1 Sadistic sexual femicide in Alejandra Jaramillo Morales’s Acaso la muerte

It can be argued that the most efficient way of determining whether the UN’s Declaration is being adhered to in contemporary Latin American society would be through the social scientific monitoring, extrapolation and analysis of the relevant societal documentation, i.e. legal records of trials, police reports and medical reports along with the results of social monitoring as provided by the relevant Social Care Services, followed by the publication of recommendations on preventative measures relating to social health as promulgated by the relevant government department. The present study seeks to complement this social scientific monitoring and knowledge creation, which is often quantitative in emphasis, with a creative-qualitative knowledge that seeks to address the problem of VAW from the perspective of what that violence feels like when experienced ‘from the inside’ rather than from the perspective of quantitative data with its focus on the number and frequency of violent events committed.

The problem, of course, with this creative-qualitative approach is that it can be dismissed as non-scientific and therefore irrelevant for the larger social project of elimination of VAW. But, in its defence, we propose that this creative-qualitative approach can also have a role to play in the larger social panorama of incentivizing the social desire to stop VAW. In broader terms the creative-qualitative approach can take, grosso modo, three major forms:

Yet, as we shall see, there is always a balance between the two apparently opposite poles of literature and sociology. Indeed, in order to analyse the ways in which literary ideation and sociological research come together in a novel – that is, in this case, the representation of a violent event perpetrated against a woman or women – it is crucial to measure the degree of historical mimesis contained within each text, and the first important step is to establish whether the text is (1) an empirical reconstruction, (2) an imaginative re-creation or (3) a non-empirical ideation. Ideally, the literary text will be juxtaposed with an empirical sociological study focusing on a similar sub-set or group of individuals or, if this is not possible, a sub-set overlapping in some key respects with the social group and/or individual explored in the novel, based on a similarity in terms of indicators such as gender, race, age, nationality and sexual orientation.

The following chapters have been drawn up as test-cases revolving around the knowledge of these two poles, sociology and creative writing. They are seen as complementing the social scientific and quantitative analyses provided by discourses such as sociology and psychology, geography and history. But their uniqueness relates to their ability to capture the experience of VAW ‘from the inside’, and this is the reason that these texts are valued. This is also the reason why these texts are analysed in this study. In this set of two chapters that focus on contemporary fiction written by Colombian women, we will be focusing on two crucial texts that treat imaginatively and perceptively the theme of the violence committed against women’s bodies, that is, Alejandra Jaramillo Morales’s Acaso la muerte (2010)4 Acaso la muerte (Buenos Aires: Editorial El fin de la noche, 2010); there is no English translation; all translations are my own. and Laura Restrepo’s Delirio (2004).5 Other works by twenty-first century Colombian female writers that should be mentioned in this context include: Patrizia Ariza’s theatre which fights against violence against women; see Alexis Greene, ‘Theatre Against Violence Against Women’, American Theatre, 10 December 2014; https://www.americantheatre.org/2014/12/10/theatre-against-violence-against-women/ (last accessed 1 January 2021); and Melba Escobar’s La Casa de Belleza (2015); House of Beauty, trans. Elizabeth Bryer (2018), which tells the story of corruption in Bogota within the frame of a detective story; . Both of these texts ultimately fall somewhere between the second and third categories of creative literature identified above, that is, they hover between the imaginative re-creation and non-empirical ideation of events relating to VAW. Jaramillo Morales’s creates a compelling backdrop for her novel consisting of a creative re-creation of ‘what really happened’ behind the scenes in the historically empirical acts of terrorism carried out by M-19 in the 1980s against which the ideation of an emotionally explosive and politically charged relationship between one man and two women is silhouetted. Laura Restrepo does something similar in Delirio; key events of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel war pitted against the Colombian State during the 1980s form the empirical backstory to the ideation of gender-based murder and delirium in the lives of two fictional female characters.

