Deception and betrayal in Liliana Heker's El fin de la historia.

Frouman-Smith, Erica

In comparing Zona de clivaje and El fin de la historia, there are clear thematic and formal links, an issue not previously considered by critics and which the present study intends to explore. Deception and betrayal are a major concern in the relationship between the two principal protagonists in both Zona de clivaje and El fin de la historia. In addition to containing elements of autobiography and testimonial literature, El fin de la historia fits the criteria of the Spanish American Bildungsroman, articulated by Julia Kushigian in her study of the genre. (1) Significantly, Kushigian notes that testimonial narratives should be read as a Bildungsroman (146).

Argentine writer Liliana Heker has played an important role in the literary life of Buenos Aires through her involvement with its leading literary journals and her publication of short fiction, essays and novels. Heker's famous polemic with Julio Cortazar over the author's role vis-a-vis Argentina's military dictatorship, 1976-83, originally appeared in the pages of one of those journals, El Ornitorrinco, in two separate editions from 1980. Heker was responding to Cortazar's article in Eco (1978), "America Latina: exilio y literatura," in which he refers to himself as an exiled writer. (2)

Because Cortazar voluntarily left Argentina in 1951 to live in Paris, Heker challenges his use of the term. In response to Cortazar's emphasis on the restrictions created by censorship under the military regime, Heker counters by reminding him of the actions of numerous Argentine writers, including herself, who chose to stay in order to bear witness by writing and fighting for change: "Se escribe a pesar de la censura y contra la censura" ("Polemica" 211). (3) Instead, Cortazar's abandonment of his country deprived him of the opportunity to document the horrors of the dictatorship. David William Foster has observed that many authors published important works during this period because in fact censorship under the military government was quite erratic ("Los parametros de la narrativa argentina" 98). According to Heker: "... quienes hemos vivido dentro este proceso argentino estamos en mejores condiciones que usted de crear una literatura de testimonio" ("Polemica" 215). The fervent ideals that Heker expresses in this polemic are at the core of her second novel, El fin de la historia.

El fin de la historia (1996) incorporates the author's convictions regarding the issue of the writer's obligation to bear witness. In an essay from Las hermanas de Shakespeare, "Acerca de El fin de la historia," she recounts a series of personal experiences that occurred during the 1970s: "Una tarde del invierno de 1971, estoy en un cafe esperando a una mujer de mi edad que poco tiempo atras ha pasado a la clandestinidad.... Cinco anos despues lloro la muerte de la mujer a quien habia esperado; tres anos mas tarde un hecho feroz me sacude mas que esa muerte y empieza a convivir conmigo como una presencia intolerable" ("Acerca" 100). What Heker discovered was that her militant friend had conspired with the military government. This revelation forms the basis of El fin de la historia, which the author labels a combination of "documento y ficcion" in which she presents the story of a betrayal from the traitor's point of view, taking into account how that person does not view herself as such ("Acerca" 101).

The difficulty of her task, according to Heker, resided in her objective to present a unique narrative that was different from the profusion of works that had already appeared about this period: "Para mi, su escritura fue un salto al vacio.... Como y desde donde contar la tortura y la muerte. De que modo no ser redundante respecto de los testimonios terribles que ya han sido escritos y publicados" (Andre 145).

Despite Heker's comments that this work is so atypical of anything she had written: "... la Historia me excedia por los cuatro costados" (Andre 145), there are evident similarities with previous works having to do with the theme of deception and betrayal. "Las amigas," from Los que vieron la zarza, the author's first collection of short stories, published in 1966 when Heker was only 23, is a story of the friendship between two young girls, Analia and Laura, who sit together and talk incessantly in elementary school. As a result, their relationship is put into jeopardy when their teacher separates them. Analia's painful discovery that her friend Laura easily establishes a friendship with another girl while she, Analia, insists on remaining loyal by rejecting any new contact is a powerful lesson in betrayal. From the same collection "Las monedas e Irene" is the story of adolescent friendship between two girls, one of whom, Isabelita, is a servant in the home of the other, Irene. The latter willingly allows the servant girl to take the blame for some missing coins when Irene was in fact responsible for their removal. Class differences seem to be the determining factor in Irene's lack of concern and disloyalty towards Isabelita. (4) Zona de clivaje, Heker's first novel (1987) written in the form of a Bildungsroman, highlights the theme of gender conflicts via her principal protagonist, Irene Lauson, whose journey to adulthood is impeded by an affair of the heart that takes place over 13 years with her older, charismatic, former literature professor, who is unable to be faithful to her. (5) Irene's self-deception regarding her ability to tolerate her lover's infidelity is the foremost obstacle she must confront and overcome in order to move on in her life.

