Rosario Tijeras: Femme Fatale in Thrall (2009) PDF

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300 Ivonne del Valle W. -. Sociey Must Be D$ended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976 New York: Picador, 2003. Gibbon, Edward. B e Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. 11. New York: The Modern Library, 1932. Gdnzalez Rodriguez, Luis. Etnologiay misidn en la Pimeria Alta, 1715-1740. Mk...

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Ivonne del Valle W.

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Sociey Must Be D$ended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976 New York: Picador, 2003. Gibbon, Edward. B e Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. 11. New York: The Modern Library, 1932. Gdnzalez Rodriguez, Luis. Etnologiay misidn en la Pimeria Alta, 1715-1740. Mkxico DF: Universidad Nacional Aurdnoma de Mtxico, 1977. Herder, Johann G. Outliner ofa Philorophy of the Hirtory ofMan. Trad. T. Churchill. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966. Horkheimer, Max y Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philorophical Fragmentr. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Chtique ofPure Reilion. Trad. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc, 1996. -. "Reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind". Political Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss. Trad. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge UP, 1991. 201-20. "What is Enlightenment!" Political Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss. Trad. H.B. Nisbet. New York: Cambridge UP: 1991. 54-60. Levinas, Emmanuel. "Two Texts on Merleau-Ponry". OntologyandAlterity in MerleauPonty. Ed. Galen A. Johnson 81 Michael B. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990. 53-66. Max, Karl y Frederick Engels. KarlMarx FrederickEngeL. Collected Works. 184+1844. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975. Merleau-Ponry, Maurice. P h e n ~ m e n o hof~Perception. New York: Romledgc, 2003. Meyer, Jean. Coleccidn de documentorpara la historia de Nayarit: El Gran Nayar. Vol. 111. Jalisco: U de Guadalajara, 1989. Moreiras, Alberro. "Ten Notes on Primitive Imperial Accumulation: Ginks de SepGlveda, Las Casas, Fernindez de Oviedo". Interventions: Internationaljournal of Postcolonial Studier 2.3 (2000): 343-63. Ortega, JosP de, S.J. Marauillora reduccidny conquita de laprovincia de San Joreph del Gran Nayar. Mkxico: Editorial Layac, 1944. Pagden, Anthony. " R e Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in Dideror and Herder". Afteer Colonialiim. Imperial Hiitories and PortcolonialDiryhcementr. Ed. Cyan Prakash. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. 129-52. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Wrih'ng and Tranrculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Quin, Alejandro. "Silencios deliberados, silencios falsos: La Condamine y la caceria de fibulas en el siglo XVIII". Kipus. Revista andina de leha 20 (2006): 91-105. Rama, h g e l . B e Lettered City Trad. John Charles Chasteen. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Segesser, Philipp. "The Relation of Philipp Segesser". Mid-America: An Hirtorical Review. 16 (1945): 139-87. Taussig, Michael. Mimesir and Alterity: A Particular History of the Semer. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Rosario Tqerds: Femme Fatale in Thrall l l e epidemic of drug-fueled violence that afflicted Medellin, Colombia during the late 1980s and early 1990s is by now infamous. During this period Colombia's national homicide rate was seven or eight times higher than that of the US, while Medellin's rate more than quintupled that of Bogoti. In 1993, at the end of the Pablo Escobar era, Medellin was identified by Human Rights Watch International as the most dangerous city in the wor1d.l The extraordinary history of this period has subsequently become the subject of a number of remarkable fictional and semi-fictional works by artists such as director Victor Gaviria and novelist Fernando Vallejo, many of which fall into a category designated by HCctor Ahad Faciolince as the sicaresea, in reference to the sicarios or teenage hittnen who won national attention through a serious of spectacular assassinations of national political and judicial figures during this p e r i ~ d In . ~ 2005, the film Rosario Eyeras became the most commercially successful of these narratives of the sicariato, breaking domestic box office records by attracting 1.2 million viewers in its first year of release in a country of approximately 44 million inhabitants, and becoming possibly the highest grossing Colombian film of all time (Holland, Lira). Rosario Zjeras is a three-and-a-half million dollar, five-country co-production that adapts Jorge Franco Ramos's 1999 novel of the same name. Franco's novel sold out its first edition in one week and by some accounts has since become the second-best selling Colombian novel of all time, after Cien avios de soledad (Valbuena). In a recent article on the current visibility of Colombian narrators in international markets, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola has cited Franco's Rosario Ejera as a prime example of "un tipo de best-sdler hasado en novelar las penurias sociales latinoamericanas y ofrecer personajes marginales aptos para el consumo masivo" (43). Questioning the impact of Rosario E j z r a and other novels by Vallejo, Mario Mendoza and Laura Restrepo on Latin America's signification within a transnational cultural imaginary, Herrero-Olaizola writes as follows:

