A Narrative Vaivén

A Narrative Vaivén:Lucha libre and the Modern Nation Unready-to-hand in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s La sirvienta y el luchador Tamara L. Mitchell Conferrer of anonymity and mystique, the luchador’s mask is the most sacred of symbols in lucha libre of Mexico and Central America. In “La hora de la máscara protagónica,” Carlos Monsiváis credits the silver mask of El Santo, the sport’s most iconic luchador, with the longevity and vitality of his career: “En la perdurabilidad del Santo, intervienen sus méritos y, de manera notable, las aportaciones de la máscara (no ocultadora sino creadora de su identidad)” (128). Heather Levi discusses how the lucha libre mask grants power to its bearer, and, conversely, how the act of “demasking” results in dishonor and humiliation (115). Consequently, the mask is one of the central motivating objects in a lucha libre performance. In Honduran-Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya’s La sirvienta y el luchador (2011), I show how the lucha libre mask is associationally transposed to the narrative in the form of “el pañuelo”—a handkerchief or bandana. Initially portrayed as an innocuous part of daily life in pre-civil war El Salvador, the bandana gradually shifts associational valence when it is deployed as a face mask during rebel attacks. As civil society gives way to civil war in the narrative, the bandana begins to function like the lucha libre “máscara protagónica,” a sort of motivating piece of equipment that drives the epoch-shifting violence of the narrative. Below, I return to “el pañuelo” in La sirvienta y el luchador, but this brief treatment of its role in the narrative serves to elucidate [End Page 270] the “vaivén” proposed in this study’s title. Inconstancy, a swaying, or an unexpected change: vaivén derives from the Spanish verbs ir and venir and designates the “[m]ovimiento alternativo de un cuerpo que después de recorrer una línea vuelve a describirla en sentido contrario” (“Vaivén”). I draw on this concept to show how La sirvienta is characterized by a formal narrative vaivén that makes visible the shifting societal norms of El Salvador on the brink of civil war. I maintain that this vaivén is indicative of an epoch-changing sociopolitical dynamic: from an ostensibly functioning national community to a complete breakdown in state legitimacy due to extrajudicial violence. The above discussion of the mask also introduces one of the central thematic elements of interest to the present study: the symbolic role of lucha libre in the novel. I analyze the narrative deployment of lucha libre in the text, in which the maid of a wealthy Salvadoran family investigates the disappearance of her young employers while a state police officer and former lucha wrestler abducts and tortures Salvadoran citizens as part of a counterinsurgency campaign. My reading attends to the symbolic role of lucha libre—which is yoked to the Salvadoran state in the text—in order to take up the question of a broken social contract. I examine the breakdown of the sport’s symbolic register in the novel, which parallels a similar collapse in the legitimacy of the Salvadoran state. Lucha libre is a highly allegorical, spectacular sport that culminates—at the end of a match, a series of matches, or across a season—in an outcome that restores the equilibrium of justice. Castellanos Moya’s novel renders visible the artificiality of justice in lucha libre and, in a parallel manner, the growing impossibility of security and justice in El Salvador. This reading leads to the core of my analysis, which is a consideration of how the world presented in the narrative is further indicative of a changing sociopolitical dynamic. World in this context denotes a Heideggerian sense of the term, and I read the novel alongside Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), specifically his theory of the “broken tool.” In this theory, which is treated in depth below, Heidegger gives an account of Dasein’s primordial relationship to a given object—what he calls objects’ readiness-to-hand. When Dasein uses an object as equipment, that is, when Dasein interacts

Latin American Literature Studies · Philosophical and Cultural Analysis · Sports and Physical Education Studies