A recent survey of population-based data about VAW from a cross-section of countries from Latin America and the Caribbean – namely, Violence Against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Population-based Data from 12 Countries (2012), authored by Sarah Bott, Alessandra Guedes, Mary Goodwin and Jennifer Adams Mendoza– was selected as the most appropriate publication for a comparative analysis of this kind. In order to provide a representative picture of the prevalence of VAW in Latin America and the Caribbean, the authors extracted extensive data from demographic and health surveys as well as reproductive health surveys conducted with c. 24,000 respondents from 12 different countries; the countries chosen were Bolivia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Peru.6 Sarah Bott, Alessandra Guedes, Mary Goodwin and Jennifer Adams Mendoza, Violence Against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Population-based Data from 12 Countries (Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 2012), p. 6. A Conflict Tactics Scale (CTC) approach was used in the interviews in order to focus specifically on the experience by the interviewees of violence in the previous 12 months, including violence committed by intimate partners.7 Sarah Bott, Alessandra Guedes, Mary Goodwin and Jennifer Adams Mendoza, Violence Against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Population-based Data from 12 Countries (Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 2012), p. 10. The surveys in the report were also germane to this study in that they also focussed specifically on the topic of sexual violence as carried out by an intimate partner; the latter was defined as including any of the three following acts: a woman who (1) is forced to have unwanted sexual intercourse; (2) is forced to perform unwanted ‘sex acts’; and/or (3) had unwanted sexual intercourse for fear of what a partner might do if she refused.8 Sarah Bott, Alessandra Guedes, Mary Goodwin and Jennifer Adams Mendoza, Violence Against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Population-based Data from 12 Countries (Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 2012), p. 12.

Respondents in the 12 countries were asked if their intimate partner had used ‘moderate’ violence (ranging from slapping, shaking, shoving her, or twisting her arm and pulling her hair) to more ‘serious’ acts of violence (including punching, kicking, beating, choking, burning, threatening to injure or injuring with a gun or a knife), and it is noteworthy that the Colombian respondents reported the highest levels of moderate acts of violence (37.9%), that is, more than any other of the 12 nations (the lowest was Haiti with 12.5%), and also recorded the highest score in one of the categories of severe acts of violence, that is threatening to wound or wounding with a knife or gun (8.3%) – in this category the lowest percentage scores were from respondents from the Dominican Republic and Peru (both listed as at 3.6%).9 Sarah Bott, Alessandra Guedes, Mary Goodwin and Jennifer Adams Mendoza, Violence Against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Population-based Data from 12 Countries (Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 2012), p. 22.

Figures such as these allow us to provide some context to the depiction of gendered violence in the novels written by Colombian women analysed in this section, namely, that the portrayal of the violence perpetrated on women’s bodies has some basis in empiric phenomena and should not, therefore, be treated in the same ‘remote’ way that a literary critic would interpret, for example, an event in science fiction in which the relationship with empirical reality is much more tangential. But this sociological data needs to be treated with some circumspection. The data cannot be interpreted as a bedrock of empiric truth that the novel is then, as it were, seen as confirming, even if in the manner of a literary embellishment. The important point to be underlined here is that the violence enacted on the female body by men as depicted in the Colombian novels studied in this section is not so much directly representational as obliquely allegorical. The dismemberment of a woman’s body depicted in Alejandra Jaramillo Morales’s Acaso la muerte, for example, is a synecdoche, standing in part for the whole of gender-based violence in Colombian society. Clearly, there is an enormous difference between the empiric, quantitative knowledge created as a result of interviewing, collating and analysing the answers to a set of pre-agreed questions provided by c. 24,000 respondents and a non-empirical ideation of the suffering of just two women within Bogotá society, that is, Irene Carmona and Camila in Acaso la muerte.