Glen S. Close El mercado editorial, que es ohviamenre participe de las politicas econ6micas glohales, perpetlia la comercializaci6n de esros mirgenes y promueve cierra exotizaci6n de una realidad latinoamericana "crud$ dirigida a un pliblico m& arenro e insrruido [sic] en cuestiones socio-politicas de AmCrica Latina y ansioso de leer algo nuevo, dgo mis light como en el caso de Rosavio Tqeras. pero con cierro 'peso cultural'.. (43)

As other critics including Ignacio Sjnchez Prado have also argued, various forms of "exotic violence" such as a new Latin American strain of dirty realism and the sicaresca do indeed seem to have replaced magical realism as what Sinchez Prado calls the "new trademark of Latin America" (39). However, in the case of the film version of Rosario Eyeras another problem of interpretation is posed by the fact that, to date, reception seems to have been more enthusiastic in Colombia than abroad (48). While little academic attention has yet been paid to Franco's novel in the United States and barely any to the film, the resounding commercial triumph of both texts certainly poses the question of how Franco, and then Mexican director Maillt and Argentinean screenwriter Marcelo Figueras, managed to seize the imagination of the Colombian public more forcefully than previous authors who dealt with similar subjects. Suggestively, Mail16 has attributed this success to "'casi una labor teraptutica [...I La novela de Franco cerr6 una herida muy dura que la sociedad colombiana arrastraba"' (qtd. in "Emilio Mail16 narra"). Other factors that might begin to explain the success of novel and film are easily surmised: the dynamic, fluid and sensational character of the original narrative by Franco (a gaduate of the London International Film School); an intensely melodramatic treatment of violence centering on a phallically "armed contemporary Colombian femmefatdle; and a tried-and-true narrative structure of triangular desire within which a rapt male narrator enunciates the story of the violated and violent Rosario Tijeras3 By Franco's account, the character of Rosario Tijeras was developed on the basis of his research into sociological studies and testimonies of the sicarios and other actors in Medellin's culture of narcoviolence, and particularly on the basis of his interviews with youngwomen serving time in prison for murder. Franco acknowledges, however, that he never intended to produce a chronicle or testimonial novel, opting instead to assimilate the findings of his research into a love story

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focused on the fictional sicaria. Franco has also implicitly acknowledged the disproportion between the commercial success of his novel and the reality of sicario culture, since women working as assassins are very few in comparison to men. "'Es mis bien atipico,' Franco states, 'ver a una mujer asi en una cultura mafiosa"' (qtd. in "Emilio Mail16 narra"). Although the participation of women in violent crime has increased during recent years according to some sources, the most recent official statistics indicate that more than 93 percent of Colombians convicted of homicide in 2006 were men, and studies suggest that women rarely function as the primary agents of violence in drug-dealing organizations (Lancheros). In light of the scarcity of actual sicarias, the conversion of Rosario Tijeras into something of a popular heroine may seem even more curious, but I will attempt in what follows to account for the appeal of the character by relating her to the modern noir archetype of the femmefatale, as well as to delineate what I see as significant differences in the treatment of the figure by the literary and cinematic versions. The opening page of the novel introduces one aspect of Rosario's fatality: "Aun moribunda se veia hermosa, fatalmente divina se desangraba cuando la entraron a cirugia" (9). In subsequent pages, Franco's narrator, Antonio, describes Rosario in the first of numerous flashbacks, remarking on her "brazo mestizo," "sus camisetas diminutas y sus senos tan erguidos como el dedo que sehalaba" (10). Antonio also refers to various lovers and patrons exerting claims on Rosario as her "duehos," and he contrasts Rosario's low social origins with his own privileged class position. Above all, Franco's narrator identifies the sicaria as a solitary and unstable but dangerously seductive figure: "sin una identidad que la respalde"; "se defendi6 [. ..] creando a su alrededor un cerco de bala y tijera, de sexo y castigo, de placer y dolor. Su cuerpo nos engafiaba, creiamos que se podian encontrar en 61 las delicias de lo placentero, a eso invitaba su figura canela, [. ..] siempre daban ganas de meterse dentro de Rosario" (12, 13). This desire to get inside Rosario, both psychologically and physically, proves to be the driving motive of the entire narrative, but her name advertises the potentially excruciating consequences for doing so. Rosario is nicknamed "Tijeras" for having castrated her rapist at age thirteen. Throughout the novel's approximately 150 pages, the drama scarcely relents. Rosario, we learn, was first raped at age eight by her mother's boyfriend, left home at age eleven to live with her brother,

