7
The posthuman female body in lockdown in Diamela Eltit’s Fuerzas especiales
Stephen M. Hart
As Soledad Larraín, in collaboration with Lorena Valdebenito and Luz Rioseco, demonstrate in their pioneering study, Country Assessment on VAW: CHILE, published in July 2009 and sponsored by the United Nations, violence against women (VAW) is an area of major concern in Chile. The authors define VAW as
such an act of physical, sexual and psychological violence that
(i) Occurs within the family or domestic unit or within any other interpersonal relationship, irrespective of whether the perpetrator is currently residing or has resided in the past with the victim, such violence includes, among others, rape, battery and sexual abuse;
(ii) Occurs in the community as a whole and is perpetrated by an aggressor, including among others, rape, sexual abuse, human trafficking, forced prostitution, kidnapping and sexual harassment either in the workplace, in educational institutions, health facilities or in any other place;
(iii) Is perpetrated or condoned by the State or its agents regardless of where it occurs.
1 Soledad Larraín, Lorena Valdebenito and Luz Rioseco, Country Assessment on VAW: CHILE (Santiago, Chile: United Nations, 2009), p. 5.The third point raised – which itself points to the culpability of State employees actively condoning or turning a blind eye to VAW – is significant and has an important resonance for the two novels written by Chilean women and studied in this and the following chapter, that is, Diamela Eltit’s Fuerzas especiales (Special Forces; 2015) and Carla Guelfenbeim’s Contigo en la distancia (In the Distance with You; 2015). Fuerzas especiales, in particular, as we shall see, focuses on the representation of VAW, and it does so in the context of the broader political lockdown imposed by State authorities on Chile’s subaltern classes.
The authors of the above-cited report also draw attention to the promulgation in Chile of Law No. 19.325, dated August 1994, and Law No. 20.066 of October 2005, which served to criminalize domestic violence, as well as Law No. 19.617 (1999) and Law No. 19.927 (2004), both of which relate to sexual violence and are symptomatic of a ‘conceptual change regarding the judicially protected asset, which was initially considered as being confirmed to the family sphere and to public morality, but is now considered part of “sexual freedom”’.
2 Ibid., p. 7. The monitoring of crimes demonstrated that ‘femicide represents nearly half the women murdered in Chile and that they generally occur in a context of past or present intimate relationships’.
3 Ibid., p. 20. The authors also draw attention to the important role played by the media in Chile in enhancing societal awareness of gender-based violence (GBV) so that the murder of women is now seen as a ‘media event’:
An important step forward has been taken to address a specific aspect of VAW – femicide – which at first was promoted by civil society and today has been taken-up by SERNAM as its core mission as it is seen as an extreme form of GBV. This visibility has enabled the issue of femicide to remain in the public agenda as a priority issue; thus, it becomes necessary to ascertain its magnitude and associated risk factors in order to establish an effective strategy for the protection of women. Civil society organizations have made an important contribution to making femicide visible and placing the issue in the public agenda as an extreme form of VAW. Due to the study carried out by The Chilean Network against Domestic and Sexual Violence, femicide became visible and has been addressed explicitly by the State through SERNAM, which has placed it today in the public agenda and in the collective mind of Chile as a serious problem, affecting a significant number of women. Women NGOs have played an important role in the generation of shadow reports, displaying the hurdles that still exist in regards to addressing women’s human rights and the challenges that Chile continues to face regarding this matter.
4 Ibid., p. 9.For both of the authors studied in these two chapters on the Chilean novel literature is seen as providing a vitally important space for the expression of the urgent need to re-assess VAW in contemporary Chilean society. That said, neither Fuerzas especiales nor Contigo en la distancia should be understood as thesis-type novels that function like ‘coat hangers’ on which a particular political issue can be conveniently hung. Both novels are barometers of the distress caused by VAW and express that distress ‘from the inside’, as argued in Chapter 4. This is their strength and, as we will be arguing in this chapter, what allows them to offer a socially valid discourse that complements the sociological study of VAW and GBV in twenty-first century Chile.
There are some ingredients of
Fuerzas especiales, Diamela Eltit’s tenth novel, that overlap with the broad parameters of sociological research. The novel is set in a rough and depressed neighbourhood of Santiago, Chile, in an estate full of run-down blocks of flats. It draws for its inspiration on historical examples of the forced ejection of inhabitants living in districts of the capital city of Chile such as Santiago, Providencia and Las Condes, away from the centre to the outskirts.
5 For an analysis of this sociological background to the novel, see Sandra Navarrete Barria, ‘Miedos al margen: representaciones de la violencia y la precariedad en Fuerzas especiales de Diamela Eltit’, Amérique Latine: Histoire & Memoire, 34 (2017). In an interview Eltit mentioned that she had been inspired in particular by the treatment meted out to Población la Legua in Santiago by the police in writing her novel.