"El fin de la historia:" Testimonial and Autobiographical Writing

In her introductory essay to Women as Witness: Essays on Testimonial Literature by Latin American Women, Linda Maier observes how women writers began to finally achieve wider international recognition during the post-boom period. It was also during that time that testimonial literature became a dominant genre in which women writers joined with male writers to become prominent practitioners of the form (2, 3). Theorists have characterized this literature as a hybrid genre that overlaps with other disciplines, including autobiography (Maier 4). For women writers it is an ideal vehicle for presenting a view of history from the perspective of a marginalized group that seeks to make sense of the past within the context of relationships. The result yields a female identity that stands in contrast to that of men with their "individualistic concept of the autobiographical self" (Friedman 72).

El fin de la historia then is Liliana Heker's meditation on the traumatic period of Argentina's Dirty War and her goal of making sense out of the shocking discovery of her friend's betrayal. The author notes that as a work of memory the novel was a way of reconstructing herself ("Acerca" 103), and she attests to its testimonial nature: "Yo muy tempranamente elegi la literatura y elegi dar testimonio desde alli" (Gociol 42). Heker's challenge resided in presenting a complex and disturbing truth--that prisoners sometimes collaborated with their captors.

Based on Heker's personal experiences, this novel is a female discourse of history, different from the dominant discourse, through the prism of a female world in which relationships and community are foregrounded. It is a complex, fragmented, non-linear narrative in which the voices of the three principal female protagonists merge into one another and present competing accounts of the past. Diana Glass, a young, Jewish writer who is one of the main characters, has as her objective to tell the story of her generation by casting her childhood friend, Leonora Ordaz, as the heroine. This decision will create a serious dilemma for Diana that can only be resolved by eventually ceding the narration to a third protagonist, the older Viennese writer, Hertha Bechofen, who experienced her own history of oppression when she was forced to flee her country to escape the Nazis.

"El fin de la historia" and the Spanish American Bildungsroman

Diana Glass' journey of self-discovery is dominated by her fervent desire to document the political activism of her generation that came of age in the 1940s. Diana and her childhood friend Leonora were shaped by key political events of their era: the Korean War, the Cuban Revolution, and the Vietnam War, all of which lead to their impassioned identification with the people's cause (El fin 17). Eventually their paths diverge when Leonora joins the Communist Party while Diana, in contrast, realizes that writing, not politics, is her destiny. Yet Diana's life continues to be governed by her devotion to Leonora, as well as her persistent concern over the fate of Argentina during the increasingly dangerous period of the 1970s. Thus her self-realization is intimately connected to larger objectives outside of herself, and therefore fits Julia A. Kushigian's characterization of the Spanish American Bildungsroman: Spanish America has revised the Bildungsroman by transforming self-realization into the service of something larger, that is, a universal social goal.... An equally important point that distinguishes the Spanish American Bildungsroman is its celebration of issues of gender, race, class, and age, for a more complex and satisfying weaving of humanity. To achieve this stage it moves beyond the typical white male, middle class, adolescent protagonist to incorporate portraits of self-realization and development, both personal and economic, which center the poor, black, indigenous, female, elderly--in effect, marginalized experience. It also recognizes itself as hybrid, with respect to its cultural, social, economic, historical and political matrices, and can be characterized as relational, that is, grounded in an understanding of the self in relation to the Other. (15-16)

Childhood

In the Bildungsroman or novel of formation, childhood is a vital period during which fundamental relationships are formed. For young girls, this stage is especially significant as they begin to define themselves relationally. In her studies, feminist psychoanalyst Nancy J. Chodorow has stated that the impact of women's mothering is crucial to the development of core gender identity for girls and boys:

... as a result of being parented primarily by a woman, men and women develop differently constructed selves and different experiences of their gender and gender identity ... "The basic feminine sense of self is connected to the world...." (6) Men develop by contrast a self based more on denial of relation and connection and on a more fixed and firmly split and repressed inner self-object world: "the basic masculine sense of self is separate." (7) (Feminism 184)

The Voyage In, a study by Abel, Hirsch, and Langland, that reexamines the Bildungsroman in light of revisionist theories by Chodorow and others with regard to the development of gender identity, observes the following: (8) "The heroine's developmental course is more conflicted, less direct: separation tugs against the longing for fusion and the heroine encounters the conviction that identity resides in intimate relationships, especially those of childhood" (11).

Diana Glass, Heker's protagonist and alter ego, looks back at her childhood and reflects on her relationship with Leonora Ordaz, her larger-than-life friend whom she met in elementary school. They are intelligent, rebellious, ambitious and independent girls who reject the traditional goals of their lower middle class classmates who aspire to become teachers and mothers. Although the two are similar in many respects, they possess distinctive personalities.

Diana's Jewishness in an overwhelmingly Catholic country informs her role as an outsider or excluded other (Foster, "Recent Argentine Women Writers" 39). In contrast to the self-assured Leonora, Diana is a passive observer who soon realizes that her path in life will diverge from that of her friend whose leadership qualities and political activism--she calls her a "Pasionaria"--leads her to become a member of the Communist Party.

As Diana writes about their shared childhood experiences, she describes a gap in Leonora's veneer of confidence that exposes her need to be admired by everyone, a quality destined to play a major role in Leonora's future. When a third grade teacher, La Tortosa, rejects both Leonora and Diana because of their inability to sew, it is Leonora who is more deeply affected by the criticism. She responds by cultivating a relationship with her teacher's daughter that, according to Diana, returns Leonora to her customary place as the one who is beloved by all: "Asi" era Leonora, capaz de hacerse querer por todo el mundo: por las hacinadas, por las hacendosas, por la directora del colegio. Desde ese dia, tambien la empezo a querer la Tortosa" (84). (9)

During this idyllic period of childhood and adolescence in which she and Leonora "formaron una unidad perfecta" (54), a discordant note emerges when Diana is 14: "... en ese momento de perfecta felicidad, un arbol cayo sobre mi cabeza" (57). Later on she divulges that this arbol is really a rama, but the incident serves as "esta experiencia prematura de la muerte" (58). It is a foreshadowing of the personal ordeal that lies ahead resulting from Diana's misconception of the true Leonora. It will come to light as a consequence of the national tragedy of the military dictatorship's repression.

The end of this unspoiled period is marked by Leonora's marriage at age 19 to the very militant Fernando Kosac. As a result, Diana is to experience a long-term, painful separation from her friend that coincides with the deterioration of the political situation of Argentina and the start of Diana's intense period of self-reflection. According to Felski's study of the female Bildungsroman, separation marks the start of an "essential precondition to any path of self-knowledge" for the female protagonist (124). When Leonora begins a new phase in her life that has to do with marriage, motherhood and intense political activism with the revolutionary Montoneros, Diana feels adrift as she is left to wonder and worry about her friend. As she pursues her writing goals, her perception of Leonora, defined by the leitmotiv, "estaba hecha para beberse la vida hasta el fondo de la copa," will be reevaluated over the course of many years during which she will come to a dramatically altered understanding of her friend.

Self-deception via Oppressive Relationships

The heart of both Zona de clivaje and El fin de la historia resides in the heroines' self-deception or, as described by Buckley in his study of the traditional Bildungsroman, "the problem lies with the hero himself" (22). Both Diana Glass and Irene Lauson, the protagonist of Zona de clivaje, are shaped by unsustainable affiliations, established during childhood and adolescence, which serve as obstacles to growth. Irene's attachment to the much older Alfredo who rejects intimacy as he engages in a series of affairs defines her life over the course of 17 years. Diana's obsessive preoccupation with Leonora continues to dominate her life even after their paths change, when she is forced to negotiate the world without Leonora by her side. According to Felski, only by moving on and engaging with society can female protagonists of the Bildungsroman become aware of the limits of their previous existence (135).

