Sympathizing with Monsters: “Strange Things” in Luisa Valenzuela

Abstract

Luisa Valenzuela’s second collection of stories, Aquí pasan cosas raras, is set in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was published in 1975. Three stories–”Los mejor calzados,” “Los zombis,” and “Los Mascapios”—name in their titles groups of people whose grotesque characteristics make them metaphorical monsters; the title characters suffer both poverty and repression/domination in this “strange” moment of Argentine history and culture. These three tales in particular represent societal demonization of the poor and the desperate as monsters, when they were merely hungry, despairing citizens of the city. I analyze the black humor and metaphors of these stories in order to recover the underlying tales of terror. In all three the police are mentioned as those who enforce, force, or control, but the police are not the focus of the stories. Mendicants, the starving, and the underprivileged are primary; first represented as monsters, they are progressively transformed into characters readable as victims, for whom being monstrous and horrible is a label imposed from the outside and not an essential identity. In these stories, the narrators are the vulnerable poor and the narratees are the intelligentsia and the middle class who can discern realism and truths from the jokes and grotesqueries.