6 Denisse M. Lazo González, ‘The Politics of Literature in Chilean Post-Transition to Democracy Novels: Portraits of Society and the Political Status of Women in the Narrative of Diamela Eltit and Alberto Fuguet’, PhD, University of Oxford, 2018, p. 138. Even though the novel is based on a specific example of forced ejection Eltit deliberately neutralizes these referential (i.e. spatial and temporal) co-ordinates so that the reader is consequently unable to pin down the setting of
Fuerzas especiales. All that the reader is ‘allowed to know’ is that the novel describes the oppression of run-down, lower-class communities living in blocks of flats somewhere in Chile (which we can ‘deduce’ from the use of idiomatic Chilean Spanish). The fact that the place where the action takes place is never specifically named in any section of the novel gives it a sense of spacelessness and timelessness. The residents are described as overwhelmed by sadness; there are references to the ‘wake of despair’ (estela de desesperanza) which overwhelms the flats as well as the ‘cries or sobs’ (los gritos o los llantos) that greet anyone who climbs the stairs of the blocks of flats, which are themselves portrayed as enveloped by a ‘suspicious silence’ (un silencio sospechoso).
7 Diamela Eltit, Fuerzas especiales (Madrid: Editorial Periférica, 2015), p. 38. The residents who live in the blocks of flats – all we know is that they are four-storey flats – live constantly under the threat of an imminent attack by the police, the ‘pacos’ (the Chilean national uniformed police) and the ‘tiras’ (the Chilean civilian police) who often work in tandem to oppress the residents of the blocks of flats. The following excerpt from a review provides a good sense of the overriding existential perspective provided by the novel:
[T]he protagonist is a young woman from a marginal neighbourhood who works as a prostitute in a cyber cafe, her life at the height of tragedy and misfortune. The setting is a section of town surrounded by police special forces. But in a sad yet defiant play on words, the special forces of the title also refer to the will required to resist, to survive on the edge of society under such forms of repression and oppression. […] This sad, dark novel constructs a tale from various voices of the poor and the dispossessed who, despite all odds, try to survive with dignity in the middle of a world full of more and more sophisticated guns and new ways of killing.
8 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fuerzas-Especiales-Largo-Recorrido-Diamela/dp/8416291055.It is important to clarify – following the outline of the novel provided by this review – that the young woman who acts as the protagonist is unnamed and this fact alone gives a clear steer on the genre of Fuerzas especiales. It is the second type of creative-qualitative research, as identified in Chapter 4 above, which is described as follows:
the imaginative re-creation of a violent event against a woman or women about which, for legal reasons, the author is unable to provide the actual names of the perpetrators and therefore describes the empirical event that occurred but withdraws or changes the names of the protagonists (as occurs in the case of a narrative such as a novel or a feature film which, for legal reasons, is described as fictional and not based on real people or real events, although the readers and/or viewers suspect there to be a realistic core).
The violence meted out to the unnamed female protagonist of the novel becomes in effect the barometer of the State oppression described. The effects of this oppression are experienced viscerally, and ‘from the inside’. She complains about the attacks perpetrated on the community by the ‘pacos’ (the Chilean national uniformed police) alongside her neighbour, ‘la guatona’, who complains about the ‘tiras’.
9 The ‘guatona’ complains about the attacks by the ‘tiras’ on the community (see Fuerzas especiales, p. 37) and the protagonist by the ‘pacos’ (Fuerzas especiales, p. 48). The situation of the protagonist’s family is desperate; her brothers are in prison and her father often stays in bed all day long, seemingly having lost the will to live:
My father has to wake up constantly every night. Like a zealous night watchman, he tosses and turns in his bed while waiting for the police to arrive or he manages to avoid dreaming about the blow from a truncheon he got on his torso, smashing two ribs to smithereens. Two of his ribs on the right side of his chest. From that day onwards he was knock-kneed, unbalanced, because he was in the street, walking alongside one of the blocks of flats that was the furthest away, standing outside when the police turned up, raining down their truncheon blows, on precisely the day when they had just got paid.