Irene and Diana have in common their attraction to seductive, narcissistic others for whom relationships are temporary and inconsequential. Irene's self-deception regarding Alfredo leads her to believe that she can overlook his infidelity, even though she wants to be Alfredo's unica. Diana's insistence on writing the story of her generation with Leonora as her heroine is marred by her self-delusion regarding her friend, expressed through the metaphor of her own myopia, which is ironic given Diana's surname. Rather than seeing things as they are, she refuses to put on glasses because she prefers a more impressionistic view: "El miope ... ve mal los objetos lejanos; ... tiene que imaginarse la realidad" (199). And: "... la vision del miope ... es mucho mas bella que la del humano normal" (201). Diana's understanding of Leonora is based on the creation of a fantasy of her own making and indicates her willingness to see Leonora solely through a distorted lens. Irene's and Diana's personal growth can progress only by recognizing the flaws in their respective objects of worship and in themselves.

Irene's and Diana's persistent loyalty that goes unrewarded is typical of unequal relationships characterized by a lack of reciprocity and sharing. In a study on this subject, Lisa Tessman considers loyalty's pernicious effects that undermine the common perception that it is a virtue; that is certainly the case when loyalty is blind: "Loyalty fosters a dangerously uncritical stance" (26). As Leonora proceeds in life, she demonstrates how she, in contrast to Diana, never feels bound by loyalty. Her indifference towards Diana--she uses her and fails to confide in her--strongly subverts the notion of true friendship: "Friendship weakened by a lack of mutual self-disclosure can be seen as a betrayal" (Sills 3-4).

For both protagonists, the eventual loss of these important bonds leads to despair and isolation. Irene's anguish is the result of Alfredo's latest affair with a younger version of Irene. Diana's feelings of hopelessness over the news that Leonora has become a desaparecida create a quandary for her: how can she write the story of her generation with Leonora as the heroine when she does not know its ending. The loss of Leonora as the central figure of Diana's narration is a personal misfortune that inevitably disrupts her attempt to write a coherent narrative in the midst of a national catastrophe.

Writing as Vocation and Means to Self-Discovery

Writing as a vocation is essential to both Irene and Diana as they seek to understand the past and alleviate the pain caused by their respective relationships. For Irene, it serves as the means to her liberation as she ponders how she and Alfredo met, fell in love and, after thirteen years, reached an impasse. As a self-conscious narration, El fin de la historia's principal focus is on Diana's writing of the self as she contemplates how she and Leonora could turn out so differently despite their shared experiences in childhood. After all, they read the same books and lived through the same events: " por que ... una deviene militante y la otra intelectual?" (37). After many years of being apart from Leonora, Diana suffers a crisis that coincides with her rising anxiety and sense of alienation during a period of escalating violence and oppression under military rule. She also must contend with not knowing Leonora's fate as a result of her disappearance. Diana's dilemma is grounded in her inability to separate the personal from the political, a predicament that governs her life.

In her study of the Spanish American Bildungsroman, Kushigian observes how the search for identity in Spanish America carries with it a collective charge causing national identity to be intimately intertwined with that of the individual (17). By engaging in self-examination via writing, Diana is able to do more than just endure this era of political upheaval. According to Kushigian: "This self-examination and search for identity is especially productive and fluid in moments of national crisis ..." (17). It will in fact lead her to Hertha Bechofen, an older writer who will be instrumental in her life by providing the relationship that replaces the one with Leonora. She will aid Diana in exposing the real Leonora as, at the same time, Diana discovers herself.

Female Community

As Diana negotiates her path within the confines of a brutal and repressive patriarchal culture that is antithetical to her values, she seeks a milieu that echoes her sense of self. Hertha's invitation to Diana to join her literary workshop provides a safe refuge that mitigates the ordeal of daily life in a dangerous environment. Diana's relationship with this wise and generous woman who has survived her own trauma under tyranny has a lot to offer the young writer; she can provide an appropriate model of female identity to which Diana can aspire. Felski considers the role of female friendship and community in the protagonist's development in the female Bildungsroman: It is this mediating structure of the female community, whether actually present in the form of a group of women or symbolically actualized in the figure of a single female companion ... [that] serves to attenuate the clash between individual ideals and oppressive social forces ... (139).