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a teenaged gang-member and sicurio, and subsequently also fell into the thrall of narco-traffickers. In Rosario's case, employment by a drug syndicate includes not only contract killings, which she carries out by kissing her victims before she shoots them ("su beso mortal" 82), but also a vaguely described form of prostitution, in which Rosario provides occasional sexual companionship to drug lords and possibly to Escobar himself in exchange for economic benefit^.^ Rosario is thus cast by Franco rather snugly in the mold of the classic Holl~ywoodfemme fatale: sexually assertive, sentimentally unresponsive ("Rosario tenia un hielo por dentro" 129), criminally minded and violently threatening, especially to the physical and psychological integrity of law-abiding males. In the novel's final cha~ter.the timid Antonio finallv recounts his one sexual tryst with Rosario, following which Rosario unexpectedly insulted and rejected him. Antonio, reduced to tears and metaphorically unmanned, laments to himself, "Las tijeras son tu chimba, Rosario Tijeras" (155). It is telling that after tantalizing us over many pages with allusions to his one sexual tryst with the novel's unanimous object of desire, the narrator finally recounts his long-delayed "getting inside" Rosario only in the brief final chapter, immediately after recounting his diegetically subsequent viewing of her cadaver in the hospital where the novel begins and which provides the site of enunciation in the narrative. As numerous commentators on the historical trajectory of thefemmefatule have observed, the myth of the temptress whose sexual power threatens the male with subjugation and disempowerment is at least as old as Eve and Pandora. Franco, however, aligns Rosario rather directly with the modern and now predominantly cinematic tradition of the femmefatule as a phallically potent woman embodying a challenge to the stability of patriarchal symbolic as well as epistemological order. Although Maillk's film adaptation does nor opt to emulate the visual discourse of classic Hollywood noir, is perhaps instructive to recall that the first international literary prize won by Jorge Franco's novel was the Premio Dashiell Hammett for the best noveh negru published in Spanish in 1999. My reading here seeks to relate Franco's invocation and inflection of thefemmefutule archetype to the "labor terapkutica" proposed by MaillC, exploring also the ways in which Mail16 and Figueras transpose the novel's mechanism of desire by visually foregrounding a seductive and ostensibly threatening female body thar is, in the discourse of the

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film, relentlessly subjected to a male-identified gaze and ultimately reduced to utter inertia when displayed dead, naked and open on an operating table in the film's closing sequence. 'Tbus does the film complete the novel's labor of providing a sexualized female icon of violence, only to reduce, discipline and fix her, in classic noir fashion, in an ultimately conservative, if comforting, gesture of narrative closure. To quote the aptly chosen words of reviewer Mario Lucarda, Rosario is ultimately "cosida a balazos," an intriguing turn of phrase that connotes her body being- sewn, bound or stabilized even as it is rent, penetrated and torn open. While the two texts clearly present an effective appeal to male fantasies of sexual danger (at least in the commercial sense of "effective appeal"), a more complex question that I would like to raise is whether the texts offer any basis for constructive identification for a hypothetical female readerl~~ectator. There is an ambiguity here that relates to an ongoing debate among feminist film critics about the progressive potential of the violentfemmefutale archetype, and that we might relate to comments by lead actress Flora Martinez, claiming Rosurio %eras as a story for women: "'Es una historia que pertenece a todas las mujeres. Tanto el libro como la pelicula tienen un impacto sobre la mujer, de ahi su kxito"' (qtd. in "Emilio Maillk narra"). Without presuming to speak for a hypothetical abstract female viewer, much less for real Colombian female spectators, my own viewing of the film makes me skeptical about that impact and leads me to reconsider certain problems in the novel thar are smoothed over by its affectionate tone ("10s tonos rosas"; Segura Bonnett 118). Even prior to cinematic elaboration, Franco's fiction is often presented in visual terms and firmly structured by the desiring gaze of the male narrator. Franco's Rosario is weakly voiced but strongly embodied. She is, as I have indicated, "mestiza," her skin is cinnamoncolored, and her every feature seems to stand at attention for the male gaze: "Vi sus piernas templadas, su trasero empinado, su figura erguida a pesar de estar cargando con su peor dolor" (41). Most particularly, and as if in anticipation of the film, Rosario's breasts are as erect as a pointing finger and seem to stare back at Antonio: "me miraron sus senos, sus pezones morenos electrizados por el frio" (102). In contrast, Rosario's actual eyes are closed both when Antonio first sees her and, naturally, at the story's end, when she lies dead on a hospital cot. Antonio's account of his first sight of Rosario reads as follows:

Glen S. Close Del humo y las luces que prendian y apagaban, de 10s chorros de neblina artificial, de una m a r d a de brazos que seguia el ritmo de la mlisica, emergi6 Rosario como una Venus futurista, con botas negras hasta la rodilla y plataformas que la elevaban mas alM de su pedestal de hailarina, con una minifalda plateada y una omhliguera de manga sisa y verde ne6n; con su pie1 canela, su pel0 negro, sus dientes blancos, sus lahios gruesos, y unos ojos qne me toc6 imaginar porque bailaba con ellos cerrados para que nadie la sacara de su cuento, para que la mlisica no se le escapara con alguna distraccibn, o tal vez para no vet a la docena de guaches que la creian propia, encerrindola en un clrculo. (74)

Taking my cue from feminist film criticism, I am tempted to conclude that Franco's novel never manages to "sacarla de su cuento" or, rather, to get her story out of her (74). In the novel's final pages, the narrator's account of his postcoital humiliation by Rosario ("Las tijeras son tu chimba, Rosario Tijeras") is immediately followed by a final cut back to the operating room where he gazes on her dead but still desirable body, "esperando un milagro, el prodigio de sus ojos negros mirindome" (155). Her eyes remain closed, she does not return the gaze, and the novel ends with a phrase of dismissal that appears in quotation marks within the narrator's discourse ('"eso es todo, Rosario Tijeras"' 156). As i n j l m noir, where, to quote E. Ann Kaplan, "the female discourse within [the film narrative] is subordinated to overarching heterosexual male discourses," Rosario as object of desire impels the narrative without controlling it (3).As Xochitl E. Shuru has argued, Franco's narrative ultimately approximates the structure of the male Bildungsroman more than it does any innovative social realism of Colombian violence, let alone any sustained narrative evocation of female subjectivity.j In "Towards the Latin American Action Heroine," the most substantial of the few critical articles yet published on Franco's bestseller, Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky interprets Rosario Tijeras as a character who "mirrors the relation between global cultural mythology and local circumstances" and who is "best described through the prism of internationally recognized action characters popularized by US mass culture" (17, 24). Citing the strong influence of cinematic discourse on Franco's writing, Bialowas Pobutsky observes that while he grounds the character of Rosario Tijeras in "the shantytowns of Medellin and culture of the sicariato" (24), his creation ultimately differs little from the violent heroines featured in Hollywood action films of the same period:

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Rosario's infamous aggressiveness and her pervasiveness as an action heroine in the whisperings of the city of Medellin are more characteristic of Hollywood productions and popular television series in the US then [sic] of any situations found in real life. Nevertheless, Franco's novel is presented in remarkably realistic settings, depicting with minute details the erratic and volatile lives of Colombian ricarioi of the end of the twentieth century. The question that arises I...] is whether the novel moves away from the reality of predominantly male delinquency in an attempt to materialize the perpetual masculine fantasy of the fimmefatale or, whether Rosario does havc 'real' antecedents among the female population of the violent Colombian scene, thus calling attention to changing gender roles in these particularly volatile sociopolitical conditions. (18)

Bialowas Pobutsky concludes in favor of the latter proposition, arguing that Rosario Tijeras "expresses with vivid clarity the complex uncertainties of current cultural notions of gender and sexuality in Colombia, amidst violence and poverty" (31). In this view, Franco's emphasis on Rosario's "fears, drives, insecurities and desires" and on the psychological motives of her violent conduct converts "what could at first be perceived as a masculine fantasy of the ultimatefemmefdtale into an impressive reproduction of woman's complex nature in the very real circumstances of endemic violence" (29). While Bialowas Pobutsky attributes the novel's great popularity to the character's defiance of a "male monopoly on power and aggression" (18) and her underwriting of "the reconcilability of femininity and fighting (30), I would suggest that this reading minimizes the more repressive aspects of Rosario's characterization, including her relative lack of voice and "proper" identity ("sin una identidad que la respalde" [12]), her positioning as an object of desire for a male narrator, her primary rendering through sexualized anatomy, the importance of her sexual servitude to more powerful males ("10s patrones de Rosario" [...