10 Spanish original: ‘Mi padre se desvela de manera obligada cada noche. Como un acucioso guardián nocturno, se da vueltas y vueltas en su cama mientras espera a la policía o evita soñar con el lumazo, el que le dieron en su costado y le hizo polvo dos costillas. Dos de sus costillas derechas. Desde ese día quedó medio chueco mi papá, desnivelado, porque estaba en la calle, caminando al lado de uno de los bloques más distantes, parado afuera cuando los carabineros llegaron repartiendo lumazos justo el día en que estaban recién pagados’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 50.The main point to be made about this beating is that it is an example of the countless acts of random and gratuitous violence meted out by the police on community residents – and they can do nothing about their fate. One of the leitmotifs of the novel, indeed, is impunity. The protagonist’s two brothers are in prison, and the memory of their seizure by the police in an early-morning raid still haunts the family:
My mother turns pale, pale, and she almost faints, and she kneels down in front of the ‘pacos’, she kneels down like a parishioner in front of the ‘pacos’, and she begs them not to take them, please, please don’t take them, what are they to you, what are they to you, leave them here with me, my sons, they are my sons, ours, our family, do you understand? Can’t you see that they are bleeding, now more pale, this poor woman on her knees, and my sister also sinks to her knees beside her, she kneels down crying, hugging my mum, that fateful Monday, the two of them together, my mum and my sister, with their knees on the floor, until my dad kneels down because he sees his sons with their faces covered in blood, all of them kneeling down before the ‘pacos’ but I can’t kneel, I can’t kneel down, and I don’t know what to do with my body and with my fear, and the pity for their swollen faces because of the beatings and those terrible trails of blood that I can’t see, I can’t see clearly where they are coming from, while my mother screams out and clings onto the leg of one of the ‘pacos’, still on her knees.
11 Spanish original: ‘Mi madre se pone pálida, pálida, casi desvanecida y se hinca ante los pacos, se hinca como una feligresa ante los pacos y les pide que no se los lleven, que por favorcito los dejen, qué les cuesta, qué les cuesta, déjenmelos, a mis hijos, son míos, de nosotros, de la familia, ¿entienden?, que no ven les sale sangre, más pálida, hincada la pobre y mi hermana se hinca al lado, se hinca llorando, abrazando a mi mamá, ese lunes infame, ellas dos, mi mamá y mi hermana con las rodillas en el suelo hasta que se mi papá se hinca porque ve a sus hijos, los hermanos que teníamos, con sus caras llenas de sangre, todos hincados ante los pacos pero yo no puedo hincarme, no puedo hincarme y no sé qué hacer con mi cuerpo y con mi miedo y la lástima antes sus caras tumefactas por los golpes y esos terribles hilos de sangre que no puedo ver con claridad de donde viene, mientras mi madre grita y se aferra a la pierna de uno de los pacos, siempre hincada’; Fuerzas especiales, pp. 81–82.What we have here is part of a never-ending story of physical brutality. Even when the police leave after one of their raids, the threat of an attack by the police is ever-present as a result of the spies who remain behind after the police operations: ‘the bodies who stay behind after each one of the police operations spy on us through the plastic. I know those machine-like eyes, covered and shifty, the same eyes that count the patrols.’
12 Spanish original: ‘los cuerpos que van quedando después de cada uno de los operativos policiales nos espían tras los plásticos. Conozco esos ojos maquínicos, encubiertos, huidizos, los mismos ojos que cuentan las patrullas’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 39.Fuerzas especiales provides, in effect, a mosaic of the various voices of the poor and the dispossessed living in a deeply unjust world. Their bodies bear the scars of violence, which are both physical and psychological. A good example of this is the whipping that the protagonist’s sister receives at the hands of the law. The protagonist’s sister was once whipped on the back by a policeman:
If she manages to get to the centre, she tells us, she would forget the lashing that the ‘paco’ gave her when she took her shirt off and he whipped her back. There were five hundred synthetic 597 Remington rifles there. One whipping, just one, which took place in the most mundane part of the police station, a spectacle created by a police officer in order to amuse the ‘pacos’ on duty that night who felt dejected as a result of their derisory amount of that month’s salary. It was all about settling an account he had with one of the ‘pacos’. One police officer and her, she tells us. This is what my sister states, it is a debt that will disappear for ever as a result of one whipping along with the indispensable presence of the ‘pacos’ on duty that night who saw her back as offering a way out of the anxiety produced by their unpaid dues.
13 Spanish original: ‘Si logra llegar al centro, nos dice, se olvidaría del guaracazo que le dio el paco cuando ella se sacó la blusa y le azotó la espalda. Había quinientos rifles Remington 597 sintéticos. Un azote, uno solo, realizado en el sector más neutro de la comisaria, un escenario que armó un oficial para entretener a los pacos de turno que estaban abatidos por el monto irrisorio que arrojaba la última gratificación. Se trataba de soldar una cuenta que tenía con uno de los pacos. Un oficial y ella, nos dice. Así lo afirma mi hermana, una deuda que terminaría para siempre con el correazo y la presencia indispensable de los pacos de turno que veían en su espalda una posibilidad de sortear la ansiedad que les generaban sus cuotas impagas’; Fuerzas especiales, pp. 71–72.As we can see, it is as a result of the disgruntlement caused by their low wages that the police spend their time attacking the populace. In this sense we can talk about Fuerzas especiales as a type of sociological but anonymized x-ray of Chilean society, one that captures a snap-shot of oppression in one of its most marginal communities. As readers we become unwitting witnesses to various acts of violence committed by the police on the local community, always it seems without any justification, we see the community’s acts of humiliation, the parents who cannot stop their children being taken away from them, the hunger they all experience, their broken dreams and their despair. We see and feel their pain as they are forced to accept the rules of a world that does not make any sense to them. The lockdown in Fuerzas especiales is disproportionate; it has no objective correlative.