The workshop also provides Diana with an important forum in which she can engage with others rather than struggle in isolation. At the same time, she is forced to withstand the scrutiny of the workshop's organizer, Garita. Her hostility towards his probing questions underscores how Diana is not yet ready to write a lucid narrative because she still has not developed a coherent sense of self. Her rigidity with regard to ethical issues is exposed during a discussion of a Russian film, a favorite of both Diana and Leonora. Diana's support for the actions of the film's revolutionary heroine who kills her lover--he is her political prisoner--rather than compromise her political convictions, reveals how Diana's youthful idealism has not evolved into ethical values that are more nuanced and balanced. For Diana: "Lo unico etico ... era elegir la causa trascendente, en este caso la causa de todo un pueblo" (168). (10)

After eight months of weekly meetings, Diana departs over her anger and frustration with Hertha's silence; she has not gotten the help she expected and needed to write her story. Yet it is apparent that Diana is unprepared for this task. She will stay away for two years.

Integration through Catharsis

The novel's disjointed, intricate and fragmented style in which the three narrative voices merge has the effect of creating a puzzle that at times confounds the reader who must work towards putting the pieces together: "El lector debe empezar a armarla como un puzzle gigante, de infinitas piezas, como telon de fondo una historia canibal, que se come a pedazos los retazos del horror" (Kuperman 287). But the work's technical complexity reflects the difficult task Diana has created for herself: to comprehend how her generation's idealistic goals for the nation have been betrayed and have resulted in the current horror of the military dictatorship. In order to do so, Diana must first revisit a crucial event whose meaning can only begin to emerge after many years of contemplation once she is willing to overcome her resistance to seeing clearly.

Diana's encounter with Leonora in 1979 after the latter's release from imprisonment is a pivotal and painful moment in the novel that provides the shock that forces Diana to take a leap forward in her personal evolution. It is a revealing scene in which Leonora comes up behind her friend and covers her eyes; a description of Leonora's hands follows: "Palpa esas manos, blandas, como carentes de huesos, capaces de amoldarse a los accidentes de su cara" (226). These boneless hands symbolize Leonora's flexible character that allows her to survive. After being tortured by the military due to her prominence as a leftist leader who engaged in violent activities, Leonora discloses how she has come to embrace her new role as a collaborator with the military, despite the atrocities they have committed. Her relationship with her captor Escualo has evolved into a political and romantic partnership that allows Leonora to save her daughter through her willingness to betray Fernando; he is killed by the military. Leonora also shows a troubling lack of concern over the fate of her fellow prisoners, some of whom have vehemently rejected her for her new role. After gaining the confidence of her captors, Leonora employs her considerable talents--her intelligence and leadership skills--towards having a mission. She will travel abroad to restore the government's reputation, notwithstanding the fact that the plight of the disappeared has become international news.

Diana returns to the literary workshop after a two year absence with the news that she cannot finish the story because she recognizes how mistaken she was about her friend: "... lo peor es que la mujer que me hablo durante dos horas en una mesa de la Richmond nunca debio ser una desconocida para mi" (230). Diana's reading of the first chapter of her story in front of the group is preceded by the crucial act of putting on her glasses, signaling her willingness at last to leave behind the distorted vision she previously embraced.

Diana evokes that July 1971 afternoon when Leonora asks to meet with her; it is a dangerous time with people disappearing. Diana has just seen the news regarding the police's search of Leonora's and Fernando's apartment that contained plans to kill government officials. The couple, along with their daughter, is on the run. Diana is anxious and fearful as she waits, especially when Leonora is late. But Diana will not leave because such is the nature of her loyalty: "Ya ha pasado media hora ... El aprendizaje de la lealtad" (193-94). She is also worried that her myopia will impede her from recognizing Leonora from a distance. Ironically, the closer Leonora comes to her, the more troubled Diana becomes: "... la que se acerca no es la mujer esperada" (231). Leonora hands Diana a package of papers with the instructions to deliver them to Leonora's parents without ever asking Diana if she is willing to do so. After all, those papers represented polvora encendida about the two most wanted people in Buenos Aires. Yet Diana unquestioningly complies because she believes that by helping Leonora, she is also supporting their shared leftist ideology.

