Let me share three stories.
The first tells of a terrible drought that devastates the countryside in a South American country. The peasants struggle to survive in the face of bad harvests, dying animals, and a host of other obstacles that pervade their apparently cursed lives. Rumors soon circulate about strange activities on the estate of a wealthy landowner, whose daughter and her nursemaid are suspected of practicing witchcraft, and thus bringing this endless blight upon the region. The landowner is troubled by these tales, and one evening he storms into his daughter's bedroom, followed by his nine sons, but what he sees shocks him so deeply that he holds up his cloak to block anyone else from witnessing the troubling scene. The father hands over the nursemaid to the sons, who kill the dangerous witch, and tie her body to a log, sending it down the river to the sea, where it will disappear into the deep waters and remove the curse from countryside. The landowner's daughter is sent to a convent, where her dark past and unholy connection to infernal powers will be hidden from view and eventually forgotten.
In the second version of the story, the landowner's daughter is not a witch, but a saint. The father travels from his estate south of the Maule River to deliver the pious young lady to the convent of the Capuchin cloistered nuns, and he donates a large sum of money to establish a chaplaincy in his family’s honor. The girl dies at a young age in an aura of sanctity, but before her death she astonishes the nuns by anticipating an earthquake that destroys every other building in the area. The convent is saved by landowner's daughter, who kneels down amidst the tremors, stretches out her hands and offers a prayerful entreaty to the divine presence. The nunnery is saved from ruin, even as so many others are levelled to the ground, and word soon begins to spread throughout the country, even to the capital, that the daughter of one of the nation's wealthiest families possess an awe-inspiring sanctity and has been blessed by the Lord with miraculous powers.
In the third version of the story, the young lady is neither witch nor saint. She is simply a guileless landowner's daughter who falls in love with a country boy. She enters into a clandestine romance with the young man, assisted by her nursemaid, who is incapable of refusing any of the girl’s wishes, no matter how sinful or dangerous. In this telling of the tale, the father again storms into his daughter’s room, and blocks the ignoble scene from view with his outspread cloak—but the shocking vision is now the sight of the girl in the agonies of childbirth. In this version, he still sends the young lady to a convent—but merely to avoid scandal. Here she is forced to take the veil and expiate her transgression. Hiding his disgrace behind a mask of piety, the father donates a large sum to establish a chaplaincy, and never tells anyone— including his nine sons—the true story of his daughter's defilement of the family's honor.
Each of these stories is related during the course of José Donoso’s novel The Obscene Bird of Night . And which one is the true story? In the topsy-turvy world presented in these pages, all of them are true. Or perhaps none of them.
Those who apply the standards of strict realism to works of fiction will insist that only one valid sequence of events can exist within the structure of any story. From this perspective, a novel is no different from a work of non-fiction, and must avoid contradiction and incompatible plots at all costs. Yet even staunch realists are familiar with other styles of narrative in which such restrictions do not apply. In the world of myth and folklore, different versions of a story co-exist, each with its own validity and signification. In the modern day, rumor and gossip operate within a similar realm of ambiguity and multiplicity. On closer examination, even non-fiction must embrace paradox and contradiction if it aspires to scrupulosity. No honest historian could, for example, write an account of JFK's assassination without addressing the various conflicting narratives in which that event figures. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to cast doubt on simple, linear interpretations of reality—you simply have to probe beneath the surface and listen to the background noise.
That background noise soon overwhelms Donoso’s novel. Every fact here is provisional, and each succeeding account likely to get swept aside by the next interpretation of events. Even the chief protagonist mutates repeatedly during the course of the book. At some points, we know him as Humberto Peñaloza, an aspiring author who hopes to overcome his obscure origins and gain some renown for his hitherto humble family name. At other points, he is Mudito the deaf-mute, a caretaker at the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnacion, a home for nuns, orphans and retired servants. In other instances, he is a baby, or an old woman. During one interlude in the book, he wears a large papier-mâché head, which makes him look like a giant—a fitting symbol of this whole book, in which masks are inevitably mistaken for the true features they hide.
Peñaloza, in his many guises, serves as narrator for most of the novel. But other first person voices regularly emerge during the course of this stream-of-consciousness—sometimes shifting multiple times within a single paragraph or even a single sentence. Such is the ambiguity of this book that the reader is often forced to puzzle over these disjunctions, unsure whether the narrative voice has changed or the narrator himself. When the point-of-view moves from Mudito to a stray dog, we are always left with the possibility that Mudito has turned into a canine—and, indeed, the metamorphosis of human into animal is a recurring element of the plot.
Peñaloza's life is intertwined at many levels with the Azcoitía family, whose wealth and distinction is the mirror image of his own poverty and obscurity. Don Jerónimo, paterfamilias of this illustrious clan, is left without a male heir, and his wife has abandoned him, focusing her energies on securing the beatification of Inés de Azcoitía, a long dead relative, from the cardinals in Rome. Unable to grant her husband a son, she has decided that the family’s lasting renown can only come from elevating an Azcoitía to the ranks of the venerated and saintly.
But in Donoso's novel, each plot has its own alternative, and in a different, co-existing version of Azcoitía's story, Don Jerónimo does have a son, but he is monstrous and deformed. The family patriarch sends him off to a remote part of the country, where the boy can be raised away from the prying looks of friends and strangers. Here the family heir is surrounded by others equally disfigured, in a confined setting where he will never feel the shame of being an outsider.
Donoso's novel puzzles and provokes by turns. The prose never actually falls into incomprehensibility—the reader can grasp each scene in its particularity; but confusion reigns whenever the different incidents and chronologies are juxtaposed and compared. Nothing fits together here, or stays the same for more than a few pages. Certainly one can complain about the author's effrontery in presenting such a stubbornly fractured narrative, but this provocation is clearly intended. Donoso came of age during an era in which all of South America, but especially his native Chile, was a playground of competing ideologies and interpretations, where reality was not a static set of given facts, but a battleground over which various interests and forces fought, and one person's truth was another's distortion. In The Obscene Bird of Night , Donoso captures this disturbing sense of mutability.
Other works of Latin American magical realism—by authors such as Gabriel García Márquez , Jorge Amado , Miguel Ángel Asturias, Laura Esquivel or fellow Chilean Isabel Allende —may be more fanciful or enchanting, but Donoso prefers to evoke a darker magic. More than these other storytellers, he comprehends the threatening side of the phantasmagorical, the terror and confusion that disorient us when things prove much different from what they seem. Yes, this is an unsettling novel to read, and probably was an unsettling book to write. Long before you finish it, you may be looking for an escape.
In its final pages, this lack of exits takes on physical, even physiological, form. Donoso draws on the folklore figure of the imbunche , a child stolen by witches, who sew up all of the infant's orifices. Humberto Peñaloza, in his final manifestation, becomes the imbunche, and now Mudito is bereft of all senses— mute, deaf, blind, even unable to take in a breath of fresh air. This grotesque turn of events serves as an all too fitting conclusion to a tale that started as a historical novel and now has morphed into a bizarre horror tale. You will be left with many questions, and conflicting interpretations, but on one matter you will be absolutely clear: few authors have gone as far as Donoso in capturing the sense of claustrophobia and turning it into a literary style.