At first flush the distance between knowledge based on 24,000 individuals in the case of Sara Bott’s study and knowledge based on two (fictional) individuals in the case of Jaramillo Morales’s novel appears so extreme that the researcher feels tempted to wring their hands in despair. But though there are major differences between the sociological approach on the one hand and the literary perspective on the other, there are some points of coincidence that bear greater scrutiny. The point becomes more obvious when we start to drill down into the motives for VAW as elucidated by the sociological study on the one hand and the novel on the other. Firstly, we should note that in Sarah Bott’s study of Violence Against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, the data produced by the c. 24,000 responses is mined in order to identify the main causes of aggression towards women and some mining of the data produced the following ten reasons why intimate partners resorted to violence. These triggers are listed in descending order of frequency:

What we clearly need at this point of the investigation is more granulated sociological information about the crime that is depicted in the novel under discussion. Since the subject of this chapter – Jaramillo Morales’s Acaso la muerte– is a novel that depicts femicide, defined as ‘the intentional killing of a woman or girl because of her gender’,11 OECD, ‘Addressing femicide in the context of rampant violence against women in Latin America’; https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/addressing-femicide- in-the-context-of-rampant-violence-against-women-in-latin-america.htm (last accessed 31 December 2020). it is important to drill down deeper into the social significance of femicide in Latin America. VAW is a pervasive issue in Latin America, as already noted, but this is a region that has seen particularly high rates of femicides in recent years. A recent regional report on Latin America and the Caribbean provided by the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) reveals that ‘27% of women in the region had suffered violence from an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime, reaching 33% in South America’.12 OECD, ‘Addressing femicide in the context of rampant violence against women in Latin America’; https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/addressing-femicide-in-the- context-of-rampant-violence-against-women-in-latin-america.htm (last accessed 31 December 2020). In 2018, 3,529 women were murdered in this region ‘because of their gender’.13 OECD, ‘Addressing femicide in the context of rampant violence against women in Latin America’; https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/addressing-femicide-in-the- context-of-rampant-violence-against-women-in-latin-america.htm (last accessed 31 December 2020). Part of the problem, as identified by the OECD, is that gender norms in South America and the Caribbean are often to blame for such acts of violence since these often underpin ‘attitudes that justify domestic violence’; these attitudes include acceptance of the idea that a woman may be beaten by her husband if she ‘burns the food, argues with her husband, goes out without telling her husband, neglects the children or refuses sexual relationship’.14 OECD, ‘Addressing femicide in the context of rampant violence against women in Latin America’; https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/addressing-femicide-in-the- context-of-rampant-violence-against-women-in-latin-america.htm (last accessed 31 December 2020). In order to combat the core beliefs of these gender norms a number of governments in South America and the Caribbean have passed laws, in recent years, in order to identify, name and thereby specifically sanction femicide. These include Costa Rica, the first country to pass a law sanctioning femicide, which they did in 2007, followed by Guatemala (2008), Chile (2010), Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mexico (2012), Bolivia, Panama, Colombia, Honduras, Peru (2013), Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela (2014), Paraguay (2015) and Uruguay (2016).15 OECD, ‘Addressing femicide in the context of rampant violence against women in Latin America’; https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/addressing-femicide-in-the-context-of-rampant-violence-against-women-in-latin-america.htm (last accessed 31 December 2020). As we can see, therefore, at the time when Acaso la muerte was published (2010) Colombia’s government had by that time not yet specifically identified and outlawed femicide; in Colombia’s case, the sanctioning of femicide as a specific crime would occur some three years later. Extra clarification about the timing of the edict is needed. To be precise, though the Act of Parliament occurred in 2013, the Law Against Femicide No. 1761 was passed into law and became effective on 6 July 2015 when it was included in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Colombia. Article 2 of that new law stated the following:

It is important to underline at this point that a number of the issues outlined in the legal document relating to femicide sponsored by the Colombian government resonate with the murder of Irene Carmona as portrayed in Acaso la muerte. What follows at this point should be seen as a thought-experiment in that the provisions relating to the articles of the law had not at the time that the novel was being written been released, but this line of enquiry is important because it indicates the extent to which – quite by coincidence – Acaso la muerte shoehorns its plot into the Colombian femicide genre.

