In a recently published book of essays, El caimán ante el espejo (‘The Alligator in Front of the Mirror’, Ediciones Universal, Miami, Florida, 1993), Uva de Aragón Clavijo advances a polemical thesis: the political violence that has bloodied the history of Latin America, and of Cuba in particular, is an expression and a product of machismo, of ‘homocentric culture’ that is deeply rooted throughout the continent.
‘Militarism and caudillismo, the endemic evils of our America,’ she argues, ‘have their origins, in our opinion, in the cult of virility.’ And on another page of her disturbing formulation, she sums up three and a half decades of Castro’s revolution with an allegory that the film censors in my youth would have classified as unsuitable for young ladies. ‘One man penetrated a female people, which opened its legs to receive him. After the first orgasm of pleasure was over, the genuine thrusts in search of liberation were to no avail. The dead weight of masculine strength still captivates some, kills others and controls the majority.’
On the evening of the book launch at Florida International University, which I attended, Carlos Alberto Montaner, who presented the book with his usual humour and flair, concluded that Uva’s formula for peace and tolerance in our people was that the culture of Latin America should be ‘gelded’. He told me later that when he said this, a shudder ran through the auditorium and that, to a man, all of us males pressed our knees together. This is an unfounded fear in the case of Uva de Aragón Clavijo, a mild-mannered friend whom I know would be incapable of inflicting such surgery even on a chicken or a rabbit. Her extremism has never moved beyond the intellectual sphere. In politics, she is a moderate within the Cuban exile community, an activist in the Democratic Platform which proposes a dialogue with the regime in order to achieve the island’s peaceful transition to democracy. And all the other essays in El caimán ante el espejo bristle with exhortations that the hatreds of Cain should disappear and that Cubans outside and inside the regime should at last coexist and collaborate.
But while under the blazing Florida sun in the middle of last year, Uva was elaborating her theoretical accusations against what some feminists have baptized the phallocracy, another ‘Hispanic’ in the United States (here all Latin Americans are known by this name), Lorena Gallo – a young Ecuadorian woman educated in Venezuela — proceeded, without metaphors of any kind and in the crudest way, to decapitate her husband sexually. This ex-marine infantryman, ex-taxi driver, exconstruction worker and current bouncer was baptized with a name that seems a programme for life: John Wayne Bobbitt.
The story has travelled the world and here, in the past few weeks, no one has talked about anything else — in the newspapers, on the radio, on the television, everywhere, as if a phantom more terrifying than that of the celebrated Manifesto was loose in this society: the castration complex. (I am referring, of course, to the phantom of the Manifesto of Karl Marx, not to that of Valerie Solanas, the author some three decades ago, as some of you will remember, of a Manifesto for Cutting up Men, which the current situation has revived and made fashionable. In the mid sixties, she fired three shots at Andy Warhol, not for the terrible paintings that he was perpetrating, but for the generic crime of being a man.)
I summarize the facts with the objectivity of which I am capable, and which my newspaper sources permit. In the early morning of 23 June last year, at a place in Virginia, John Wayne Bobbitt returned home drunk and forced his wife to make love. Married for four years, the couple got on quite badly, they had had their separations and reconciliations and many witnesses agreed that the husband often illtreated Lorena, a manicurist in a beauty salon. On several occasions her boss and her female workmates saw the marks of conjugal violence on the face and body of the Ecuadorian.
Since there are no witnesses, it is more difficult to prove the ‘Hispanic’s’ accusations that her husband raped her continually and he, of course, denies it, accusing his wife, in turn, of being bad-tempered and a nymphomaniac. In any case, on the fateful night of 23 June, after the sexual act, John Wayne Bobbitt fell asleep. Humiliated and in pain, Lorena stayed awake for a long time and then got up for a glass of water. In the kitchen, she caught sight of a household knife, twelve inches long, with a red handle, which she picked up in a state of almost hypnotic confusion. She went back to the bedroom, lifted up the sheets and, with a skilful butcher’s slice, she rid her husband of the emblem of his virility. Then she fled.
While the bar bouncer had an inconsiderate and bloody awakening, Lorena was fleeing through the dark, deserted streets of Manassas, at the wheel of the family car. A mile and a half from her home, she discovered that she still had, in one hand, the weapon and, in the other, the body of the crime. She put on the brakes and threw out of the car window, into some brambles, the kitchen knife and what had been the penis of John Wayne Bobbitt. Both were picked up some hours later by the police and the latter was reinstated on to the body of Lorena’s husband in a nine-hour operation which, it seems, has been a major achievement of medical science. According to all accounts, and in particular that of the interested party — I have heard him state this on television — the most photographed and most publicized penis in the history of the United States is beginning to function again, although still weakly and not, I imagine, with the same excesses of old.
