora's Si muero lejos de ti

117 Chapter Four Totality in Post-Tlatelolco Mexico Subjectivity and Interpellation in Jorge Aguilar Mora’s Si muero lejos de ti Jorge Aguilar Mora’s second novel, Si muero lejos de ti (1979), tells a remarkable and strange story about violence and paintings set in Mexico City during the Student Movement of 1968 and the years following the Tlatelolco massacre. Its protagonist, Yoris, is a young artist who struggles to maintain relationships with his friends and lovers, and to understand the meaning of his life during a period of Mexico’s history defined by trauma and repression, both physical and psychological. A nomadic figure , Yoris traverses a dangerous cityscape populated by brutal police, paramilitary thugs, and intimidated or apathetic citizens doing their best to ignore the violence that surrounds them. Yoris, who collects matchbox reproductions of European paintings, encounters another more serious art collector named José Dziadeck, a Polish immigrant to Mexico who is also an expert falsifier of medieval and Renaissance paintings. In his basement, Dziadeck displays five works he has stolen from various museums, which now house his forgeries. They are Uccello’s Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1450), Messina’s Condottiere (1475), Titian’s Man with a Glove (c. 1520), Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Book (c. 1550), and Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1593). In search of Martini’s Annunciation (1333), a sixth painting that will complete his collection, Dziadeck sends Yoris to Europe to steal the original and replace it with a fake. In Europe, Yoris meets Nicole, who is charged with giving him Dziadeck’s forgery. Notably, Yoris and Nicole fail to complete Dziadeck’s request and instead spend their time passing through various train stations and inventing games intended to help them break out of the oppressive narratives that define their lives. 118 Chapter Four Dziadeck’s relationship to the paintings he possesses is a symbolic manifestation of the oppressive power he wields over six orphans, whom he has adopted and christened with names that correspond to the five works he owns and the sixth he desires: Uchelo, Mesina, Tisiano, Bronsino, Caravayo, and Martina. In return for his care, the orphans perform a number of tasks for Dziadeck. He even contracts them out as halcones, or shock troops informally associated with the state and hired to repress and sabotage the Student Movement.1 When Yoris does not return as planned with the stolen painting, Dziadeck sends the orphans on another mission, to find and bring Yoris back to Mexico. In one of the novel’s particularly perverse reflections on subjectivity, Dziadeck takes advantage of the orphans’ travels and arranges for them to undergo plastic surgery in Italy. Following their operations, each orphan’s face matches the portrait painted centuries earlier by his or her eponymous artist . The orphans do not capture Yoris, and after Uchelo dies in France the remaining five return to Mexico. The identities that Dziadeck has imposed upon them compel the orphans to question who they are and where they came from. What becomes an obsession with origins divides the once tight-knit group of friends, who gradually lose touch with one another and suffer lonely, separate fates. The despair that besets them also awaits Yoris upon his return to Mexico City, where he meets a fate at least as horrific as the surgeries that transformed the orphans’ faces. When Yoris arrives, Mexico City is sinking in its own sewage, and the apocalyptic scene of the capital’s destruction closes the novel. By making a series of late medieval and Renaissance paintings into characters who represent disenfranchised young Mexicans, Aguilar Mora’s novel establishes a critique of subjectivity that is at first glance absurd but ultimately poignant and thorough. The particular paintings Dziadeck wants to bring to Mexico trace a continuum of representations of the human figure that begins with the almost two-dimensional, seemingly distorted figures, especially for modern eyes, of Martini’s fourteenth -century work to the lifelike, three-dimensional body idealized in the sixteenth-century Caravaggio. Dziadeck’s violent transformation of the orphans suggests that he wishes to impose upon them a teleology of human form that corresponds 119 Totality in Post-Tlatelolco Mexico to traditional European standards. The orphans’ distorted names are only the first clue that Dziadeck’s vision does not quite correspond to reality. Their conversations about their own identity and the crises...