As we shall see, the depiction of the murder of Irene Carmona by her (unbalanced) male lover, Daniel, as well as the murder of Irene’s female lover, Camila, means that Daniel’s crime fits the description included in paragraph (a) of Article 2 in that he did have an intimate relationship with Irene that was characterized by a cycle of psychological violence; as well as paragraph (b) in that he did as a result of his crime exercise on Irene’s body acts of gender exploitation relating to her life’s vital choices and her sexuality (i.e. her choice to embark on a lesbian relationship); as well as paragraph (c) in that his attack was also a political attack on her office as a congresista, and he was thereby harnessing the power relations expressed in political hierarchy. With regard to paragraph (d) – i.e. that the crime was perpetrated in order ‘cause terror or humiliation’ – this is more difficult to prove empirically, but since this was very much a public murder of a high-profile politician, it is not too difficult to speculate that the desire to cause terror is part and parcel of Daniel’s plan. There are also some hints of the oppression of Irene which echo the ideas expressed in paragraphs (e) and (f) of article 2, as we shall note later. All in all, the above suggests that Jaramillo Morales has picked on a particular type of crime committed against a woman and her female lover such that it fits very snugly within the broader parameters of the crime of femicide that the Colombian government would legislate on some three years after the publication of the novel.

The existence of this time-lag does have important implications for our interpretation of the novel. It is clear that we cannot interpret the significance of the novel without drawing on the context of the laws relating to the oppression of women in Colombia that were bubbling up at the time when the novel was written. But we should also draw attention to the fact that the publication of the novel preceded the enactment of the crime of femicide by the Colombian government. Perhaps this is nit-picking, but there is an important distinction here that needs highlighting since it shows just how relevant the notion of impunity is when evaluating Jaramillo Morales’s novel. The relationship of Colombia’s legal system with the crime of femicide was in 2010, as suggested above, in limbo. It was ghost-like; for if an act is not identified as a crime by the State then there can be no reprisal or legal redress for that ‘crime’ because no trial to examine its culpability can take place. And without a trial there can be no justice, at least if this is understood in a national sense. Yet, as we shall see in our analysis of Acaso la muerte, this limbo situationality led to the creation of what might be described as a ‘phantasmal consciousness’ in Colombian literature of this period, that is, a crisis of consciousness experienced and mediated by the female body. This phantasmal consciousness is quintessentially present in Acaso la muerte, since the novel focalizes the corruption and impunity of Colombian politics through the lens of a dead woman’s body. Although the trial of an act of femicide could only have been a philosophical thought-experiment at that time (2010), since there were no instruments of a legal apparatus that could have produced a trial of such a crime in empirical terms, Jaramillo Morales’s novel enacts a mock performance of the mechanics of a trial in that it follows the investigation of a detective figure – that is, the psychiatrist, Dr Beatriz Galindos – who embarks on a journey of investigation in order to find out how and why the key witness died. The death of the protagonist in Acaso la muerte is caused by the mind-boggling opprobrium of Colombia’s corruption and impunity. That injustice is enacted in Jaramillo Morales’s novel, as we shall see, within the theatrical arena of the female protagonist’s body, and thereby translates that visceral trauma into an allegory of Colombia’s corrupt political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s.

Acaso la muerte opens like the beginning of a whodunit, though it is rather more sensationalist than the run-of-the-mill detective story. We are met in the opening pages of the novel with a woman, the congresista, Irene Carmona, who is found, half-naked in her apartment, lying close to another half-naked woman, who is dead, and whom the congresista says she does not know. The rest of the Acaso la muerte is orchestrated around the topsy-turvy ride whereby we follow the investigation of the psychiatrist, Dr Beatriz Galindos, as she tries to unravel what has been going on in Irene Carmona’s life such as to produce the extreme condition of clinical amnesia from which she is now suffering. And, as the view finder of the novel gradually opens up, we begin to take in more and more events of Colombia’s past, more and more people who have been involved in political struggles of one sort and another, and more and more personal discoveries – involving love and sex – such that the novel, in effect, becomes a mapping of the key events of the struggle between the State and terrorism. Reference is made to the time when M-19 stole Simón Bolívar’s sword (January 1974), when M-19 raided the army’s weapons arsenal (January 1979), when it attacked and attempted to hold the Palace of Justice to ransom – which led to a bloodbath – (October 1985) as well as the time that narco-cassettes were released, proving that Ernesto Samper had received $6 million from Cali’s drug cartel allowing him to fund his presidential campaign and win the election (in 1994). These various events form the backdrop to the everyday story of a number of key individuals who are involved in the front-line political struggle.17 The events relating to the stealing of Bolívar’s sword are found in Acaso la muerte, pp. 233-34, the failed attempt to take over the Palacio de Justicia occur pp. 47-49, and the reference to the ‘casetes’ on many occasions in the second half of the novel, including a specific conversation with a mysterious Senator on pp. 318-19. For a discussion of the attack on the Palacio de Justicia, see Alfredo Schulte-Buckholt, The Politics of Organized Crime and the Organized Crime of Politics: A Study of Criminal Power (Lanham. MD: Lexington Books, 2006), p. 112.