This is essentially why the inhabitants of the blocks of flat have no clue about what is going on:
Lucho, Omar and myself had to recognise that there is a curious plan which aims to re-populate the blocks of flats, based on the illegal occupation of the spaces that nobody lives in, a programme that is encouraged by the ‘pacos’ and the ‘tiras’. Why? We don’t know. But we believe that they intend to infiltrate us or infect us with bemusement and insecurity. After removing our neighbours, new families turn up. Who are they? We don’t know. We prefer to keep our distance for our own safety and to carry on with our lives.
14 Spanish original: ‘Tuvimos que reconocer, el Lucho, el Omar y yo, que existe un plan curioso de repoblamiento de los bloques, una forma ilegal de ocupación en los espacios donde ya no queda nadie un programa que estimulan los pacos y los tiras. ¿Por qué? No lo sabemos. Pero creemos que pretenden infectarnos o infiltrarnos de asombro y inseguridad. Después de que se llevan a los vecinos, aparecen nuevas familias. ¿Quiénes son? No lo sabemos. Preferimos mantenernos lejos para precavernos y seguir con nuestras vidas’; Fuerzas especiales, pp. 67–68.The young un-named woman who acts – perhaps reluctantly – as the narrator of the narrative operates as a synecdoche of all the residents’ lives in the community in that she lives a life of fear, want and destitution. She uses the internet as a means of escape from this overwhelming reality: ‘I have to forget about myself so that I can become immersed in body and soul in the transparency radiating from the screen.’
15 Spanish original: ‘Tengo que olvidarme de mí misma para entregarme en cuerpo y alma a la trasparencia que irradia la pantalla’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 40. Though the cyber café offers the protagonist a sense of release from the oppression of everyday life, it is also the site of another type of bodily oppression: she prostitutes her body on a regular basis in half-hour slots in one of the cubicles there:
I go as a woman to the cyber café to search for food among the screens. They all eat each other. They eat me as well, they pull my knickers down in front of the screens. Alternatively I drop my knickers in the cyber café, I pull them down, pierced by the magnetic splendour of the computers. In contrast Omar and Lucho get their jobs done, and it’s easier and cleaner and healthier for them – they benefit from the comfortable security of avoiding anything that is destructive or truly unsolvable. We pay three hundred pesos to use the cubicle for half an hour. I drop my knickers for half an hour and I let them put their prick or their fingers inside, as much as they can.
16 Spanish original: ‘Voy al cíber como mujer a buscar entre las pantallas mi comida. Todos se comen. Me comen a mí también, me bajan los calzones frente a las pantallas. O yo misma me bajo los calzones en el cíber, me los bajo atravesada por el resplandor magnético de las computadoras. En cambio el Omar o el Lucho solamente se lo sacan, más fácil, más limpio, más sano provistos de la cómoda seguridad de que nada les resulte destructivo o verdaderamente insalvable. Pagamos trescientos pesos por ocupar media hora el cubículo. Me bajo media hora los calzones y dejo que me metan el lulo o los dedos adentro, hasta donde puedan’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 12.This might be seen as the description of a conventional case of prostitution forced upon women who have no other way of sustaining themselves in a modern society as epitomized by the cyber café mentioned here. But some of the descriptors and metaphors suggest that something more sinister is taking place, in that the protagonist describes how she removes her clothing ‘in front of the screens’ as well as ‘pierced/shot through by the magnetic brilliance of the computers’. The adjective ‘atravesada’ suggests that the protagonist’s body has, literally, been ‘crossed through’ by the computers, which points to an almost organic connection between the computer and the human body. It is significant too that the protagonist only uses the present tense in this passage (‘voy’, ‘comen’, ‘bajan’, ‘bajo’, ‘sacan’, ‘resulte’, ‘pasamos’, ‘dejo’, ‘metan’, ‘puedan’) and, indeed, this use of the present tense is consistent throughout the novel.
I never say: get your prick out or: get your fingers out. I don’t ever do that because I’m concentrating on the alternative fashions Russian site that absorbs my attention so much that my eyes wander around my brain classifying the clothes hypnotically. Afterwards I run out of the cyber café and I consume everything I can. I do this deliberately and greedily, in an anaemic and possessive way, and when quite a lot of time has gone by, when I feel refreshed and sharp, I return and wait for the amount for each of my half-hour sessions in cubicle eight. I gaze at the screen and, to amuse myself, I move the cursor and I cruise through the latest fads in de luxe Italian raincoats. They pay me between 1,000 and 2,000 pesos for each half-hour session. I pay Lucho 300 pesos for the cubicle.
