T

he dry sickle of the bell rocks in its casement in the street. The cemetery’s black wings and mottled marbled silhouettes receive Miss Silvia’s coffin through their lowering gate. That lady will never come out again. Dresses, slips, tie pins, buckles, hats, ribbons, silks, and shrouds from a bygone century pass like ghosts across the pages of Tiene la noche un árbol, the 1954 collection of Mexican gothic stories by Guadalupe Dueñas of Jalisco, Mexico, a girl gone spinster in the eyes of her society, whose austere tales of terror and death seem at first to stand in contrast to the pragmatic, jolly persona she would exude in interviews and speeches in the 1960s. Yet why should humor and death be strange bedfellows? Guadalupe Dueñas might reply that they always go hand in hand.

It seems appropriate to begin with Dueñas’ diction, ornate and precise, fully a product of the educated caste of early 20th century Mexico, of her private Catholic schooling and classes at Mexico’s finest Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM). You will catch Dueñas describing the orange tree, the cypress, the trellis and wellhead in the courtyard, and inside the gated house the moderate opulence pertaining to a mid-century upper class Mexican household: the rooms, passageways, stairs, canopied beds, crucifixes and mirrors of a small princess’s secret castle. Everything, but especially the flora and fauna, the stories devoted to spiders and fleas, seems to be the product of lonely hours and years shut into gardens, into empty spaces in large houses.

The stories themselves could easily be described as cousins to those of Shirley Jackson, the North American horror writer. They are tales of loneliness, madness and death. And as in Jackson’s work, there is a strong transgressive undercurrent that runs against abuse of power from the patriarchy, the gender inequality and social prejudice that always hemmed Dueñas in. Even in protest, in the story ‘I.Q. Test’, after her first-person character has dolled herself up to apply for a serious position in a bank, the experience of the woman applicant is reduced to that of a patient in a madhouse, as she is subjected to a barrage of humiliating psychological tests, and finally, when her application is successful, placed behind a barred window where a lineup of men attempt one by one to flirt with her.

And yet Dueñas was a staunch Catholic, a true believer by her own account, and as eldest of fourteen children a traditional mother figure in many ways.

She did not do hallucinogenic mushrooms, she said, but loved a good sherry.

Dueñas’ diction and delivery provide a perfect backdrop for her relentlessly satiric tone: the little bald man is surprised by a woman’s alacrity (‘I.Q. Test’), her pet chimp has decided to leave her (‘My Chimpanzee’), the line of people waiting for stamps is a procession to the confessional, the postmaster a deaf octogenarian judge (‘The Post Office’), and again and again we are reminded drily of each human being’s final doom, while exterior characters are worrying about day-to-day minutiae. ‘But one day, the day that always comes,’ she writes in ‘The Dying Man’ (Dueñas 33, emphasis mine), and we know which day she means.

Dueñas’ tone is sardonic, skeptical in the extreme, humorous but never light. ‘[The man] asked me who I thought was the most famous Mexican who had ever lived. Naturally I told him Our Lord Jesus Christ! Maybe he was Jewish, he got disgusted and changed the subject’ (from ‘I.Q. Test’, Dueñas 17). The story ‘Me Talking Like a Cow’, which is also a commentary on her reception by society, begins with the line, ‘If I had been born a cow I would have been content’ (Dueñas 70).

She fills her stories with ferns and vines, willow trees, wood floors, skylights, mosses, and the curse of the lonely child that plays in the patio: splinters and nails. Dead bodies are hurled into patio wells. There is the abusive Aunt Carlota, the man in the ruby shirt and dancing shoes who may have murdered Miss Silvia, or loved her to death, and the shoeshine man with hands like iguana bellies who reeks of horse piss, whose hands no one would want them to touch, ‘and yet this thing talks’ (‘The Rats’, Dueñas 78). With just the hint of the supernatural, which Dueñas never deigns to explain, her words open up worlds.

Pita Dueñas, as she was known to her contemporaries, came from a bit of a batty family. Her words, not mine: ‘una familia chiflada’ (Espejo 5). Her father would hunt cats, trapping or shooting them with a musket that had belonged to the Emperor Maximiliano, boil them in large cauldrons in their kitchen, and eat them. Pita was born second, after the unfortunate death of her three-day-old sister Mariquita. The story goes that Pita’s father, after sitting for most of a day next to the dead baby’s crib, head bowed in silence, brined the body in a large glass chile jar and placed the dead baby on the sideboard. Mariquita spent most of Pita’s childhood in different nooks and crannies in the family’s different residences, ‘usually on top of the wardrobe,’ but also everywhere else apparently except in the parlor, because what would guests think? Pita referred to her sister in a 1967 speech as ‘Mariquita la del bote—Mariquita, the one in the jar’ (Mortiz 60), presumably to belly laughs from the audience, and the mummified sibling received several pages in Tiene la noche un árbol called ‘Mariquita’s Story’.

¡Una familia chiflada! is a large chunk of the iceberg, one must suppose. Guadalupe Dueñas’ father Miguel Dueñas Padilla was a fallen priest from an artistocratic background who had given up his vows upon meeting Guadalupe’s fifteen-year-old mother, Guadalupe de la Madrid Garcia, first cousin to former Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid. He placed the minor into a school until she came of age, and then they married. The father was relentless with his Catholicism, while the mother was essentially secular. The newleyweds moved to Guadalajara, away from both extended families, however, and Dueñas later said that she ‘didn’t know anybody’ as a child, so that when she finally got out into society, though apparently not as a quinceñera or willing candidate for advances from eligible men, she felt she had no part either in the Church or the world.