Acaso la muerte has an air of ‘testimonio’ about it, that is, it tells (or aspires to tell) the story of what really happened in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s because Colombia’s journalists – rather like Spain’s journalists during Franco’s regime – were in the pay of the government at the time and they therefore refused to tell the truth.18 As Juan Goytisolo pointed out: ‘Censorship has the Midas touch – everything it infects turns to gold. Everything becomes politicised; censorship exists to get rid of politics, but in fact it achieves the reverse’; J. S. Tennant ‘Interview with Juan Goytisolo’, The White Review (November 2014); https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-juan-goytisolo/ So novelists such as Jaramillo Morales told the story that should have been emerging in the newspapers. But Acaso la muerte goes well beyond the reportage favoured by journalism; the novel provides a herstory spin to the bland patriarchal telling of this story, and writes a new feminist ‘testimonio’ of those years; telling the struggle of those years from the point of view of the guerilleras, whose problems are more complex than those faced by the men in the movement.

Acaso la muerte begins on a note of delirium, thereby effectively presenting the woman’s dilemma as it emerges within the self and ‘from the inside’. There are six apparently unconnected paragraphs containing stream-of-consciousness thoughts in the mind of the (unnamed) person who refers to (also unnamed) people. These paragraphs are delirious since they mix up a cockroach and a human being, and they are all written in a timeless present time. They express an atmosphere of fear and panic caused by violent, torturous death – leading to delirium:

Written as it was between March 2002 and January 2009, Acaso la muerte occupies the limbo zone of impunity in Colombia when calls were being made and became more and more insistent for the government to be held to account for its alleged involvement in acts of State violence and alleged extrajudicial execution of members of outlawed political groups. And Acaso la muerte– perhaps as a compensatory act of extrajudicial justice – sets up its own tribunal in the centre of its literary universe in order to bring those who have committed trials to a justice that – it appears – can only occur in literature rather than the empiric world of the courts of the land. Given that the injustice that is being portrayed in these novels has been exacted on female subjects it makes sense that the detective-judge figurehead – and representative of a particularly female sense of justice – should be a woman. In Jaramillo Morales’s novel that person is Dr Beatriz Galindos, whose peripetia we follow as she embarks on the trail of the murderer of the woman that we encounter on the first page of this gripping novel, attempting to find the ‘truth’ hovering behind the dead body.

A characteristic literary technique used in Acaso la muerte is the way in which it floats backwards like a tide between the prosaic narration of everyday life governed by the laws of time, space, causality and referentiality, and the stream-of-consciousness passages that conform to no such laws but instead are characterized by overwhelming id-centred emotions, what might be called the ‘logic of delirium’. It is redolent in some ways of Libro de Manuel in that it switches, like Julio Cortázar’s novel, between the prose of the external quotidian and the poetry of the inner world, even if the Argentine writer makes it easier to draw a distinction between the two worlds since the unconscious world is written in italic script and the quotidian world in roman, but Jaramillo Morales’s novel has a sting in its tail. The ‘author’ or source of the stream-of-consciousness passages is the very woman that the detective-investigator, Dr Beatriz Galindos, is attempting to interrogate – with, as we soon discover, very limited success. This interrogatee is Irene Carmona, the prominent politician and member of Colombia’s House of Congress, who was found, half-naked, in her apartment next to a naked dead woman, visibly distressed but overwhelmed by amnesia. It is an amnesia that Dr Galindos tries desperately to unlock but –ironically –all of Irene’s secrets are provided to the reader in the (unassigned) autobiographical fragments that puncture the text at regular intervals.