17 Spanish original: ‘Nunca digo: sácame el lulo ni digo: sácame los dedos. No lo hago porque me concentro en el sitio ruso de modas alternativas que me absorbe tanto que mis ojos se pasean por mi cerebro clasificando las prendas de manera hipnótica. Después abandono corriendo el cíber y me voy a consumir todo lo que puedo. Lo hago con una deliberada avidez, con un estilo anémico, posesivo, y cuando ya ha pasado un tiempo importante, cuando me siento ventilada, aguda, regreso y espero la suma de cada una de mis medias horas en el cubículo ocho. Miro la pantalla y, para entretenerme, muevo el cursor y avanzo hacia las últimas tendencias de los suntuosos abrigos italianos. Me pagan mil y hasta dos mil pesos por la media hora. Yo le pago trescientos pesos al Lucho por el cubículo’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 12.The protagonist clarifies that she does not tell her clients to remove their fingers or their penises from her body because she is absorbed in other activities such as looking at and classifying clothing on a Russian website specializing in alternative fashion. The fact that she does so ‘hypnotically’ (de manera hipnótica) indicates that she is not fully conscious. Again a reader might want to see this detail in terms of a poor girl forced into prostitution who attempts to numb the pain by taking drugs. But it is clear from this passage – and what later ensues in the novel – that the numbness experienced by the protagonist of Fuerzas especialesis caused by the state of disconnectedness – almost dismemberment – within her body. Thus she is so ‘hypnotized’ by what is going on that, as she puts it, ‘my eyes are walking around my brain’ (mis ojos se pasean por mi cerebro), which suggests that not only is there a disconnect between the eyes and the brain but the normal human processes have been reversed because the eyes are no longer looking out into the world, but looking inwards towards the brain. And it is in this inward reality that the images of the Russian website are being screened. Rather like the replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the protagonist of Eltit’s novel has been turned into something hybrid, but her hybridity is even more monstrous than Ridley Scott’s imagination since her brain now functions like a printed circuit board for which moral issues such as the rights or wrongs of prostitution do not function since they have been de-programmed. The female protagonist of Fuerzas especiales is fascinated by and responds to numbers; she works in cubicle 8, she gets paid between 1,000 and 2,000 pesos and she pays Lucho 300 pesos for the cubicle.
The protagonist, in effect, combines within her being the print circuit board of a computer with the body of a young prostitute. This suggests why, in the vast majority of cases, she uses the present tense since she inhabits a vast unending present. When the protagonist of the novel refers to the passage of time she simply uses the descriptor ‘important’ (cuando ya ha pasado un tiempo importante) or ‘media hora’ (half an hour being the length of her sessions), rather than say five hours or 30 minutes. This indicates that her knowledge of past present and future has been converted into the perpetual present of on/off 1/0 binary code used by computers on the internet and, in the process, her awareness of the difference between the virtual and the real has been lost. Emotions such as shame or guilt depend for their existence on memory and the awareness of the passage of time, but the protagonist’s world is simply governed by an emotion that is in the present tense, that is, fear:
That’s why when my mum says Pedro, Leandro or dad to me, she and I look at each other in horror because we have banned the mention of their names and though I leave the flat and don’t come back all day, even though I wander the streets, rent the cubicle for an hour or eat two sarnies at Lame Pancho’s food stall, I know that the news of an imminent tragedy or a felony at home or a nervous palpitation is going to come crashing down on top of us.
18 Spanish original: ‘Por eso cuando mi mamá me dice Pedro, Leandro o papá, ella y yo nos miramos con terror porque nos prohibimos mencionar sus nombres y a pesar de que yo salga del departamento y no vuelva en todo el día, aunque corra por las calles, arriende por una hora el cubículo o me coma dos fricas en el puesto del cojo Pancho, sé que la noticia de una desgracia inminente o de una felonía doméstica o una palpitación nerviosa nos van a demoler’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 23.The protagonist of Eltit’s novel is, in fact, reminiscent of the replicants of Blade Runner in one other way. Just as the replicants are half-human and therefore remember their humanity and so rebel against the conditions of their captivity, so the protagonist of Las fuerzas especiales occasionally remembers the past despite the machine’s desire to make it disappear completely. And when it does appear it is mediated by the language of war and information technology. This is clear in chapter 2, ‘The Children’ (Los niños); when the protagonist remembers the time that her nephews were taken away, the details are blurred:
It seemed amazing to me that my sister’s children could have produced such a pervasive climate of stupefaction. I thought about the children who used to belong to us and how they managed to become individuals and achieve a unique and quite difficult notoriety as a result of my sister’s behaviour. I also saw clearly that a collective breath of horror and scandal was descending on us which, though it was transitory, was nevertheless eloquent. There were 15,000 Taurus M62 rifles right there. Sitting on the edge of my chair nothing seemed that important, except for my two nephews and the expanding reality of their publicized destinies. The children existed before a part of the world and my sister also existed and, finally, for 48 hours all of our lives took on a much-deserved profile. Amidst powerful sparks, the news reports, which were written with a quite deliberate cruelty, blurred our insignificance as well as the asymmetries.
