La travesia.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Review of novel by Luisa Valenzuela - Book Review

by Luisa Valenzuela. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2002.

In La travesia, Luisa Valenzuela returns to many of the subjects that have obsessed her since the beginning of her novelistic career: her native Argentina and the terror that engulfed it from 1976 until 1983; people's fascination with cruelty and torture; sexuality in all its unconventional and problematic manifestations; the dark zones of contemporary reality--illegal drugs, disease, pornography, insanity--and the relationship between these and art.

The novel's protagonist, who remains anonymous until almost the end, is an Argentine anthropologist living in New York. As a student during the horrific years of the military dictatorship, she becomes enamored of Facundo Zuberbuhler, a perverse, domineering, manipulative professor much admired by her mother. Facundo brings to mind the violence and barbarism associated with the nineteenth-century caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga, brought to life by the Argentine writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-88), and Valenzuela's character lives up to his namesake's legacy.

Zuberbuhler marries his student, urging her first to get some sexual experience. (He's not willing to initiate her himself because he can't stand blood, especially uterine blood.) After a short time, he tires of the relationship and, in order to get rid of her, offers her unlimited funds to travel. The only condition is that she send him letters from faraway places recounting her sexual experiences. Instead of engaging in indiscriminate sex, she makes up outlandish encounters, which she describes in highly graphic terms. In vengeance, she fills some of her descriptions with profusions of menstrual blood.

Eventually, the protagonist settles in New York, where she meets a host of off-beat characters, among them Ava Taurel, a dominatrix who appeared in Valezuela's Novela negra con argentinos. Through Ava and her activities, Valenzuela explores the relationship between sexual pleasure and pain, and the perverse appeal of torture. Valenzuela also takes a jab at American avant-garde faddishness when she depicts Ava going around to different universities lecturing on her craft. Among the protagonist's other friends are artists, criminals, gays, heroin addicts, and inmates from a nearby insane asylum, many of whom are highly creative people. Among her acquaintances is the novelist Erica Jong, whose interest in unconventional sex has led her to Ava. Cameo appearances of real people such as Jong...