Tenaglia, Alejandra. Viaje al principio de la noche. Buenos Aires: Muerde Muertos Editorial, 2018. 234 pp. ISBN 9789-8726-5072-6Tenaglia’s debut novel is a veritable Pandora’s box of feminist horror stories, a knotty tangle of narrative threads that lead the reader, relentlessly, implacable, in this labyrinthine narrative into the inner chamber of those horrors. There the Minotaur—Pablo, the piano teacher, child sex abuser and self-satsifiedprovincial supetstud—is lured to his drowning death in the waters off Mar del Plata by Victoria, the woman he abused as a twelve-year-old student. In a narrative crescendo that intertwines her persistent memory of his abuse and the details of how she gets him into the waves in order to drown him, Viaje closes a story that, upon retrospective assessment, the reader realizes has been describing, if not a cold and calculated plan of revenge, at least a fortuitous series of circumstances that ends up with the same executionary consequences of such a plan.
Troping Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), Tenaglia’s character’s voyage to the beginning of night is the voyage back to the roots of her existential nightmare, the recovery of the memory of the primal rape scene that is the common lot of more children (mostly but not exclusively women) than our self-satisfied decent society wishes to imagine. Victoria is a history teacher, and while she knows the importance of establishing the sequence of events that account for social history, the tangled mass of her narratives threads show that, in apparent fulfillment of the Freudian premise that access to a repressed past does not come easy, she is slow to come to the realization of the precise erotic trajectory, based, one repeats, in rape by a teacher twenty-years her senior, that accounts for her incapacity to love and form meaningful human, sexual relationships. One cannot discount a reading of the novel in which Victoria has had the glimmer of a revenge opportunity from the start. Yet—and I reiterate the metaphor—the tangled mass of narrative gives the sense that it is more of an awakening, first, to the truth of her rape and, then, second, to the emerging discovery of an opportunity, if not to liquidate the task, to counter one passive event of violent consequences (her rape) with another active one of her own making (the murder of her rapist).
Viaje is a complex interweaving of multiple narrative texts that, in retrospect, lead to Victoria’s murderous revenge, while at the same time they testify to the difficulties of accessing one’s psychological past. As an exercise in fictional psychoanalysis, Viaje models those difficulties at the same time that it provides a panoply of samples of how that past might be accounted for. Tenaglia combines customary third-person narration with first-person thought (in italics).Since the basic story recounts Victoria’s return to the provincial small town where she grew up to care for her ailing mother, she is afforded the opportunity of recovering diaries and other documents left behind from when she was a young woman. These she “supplements” with an extensive current personal log she maintains on her computer, as she goes about caring for her mother and interacting in difficult terms with the older woman, reviving old girlhood friendships with women who have remained in the town, encountering old lovers, and trying to piece bits together from random conversations regarding her family’s painful disintegration through cancer, suicide, and manslaughter. In the process, she teaches basic Spanish history at a local high school, and her lectures on the Spanish royal families are reproduced in the novel, by which, presumedly, one learns that human history, from the court of Spain to the dull Argentine province is one of unrelenting pathetic stupidity. At one point, she is asked to write columns for the newspaper of a local town, and her often quite pointless commentaries constitute a counterpoint to the sort of horror story of sexual abuse she cannot speak forthrightly. Indeed, at one point Victoria utters a phrase that could serve as a valuable self-help guide in this human melodrama, “Hay que protegerse de la autoboludez” (197).
Even if Victoria cannot speak forthrightly the real stories of sexual abuse of which her own is but one example, Viaje certainly can be said to be one of the most forthright feminist novels recently written in Argentina. With all of the intransigence of an Alejandra Pizarnik, who one suspects committed suicide without really saying everything she had to say beyond her allegorical bloody countess, Tenaglia has no use for discursive subtleties. Her novel is, in additional to frank assessments of multiple femininistexistencialhuits clos, replete with details of sexual emotions and sexual acts that make it difficult not to understand the extent of, and the justification for, Victoria’s propulsion toward cathartic revenge.
Viaje al principio de la noche is an outstanding novel and deserves to be recognized as one of the best feminist narratives in recent Argentine fiction.
David William Foster, Arizona State University