19 Spanish original: ‘Me parecía asombroso que los hijos de mi hermana fueran capaces de producir un clima de estupefacción tan extenso. Pensé en los niños que antes nos pertenecían y en cómo ellos consiguieron individualizarse hasta alcanzar una difícil y exclusiva notoriedad debido a la conducta de mi hermana. Percibí también que se precipitaba sobre nosotros el hálito colectivo de horror y de un escándalo que, aunque efímero, resultaba elocuente. Había quince mil quinientos rifles Taurus M62. Sentada en la orilla de la silla nada parecía importante en el mundo, salvo los dos hijos de mi hermana y la realidad creciente de sus publicitados destinos. Los niños existían ante una parte del mundo y existía también mi hermana y, por fin, a lo largo de cuarenta y ocho horas la vida de todos nosotros adquiría un merecido relieve. En medio de poderosos chispazos, las informaciones, detalladas con una deliberada crueldad, borraban nuestra insignificancia y las asimetrías’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 19.Although this could be the description of a woman in Chile watching the TV – as suggested by the ‘publicized destinies’— and hearing about the crimes and subsequent imprisonment of her nephews, which changed her life as well as her sister’s in the space of 48 hours, there are a number of pointers in the text that alienate and disenfranchise it from the reader’s consciousness. Firstly we note the irruption of the mention of large quantities of military weapons in the text without rhyme or reason (‘There were 15,000 Taurus M62 rifles right there’), which unsettles the reader’s understanding of this scene as an empiric event. The reference to the children as existing ‘facing a part of the world’ is devoid of empiric pointers, suggesting again that this is a virtual experience whose empiric validity is questionable. Again, this could be a ‘cruel’ news flash in the sense that the TV company could have decided or been obliged (by the government?) to present a deliberately negative view of the crime committed by the protagonist’s nephews, but the reader’s final response must be that this passage contains more questions than answers. There is an important detail, though, in the last sentence; the news item ‘blurred’ the ‘insignificance’ and ‘asymmetries’ of the protagonist and her sister. The social insignificance of criminals is, of course, a common descriptor used by the modern media, but this rejection is based on a more sophisticated network of associations since the crimes are seen in terms of ‘asymmetries’, inimical, we might say to the oppressive binary code used by Chile’s civil, technological and military regime. As a result of this technologically agile and vicious attack the protagonist and her sister become asymmetrical and blurred; they have ceased to exist.
It is clear from the above discussion that one of the main themes of
Fuerzas especiales concerns the criminalization and exclusion of sections of the underclass population of Santiago carried out by the Chilean government; we also know this because of an interview that Eltit gave about the inspiration for this novel. But it is also self-evident that
Fuerzas especiales is not simply a re-vamping of, let us say, the narrative of the Andrés Wood’s film,
Machuca (2004). In Eltit’s novel the exclusionary activities of the Chilean government, and the impact they have on the Chilean people are mediated by the technological discipline of the modern State, expressed as much through ultra-modern military weaponry as by the surveillance and control activities carried out by the State via the internet. This is also suggested by the way in which the novel uses the term ‘Fuerzas especiales’, which commonly simply refers to Chile’s armed police who control the streets, but also is used to suggest the ‘special forces’ that at work in virtual reality. This is evident in that the novel focuses specifically upon the impact caused by these two types of oppression on the female body, as exemplified by the protagonist’s life story. As we have suggested above, the protagonist of Eltit’s novel is essentially a posthuman creation midway between the machine and the human.
Fuerzas especiales, as Francine Masiello eloquently puts it, portrays a ‘posthuman subject that is attached increasingly to an electronic machine’; as she continues ‘we enter a global war as seen from the margin of the margin. The poor lack control over their bodies; they lose their human dimension’.
20 Francine Masiello, The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 2018), pp. 252–53. As a result of the distribution of lack performed by the regime of neo-liberalism, the populace lack food to eat and even air to breathe. As Masiello suggests, ‘[a]ccess to the electronic screen becomes the characters’ air and lungs. It alone can awaken the senses; it alone can keep people alive’.
21 Francine Masiello, The Senses of Democracy, p. 255.It is for this reason that the prostitution experienced by the protagonist is portrayed in Fuerzas especiales as a military-technological mercantilization of the human body, in which humanity has been disappeared beneath the weight of levelling on the female species. In fact the protagonist typically describes prostitution in terms of a military-cum-technological battle:
I spend ten minutes exactly sitting on top of a prick that is rammed inside me it feels like the impact of a round of high-power bullets, one after the other, they keep coming, I’m sitting watching the butterfly, and the technological fluttering of its wings, a fake, decorative fluttering, while the prick is coming to a crescendo, hurting me, annoying me, threatening me. It’s a hard prick, it’s strange, it’s martial, it’s terrible.