As we are finding out the history of Irene Carmona’s amnesia – this occurs mainly via the reader’s over-the-shoulder observation of Dr Galindos’s actions as she conducts her investigation before our eyes – we are also allowed entry into the story of Juana Vélez Arango, a guerillera, and her love affair with one of the most important members of M-19, Martín Urbano. Her main claim to fame – we at first believe – is based on her participation in the failed attack on the Palacio de la Justicia in Bogotá which occurred on 6–7 November 1985, organized by M-19 and backed by Pablo Escobar.20 It was a bloodbath; as we read in the novel: ‘Iban a morir como ratas quemadas y asesinadas por un Gobierono que entregaba sus decisiones al ejército y por un pueblo que no había sido capaz de entender que el cambio era posible, que sólo con una revolución acabarían las injusticias, que estaba en sus manos transformar este país’; Acaso la muerte, pp. 48-49. But as the novel develops, we realize that her role is crucial in the story of Irene Carmona’s amnesia. For, in more ways than one, the plot of Acaso la muerte offers a subtle rewriting of Luis Puenzo‘s famous film about the ‘desaparecidos’, La historia oficial (1984) in which a young girl, Gaby, adopted when she was a baby by a middle-class family in Buenos Aires during the early years of the ‘guerra sucia’ is discovered to be the child of two revolutionaries – and the mother, Alicia, a history teacher, becomes the detective and discovers the awful truth about her adopted child. This is also the time-bomb situated at the centre of Acaso la muerte, its final awful secret. But in Jaramillo Morales’s novel, the detective function is not occupied by the child’s mother, as in Puenzo’s film, but by an independent investigator, who ‘discovers’ Irene Carmona’s murky past, that she is not in fact the daughter of the Carmona family but the daughter of Martín Urbano and Juana Vélez. This is commented on ironically by Juana Vélez’s grandmother, Doña Cecilia, when she finally discovers the truth of what happened to her beloved granddaughter, Luisa Vélez, who ‘became’ Irene Carmona:

Jaramillo Morales’s novel explores the narrative of impunity, as we can see, and it also provides an ironic perspective on that impunity by showing how the daughter of revolutionaries can be converted into an ‘obedient’ follower of the State. But Acaso la muerte goes one step further and it gives this story about impunity a final LGBTQ+ twist. Irene Carmona, as Dr Galindos eventually discovers, had a passionate affair with a rather unbalanced man, Daniel; when this affair ended she – possibly by chance but this is not entirely clear – then embarked on an affair with the woman, Camila, who Daniel decided to marry (mainly because he could no longer hang around waiting for Irene). The novel’s spectacular dénouement – which occurred just before the novel ‘begins’ – consisted in a moment of sadistic femicide perpetrated by Daniel, when he accidentally discovered that his new wife had betrayed him, not with another man, but with his former lover, Irene. It is difficult to piece together precisely what happened next – the text takes on itself a ‘delirious’ tone when the ‘discovery’ occurs – but one reading is as follows: Daniel, overwhelmed by an intense feeling at betrayal at what his wife and former lover had done to him, decided to take his revenge on them by holding a revolver to their heads and forcing them to engage in sexual activity by threatening to kill them both if they did not do so, while he acted as a voyeur to their ‘illicit’ activity. As a result of this Camila died, possibly as a result of being forced to consume a large quantity of drugs, or possibly as a result of being killed by strangulation by Daniel, or possibly strangled by Irene who was forced to do so by Daniel. By the time the police arrive – and by the time the reader arrives – the true culprit, Daniel, has disappeared, and Irene is charged with Camila’s murder.