But all these are negligible, almost superfluous, details compared with the corollary. The real show came later. Initially, when the story first hit the headlines, it seemed that the hero would be John Wayne Bobbitt, a long-standing resident who had been decapitated and mended and the villain would be Lorena Gallo, the perpetrator of the offence and on top of this, a very recent immigrant and an ‘Hispanic’. This seemed to be the case when the court of Manassas acquitted John of the alleged crime of rape on 23 June and he made a successful appearance on the popular Howard Stern programme, whose viewers donated more than $200,000 for his defence costs.
But then came the mobilization and the formidable counter-attack of feminist movements which, in a few weeks, gave the situation a totally different slant and turned Lorena Gallo into a Joan of Arc of the struggle for women’s emancipation, the defender of women’s rights which, from time immemorial, had been trampled underfoot by the unjust, patriarchal society. They transformed John Wayne Bobbitt into a malign and deservedly punished incarnation of this system, into the embodiment and prototype of that abusive, phallocratic beast which, from the dawn of time, has discriminated against, harassed, depowered and sodomized women, physically, morally, psychologically and culturally, preventing them from fulfilling their potential and taking charge of their lives in as complete a way as possible.
Psychiatry was the leading edge of the attack in the court room
where Lorena Bobbitt was on trial. One of the three women doctors called by the defence declared, in the most memorable of all the technical depositions given to the jury, that the accessory that Lorena had cut off was not at all what it appeared to be — that is to say, a cylindrical protuberance made up of flesh and veins and traces of sperm. What was it then? An abstract coefficient, a symbolic structure, an emblematic icon of domestic horror, of servile subjection, of the blows that Lorena received, of the insults that tormented her ears, of the ignominious panting that assailed her in her husband’s drunken nights. With an impeccable sense of theatrical effect, she concluded: ‘For Lorena Bobbitt the choice was simple: the penis or life. And what is more important? The penis of a man or the life of a woman?’
Alongside this intellectual and scientific offensive, in the streets the activists were growing in strength. Many organizations representing ‘Hispanic’ communities in the United States had arrived to swell the ranks of the feminist movements in defence of Lorena Bobbitt, which proclaimed that what was really at stake in the Court of Manassas was not an alleged sexual crime, but an ethnic and cultural crime, a typical case of abuse and discrimination against the underprivileged Latin American immigrant by the domineering, racist and exploitative Anglo-Saxon. Would the court legitimate, by its sentencing of the symbolic Lorena, the miserable condition of neglect and ill-treatment suffered by citizens of ‘Hispanic’ origins in the United States? And in Ecuador a female crowd caught up in the debate threatened to ‘castrate one hundred gringos’ if Lorena was sentenced to just one day in prison.
In one of his lucid essays, ‘Killing an Elephant’, Orwell recounts how in his days as a policeman of the British Empire in Burma, he had to shoot a poor pachyderm who had bolted in the streets of the city because the pressure of the crowd that surrounded him did not allow him to act in any other way. This must have been the psychological state of the poor jurors — seven women and five men — of the Court of Manassas, on whose shoulders fell the responsibility of judging the wan Lorena Gallo, whom they naturally let off, declaring that her actions were dictated by irresistible, irrational forces. I am not saying that, judged impartially, they should have found against her. What I am saying is that in these conditions of real national — and even international — hysteria, in which they had to act as judges, it was not possible for them to display impartiality or lucidity or perhaps even a
minimum of rationality. The trial was not a trial; it was a political showpiece in which almost all the tremendous contradictions and opposing forces which keep the present North American society in a state of permanent crisis, played their parts. Is this a symptom of health, of constant renewal, or of anarchy and decadence? Until recently, I thought it was the former. Now, along with Saul Bellow, I think that it could perhaps be the latter.
And I think of the depressing sequel to this story which, aside from its picturesque and grotesque aspects, reveals something alarming in what we could call the state of culture in this country. What am I referring to? The fact that both John Wayne Bobbitt and Lorena Gallo seem to have their futures assured thanks to the tragic events in which they were the main protagonists. I read this morning in the New York Times that in simultaneous press conferences, the publicity agents of both partners have announced that John has received several film and television offers which, at the moment, he is considering; also contacts for radio and publishing, and that he has already planned a succulent series of appearances on the small screen throughout the year. With regard to Lorena, her agent has registered to date one hundred and five paid audiovisual appearances as well as three offers from Hollywood to sell her story to the cinema. And various publishing houses have sent her tempting contracts to write her autobiography.
I do not want to draw any conclusions because they are all so blindingly, painfully obvious. I will just keep on giving my classes twice a week, in the ice and snow of Washington, looking at the ceiling so that none of my female students can accuse me of ‘visual harassment’, my loins firmly girded against the cold and, well, just in case.
Washington DC, December 1993