22 Spanish original: ‘Llevo diez minutos exactos sentada arriba de un lulo que se clava adentro de mi como si recibiera el impacto de una sucesión de balas de alto calibre, una y otra, una detrás de otra, sentada, mirando la mariposa, y su aleteo tecnológico, un aleteo falso, decorativo, mientras de manera creciente me duele, me molesta, me amenaza el lulo. Un lulo duro, raro, marcial terrible el lulo’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 100.The allusion to the butterfly is created in order to underline the counterpoint with the aggressive military and technological ‘lulo’, which later on is associated specifically with the state of a larva: ‘I saw in all its depths the universal junk of the police and I understood that this junk was not completely discontinued but remained in a larva state.’
23 Spanish original: ‘Vi en su profundidad toda la chatarra universal de la policía y comprendí que esa chatarra no estaba descontinuada del todo sino que permanecía en estado larvario’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 104. This is the final point made about the oppression exercised by the State: it is like a larva than can never transcend itself and become a butterfly. It is stunted in terms of development and, as such, rotten to the core. The State regime is full of maggots and the people are the butterflies.
But, as the novel suggests, these ‘butterflies’ are being gradually and violently squeezed out of existence:
When I find myself on some site in the World Wide Web with Lucho, I understand that there is no longer even one milimetre of salvation for us, I understand how the spaces become more narrow, and we don’t have anywhere to find ourselves, we don’t have it. Fear is expressed as an interruption, a shock in which the flow of time is suspended and teres nothing left, just the certainty that an irregular and definitive feeling of terror makes life seem unliveable. Or sometimes the fear curls up into itself and then I think that a probable life exists. Beneath the clear clouds which can be glimpsed from the block of flats, I note that something that is beneficient stretches through my arm and moves it with a specific harmony. I think that everything could go backwards and in that return I would emerge whole in the middle of a place that I am unable to define.
I feel my saliva is sweeter and more tolerable because the inner space of my mouth does not torment me nor do I feel invaded by the sensation of disgust at the inner moistness in which my teeth, my molars and my tongue are contained.
24 Spanish original: ‘Cuando me encuentro en algún sitio de las redes con el Lucho, comprendo que ya no queda ni siquiera un milímetro de salvación para nosotros, entiendo como se estrechan los espacios porque no tenemos que encontrarnos, no tenemos. El miedo se expresa como una interrupción, un sobresalto en donde se suspende el curso del tiempo y no queda nada, sola la certeza que un sentimiento de terror irregular y definitivo hace que la vida parezca invivible. O el miedo algunas veces se repliega y entonces pienso que existe una vida probable. Bajo las nubes despejadas que se divisan desde el bloque, noto que algo benéfico se extiende por mi brazo y lo mueve con una determinada armonía. Pienso que todo podría retroceder y en ese giro yo emergería íntegra en medio de un lugar que no alcanzo a definir. Siento mi saliva más dulce y tolerable porque el espacio interior de mi boca no me atormenta ni me invade la sensación de asco ante la humedad interna en que se contienen mis dientes, mis muelas y mi lengua’; Fuerzas especiales, pp. 88–89.Here we can see that the protagonist via her entry into the virtual world of the internet allows for a deeper understanding of the body that overcomes the sensation of disgust caused by her awareness of her internal bodily reality, that is, her ‘inner moistness’. It is at this point that the internet transcends its expected role of alienation of the human body, and overcomes the experience of bodily self-disgust. As a result of the overlay of the sensations caused by punishment enacted by the harsh political regime with the sensations caused by the internet, the characters in the novel experience an osmotic fusion between the ‘fuerzas especiales’ of the ‘pacos’ and the ‘tiras’ on the one hand and the ‘special forces’ of virtual reality on the other. The overlap between the two realities becomes fused and confused. The female protagonist is unable to measure time and she is overwhelmed by an experience of fear. As a result her body becomes desensitized, objectified and, indeed, abjectified. This abjectification of her body becomes an allegory of the abjectification of Chile’s body politic.
It is precisely at this point that the experience of fear becomes overwhelming and leads to the self-degradation of prostitution:
My fear is something else, it’s not clean nor is it less redeemable, it’s something else, something else, it’s as if the police had invaded all the facades and their see-through shields had got right into my mouth. As if the Police Special Unit were running directly at me and were throwing all at the same time tear gas bombs which blinded me. As if one of the engagement troops, an enormous policeman, shot a big rubber bullet at my eye. But now, at precisely this time, in the cubicle that is my one, I’m pulling down my knickers, as if I was a tireless ant. I’m pulling them down without fear. A stupid fear. Fear of what I don’t know.