Diana cannot complete the story because she now realizes that the ideal heroine embodied in Leonora was based on a distorted notion of Diana's own making: "La historia que [yo] queria contar se termina, siempre se termino, en ese primer capitulo. Porque la mujer esperada nunca va a hacer, nunca quiso hacer la misma revolucion que espera la que espera" (233).

The End of the Story

Diana's arrival at the end of the story coincides with the conclusion of a friendship marked by betrayal. Leonora has shown that she is incapable of loyalty to Diana, to her own family, to her convictions and to her country. Her ability to transform herself is explained by those boneless, malleable hands that symbolize her opportunistic character. For Diana, the end of this story leads to a new phase of life in which she is finally unencumbered by the myth of Leonora as the ideal revolutionary.

Like Irene Lauson who, in finally valuing herself, is able to let go of a destructive relationship, Diana Glass, by shedding her illusions and self-deception regarding Leonora Ordaz--a play on audaz?--no longer seeks refuge in her myopia but embraces the clear view that her glasses provide. She understands that Leonora was not worthy of her loyalty, and that blind loyalty brought her to the brink of compromising her own life. Yet Diana bears responsibility for her intransigence towards her friend; she failed to show any compassion towards Leonora for the torture she suffered because of the inflexibility of her own ideology that did not take into account individual circumstances.

Diana is assisted in coping with Leonora's betrayal through the support and friendship of Hertha Bechofen, an admirable and worldly friend with similar values and goals, who fills the vacuum left in the wake of Leonora's abandonment of Diana. It is she who rouses Diana from her state of despair and makes her understand that the story of her generation's dreams and hopes for a better world must be told, despite the loss of her ideal heroine: "La historia nunca es lo que uno quiere ..." (234). Hertha agrees to take over and complete the story, traveling abroad to interview Leonora who is happily ensconced in another life with a new husband and adopted child. In a telling anecdote, Hertha observes how Leonora angrily rejects the news account that the older woman presents to her in which Escualo is portrayed as her seducer: "A mi nunca me sedujo nadie ... siempre seduje yo" (235). Ever the seductress, she attempts to seduce Hertha.

Notwithstanding the similarities between Heker's two novels, there are significant differences. Zona de clivaje, a much earlier work, is the tale of a romantic relationship and the conflict that arises due to Irene's struggle to formulate a coherent identity based on valuing herself. El fin de la historia is a more complex and fragmented narration that emphasizes female relationships--men here are secondary within the context of much broader concerns of self linked to community, social justice and the nation.

Liliana Heker presents her testimony of a horrific period of history in which a military government betrays the values and goals of its citizens to the extent that its treachery infiltrates the fabric of daily existence. Within this context resides the story of Diana Glass who, through painful self-examination, finally understands what Leonora never can: that "beberse la vida hasta el fondo de la copa ... no siempre es una virtud" (237).

NOTES

(1) Garcia-Serrano's article discusses the testimonial and autobiographical characteristics of Heker's novel.

(2) The first and second parts of the polemic, "Exilio y literatura" appeared in El Ornitorrinco. Cortazar's article, "America Latina: exilio y literatura," originally appeared in the Colombian journal, Eco.

(3) I am citing from "La polemica con Julio Cortazar" that appeared in Heker's collection of essays, Las hermanas de Shakespeare.

(4) This theme also appears in another story from the same collection, "La fiesta ajena."

(5) See my article on Zona de clivaje.

(6) Quoted in Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 169.

(7) The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 169.

(8) The authors of The Voyage In make reference to additional psychoanalytic theorists (9).

(9) Diana's first person narration is presented in italics to differentiate it from the other narrations.

(10) For a further discussion of the influence of this Russian film on the novel, see Breckenridge (35).

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Erica Frouman-Smith

Long Island University