Again, her father Miguel did not fall far from his priestly ways, and the opulent Catholicism of old Mexico breathes and rustles and fumes in Dueñas’ writings. Miguel would wake the children up for mass at six am with the words ‘Jesus lives!’, and young Pita would mutter, ‘I hope he dies!’

‘[My father] woke me up, I was cold, and we had to go to church for mass  . . . All this upset me’ (Carrizales 1–3).

But she spent her youth interned in Teresita Catholic schools surrounded by nuns and rosaries, votive candles and wafting incense, and would fantasize about one day becoming a saint. Tiene la noche un árbol is full of visions of the chapels, votive nooks, cemeteries and of course the religious fervor and hypocrisy of the day.

There is also a duality of perspective in many of Dueñas’ stories that is at first confusing, and reflects the author’s own belonging ‘neither to this sphere nor to the other’ (cf. Carrizales), as the reader is thrust from one highly subjective viewpoint to another. In ‘At the Shadow’s Touch’ the story begins with the protagonist Raquel snapping awake in a sumptuous bed, but almost immediately we are with her on a train, and then at the doorstoop of the Spinsters Moncada, then listening to the man on the train again, and then inside the house (Dueñas 36 ff.), as though being shuttered between scenes of a film, which perhaps foreshadows Dueñas’ later success as a screenwriter. The story ‘Judit’ (Dueñas 83 ff.) shifts dizzyingly between the inner monologues of the star-crossed lovers Ricardo and Judit.

Dueñas also uses frequent parentheticals within direct speech to represent interjections of dialogue or thought. In the following, between the student Rosita, who shows up at writing school with mirrors, seashells, and a little bag of sand which she arranges on her desk, and wants to be a mermaid, and her frustrated instructor Mr. Nebrija, Rosita delivers her farewell monologue while Mr. Nebrija’s exclamations remain in parentheses:

‘. . . but there are other things of which even your imagination is unaware. (I do not want speeches, shut up!) Mr. Nebrija, to be a mermaid, a real mermaid, not just in the flesh, is a privilege of women who, like me, are mermaids by choice (what stupidity). You do not understand, but you too, hungry for knowledge, have dedicated to this, excuse me for saying, the most succulent juices of your spirit. (Good, that’s enough!)

—‘Backwards’ (Dueñas 50)

Some critics have taken the bestiary approach to dissecting Duenas’ diminutive corpus, by enumerating her creatures: the tortured toad, leafcutter ants like a stream of blood, hummingbirds or ‘rose boozers’, the pigeons, turtledoves, rats, fleas, the spider, the cow, the Saint Bernard. Were these the author’s only friends, living as she did apart, growing up with rich, absentee parents, eschewing love after just one failed attempt, suspicious of the Church, in which she used to sit and read except during the Sacrament, yet having religion, feeling it inside her? The theme of fauna, especially malevolent, as in ‘The Spider’, or otherwise subjected to human malevolence, as in ‘The Toad’ and ‘The Fleas’, is insistent in Dueñas’ first collection. Even the fool in ‘The Dying Man’, when compared to a leech, squirms on the floor in an epileptic fit as though having been sprinkled with salt in the garden by a naughty, squatting child.

Another element of Dueñas’ stories that has been lavished with praise is her dialogue, lauded as curt and to the point, although bear with me as I translate the following exclamation from the story ‘Judit’, by the buffoonish character Ricardo who must have the recalcitrant Judit:

‘It has been our fault . . . For love there are no filters, nor talismans, nor formulas. I tell you that my madness comes from having seen you and longed to taste your lips. For I wish to commit treason for you, humiliate myself for you, die for you . . . With what straightforward stubbornness have I prepared these knots, and with what subtle pains have I lured the prey, hunted in another man’s grounds, and my catch I shall keep, I shall not give her up.’

—‘Judit’ (Dueñas, 87)

And so on, and on, until I can not help but think about Dueña’s later work as scriptwriter on Mexican soap operas, several of which she adapted from her own works, beginning with The Mummies of Guanajuato (produced and directed by Ernesto Alonso, Telesistema Mexicano, 1962; based on ‘Guía en la muerte’, Dueñas 62ff.) and continuing with a sincere emotional treatment of Emperor Maximiliano, who was fusilladed by the liberator Benito Juárez during Mexican Independence, and the Emperor’s wife Carlota (Maximiliano y Carlota, also produced and directed by Ernesto Alonso, Telesistema Mexicano, 1965). We also find represented in Dueñas the antiquated, austere purpure of the old and moneyed society of her time, whether their words act as foil to her lighter, more modern characters, or are simply a representation of the culture she was immersed in from childhood.

I am no formal student of Latin American literature, but I like it, so I was astonished to discover that Dueñas is still not available in English, except for individual stories around the web, translated by enthusiastic readers. The best way to start to get at Guadalupe Dueñas, how she really ticked, is of course to read her work. The translations of two of her stories that accompany this brief essay are from Tiene la noche un árbol, available in Spanish from Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico City, both to my knowledge unavailable to readers of English at the time of their translation, July 2024.

En la sangre siempre es de noche.—In the blood it is always night.

—Guadalupe Dueñas, from ‘Clinical case’ (Dueñas 89)