25 Spanish original: ‘Mi miedo es otro, no es pulcro ni menos redimible, es otro, otro, es como si la policía hubiera atravesado todas las fachadas y sus escudos transparentes se me hubieran metido adentro de la boca. Como si las fuerzas especiales de la policía corrieran directas hacia mí y me lanzaran de manera sincrónica mil bombas de gas lacrimógeno que me cegaran. Como si uno de los cuadros de choque, un policía inmenso, me disparara un balín de goma en el ojo. Pero ahora, en este preciso minuto, en el cubículo que me corresponde, me bajo los calzones como si fuera una hormiga infatigable. Me los bajo sin miedo. Un miedo imbécil. No sé a qué’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 90.Police brutality, which reduces the human body to its abject other, breaks down human culture, and leads to a causeless fear, a fear without cause or origin, which – as a knee-jerk reaction – causes the protagonist to drop her knickers. As the novel reveals police brutality – particularly when directed at the human body – leads to an unstoppable chain reaction, one in which external physical violence is internalized within the human body, leading to self-degradation, self-adjectification, self-exposure, a reaction that is automatic because the subject no longer knows or understands what she is afraid of, but simply that she experiences a fear without cause or origin. Violence leads to the symptom of fear which has no cause. She does not know what she is afraid of, but she still pulls her knickers down.
In this Brave New World the worlds of dream, of virtual reality and the world of everyday life become osmotically fused. The confirmation of the structure of the malevolence of the State is provided in one of the dreams that Omar has, which he tells the protagonist about, one in which the State uses an enormous rat to destroy the blocks:
He says that in his dream a rat was stopping in the middle of the street and that the police recognised it as one of their own. The rat was intoxicated but it was still able to smell the four-walled environment. He says that in the dream he was thinking about me and trying to protect me from the waves that were emanating from the rat. He says that it was a technological rat and it formed part of a new hunting experience, and that it was there in order to transmit a type of massive infection that would liquidate the blocks of flats. He says that after the rat there appeared a digital projection in a Compact Disk plagued with unintelligible news reports that were transmitted in a Nordic language. He says that in the rapid displacement of the images it was possible to make out the photos relating to our registration, but amidst the catastrophic bodily tragedy in which we found ourselves we were barely able to recognise ourselves.
26 Spanish original: ‘Dice que en el sueño una rata se detenía en medio de la calle y que la policía la reconocía como unos de los suyos. La rata estaba intoxicada pero aun así era capaz de oler el entorno cuadriculado. Dice que en el sueño pensaba en mí y trataba de protegerme de las oleadas que emanaban de la rata. Dice que era una rata tecnológica y formaba parte de una nueva experiencia de caza, que estaba allí para transmitir una forma de infección masiva que liquidaría a los bloques. Dice que después de la rata aparecía una proyección digital en un compacto plagado de noticias ininteligibles que eran emitidas en una lengua nórdica. Dice que en el veloz desplazamiento de las imágenes era posible reconocer las fotos de nuestro fichaje, pero que en medio de la catastrófica situación corporal en la que nos encontrábamos apenas conseguíamos reconocernos’; Fuerzas especiales, p. 96.Here we have in a nutshell all of the components of the killing machine used by the State to destroy the communities that live in the blocks of flats. The killing machine is like a huge technological rat that uses a massive infection to destroy the sink estates. Its technology is based on a compact disk containing unintelligible news in a Nordic language. The use of this news source combined with infection spread by the rat, both of which have been corrupted by a virus, led to a ‘catastrophic bodily tragedy’ in which the people in the tower blocks no longer even recognize themselves. The important point here is that the destruction of the population by the Chilean State needed to fuse two different strategies – physical as well as mental annihilation – in order to achieve its aim. As we have seen, the major part of the oppression visited on the subaltern classes as depicted in Fuerzas especiales is experienced via the unnamed female protagonist’s body as she experiences forced prostitution in the cyber café – VAW and GBV are revealed to be the central focus of the State’s oppression.
The deliberation obfuscation of the people caused by State oppression in Fuerzas especiales reaches its climax in the final pages of the novel when we are provided – via the protagonist’s focalization – of two mutually contradictory explanations of what happened to her father. She does not know whether her father was arrested and taken away to be executed by the police, which is the story provided by the inhabitants of the fourth floor of the block, or whether he eloped with ‘la Guatona’, as suggested by Lucho in the cyber café. This uncertainty is never cleared up and it remains the main unresolved enigma of the novel. As we can see, Eltit’s Fuerzas especiales expresses a disorientating and terrifying vision of reality which, though rooted in the story of a sink estate of Santiago in the 1980s, is multi-layered and – in its visceral depiction of a disproportionate military-type lockdown combined with the irrational fear of the invisibility of State power – suggests that the true barometer of that oppression is the body of a young female prostitute who epitomizes the sinister strategies used by the State to commit VAW.