The main reason why Irene has been reduced to the cataleptic state in which she was found by the police when they arrived at the apartment was that her witnessing of the death of her lover, Camila, in the context of sexual torture, had triggered her until then repressed memory of being separated forcefully from her mother, Juana Vélez, when she was a baby, and mother and daughter had been captured and taken away for interrogation. As the novel builds towards its anagnorisis, it drops a number of broad hints about why Irene is caught in a cataleptic and speechless state, such as Irene’s reference to the moment when she and Camila were discovered to be lovers by the man who was husband to one and former lover to the other as ‘that fatal evening when Daniel turned up in the apartment because he had discovered that the two of us were living together’.23 ‘esa noche fatal en que Daniel se nos presentó en el apartamento porque había descubierto que ella y yo, la una y la otra, estábamos viviendo juntas’; Acaso la muerte, p. 299.And the novel gradually begins tying things together – the (real) cockroach mentioned on the first page of the novel re-appears as a metaphorical cockroach that stands for the filthy paradise of their love: ‘Nothing perturbed me, just my fear of not knowing when or which tremendous morning I would wake up transformed into a flying cockroach that escapes, flies endlessly, and just lives from the filthiness of its escape’.24 ‘Nada me perturbaba, sólo mi miedo de no saber cuándo, en qué tremenda mañana me despertaría transformada en la cucharacha voladora que se escapa, que se vuela sin límites, que sólo vive de la inmundicia de su escape’; Acaso la muerte, p. 299. This point of transformation of the ‘flying cockroach’25 ‘cucharacha voladora’; Acaso la muerte, p. 299. is a re-writing of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the moment Samson is transfigured into an insect, the point at which the ‘little girl intern’26 ‘niñita interna’; Acaso la muerte, p. 301.– interned as a result of the trauma of seeing her mother executed using sexual torture – emerges from the chrysalis of its lockdown.

Since the sequence of events that triggered the trauma at the heart of the novel is not completely clear, it is worthwhile for us to investigate the different aspects. As mentioned above, there is the possibility – as Dr Galdindos argues – that Irene was also a victim on that fateful evening, and that Daniel forced her to kill her lover: ‘Each time it becomes clearer to me that Irene was also a victim on that fatal night. Daniel threatened them both and he used them and his state of mind forced them to commit various atrocities’.27 ‘Cada vez me queda más claro que Irene fue víctima también en esa noche fatal. Daniel las amenazó a las dos y las usó para varias atrocidades que su estado mental lo llevaron a realizar’; Acaso la muerte, p. 311.The second possibility is that Daniel himself murdered Camila, and this is suggested, rather contradictorily, by Dr Galindos when she says – and this is reported just a page later than the above statement—that ‘Now I feel sure that she wasn’t the person who killed Camila’.28 ‘Ahora me siento segura de que ella no fue la persona que asesinó a Camila’; Acaso la muerte, p. 312. However, in terms of the internal evidence of the novel – i.e. the novel as a whole rather than simply the professional opinion articulated by the psychiatrist – the first interpretation makes sense because of the description of the cockroach that appears in the opening paragraph of the novel. This paragraph must also logically be sourced in Irene’s numbed and alienated mind as presented in the third person of objective narration, and it runs as follows:

Acaso la muerte, as we can see, focuses on the shocking, sadistic femicide of a powerful political woman. That torture of Camila is used as an allegory of the dismemberment of Colombia’s political body, and it is a destruction that is wrought by a man but expiated by two innocent women whose only sin is their love of each other. This is the secret that the novel – just like Colombian society – hides in its closet: sadistic sexual femicide. Acaso la muerte also articulates an artistic truth that – in the arena of art – is as shocking as the representational depiction of the sociological prevalence of femicide. For that dismemberment becomes not only the source but also the symptom of the de-articulation of the discourse of narrativity; thus the novel unravels before our eyes in the way that Colombian society does. The novel collapses into itself in a scream of pain elicited by Camila’s torture that destroys logos, suggesting that the secret horror running through the veins of Colombian society destroys with impunity the logic of a trial of femicide, turning truth and death into phantasmal relics of their former selves: they are now nothing more than perhaps-truth and perhaps-death.