Los Soles Truncos Rene Marques Pdf Download
Kym Cavrak
Marqués's first staged work was El sol y los Mac-Donald (The Sun and the MacDonald Family, 1950), a tragedy set in the southern United States. His most celebrated work is La carreta (The Oxcart, 1952), about the trials of a family displaced from rural Puerto Rico to the island's capital and then to New York. Another masterwork of intense national and poetic symbolism is Los soles truncos (The Truncated Suns), staged in the First Puerto Rican Theater Festival in 1958. Historical events are featured in La muerte no entrará en palacio (Death Shall not Enter the Palace, 1958) and Mariana o el alba (Mariana or the Dawn, 1965); biblical events in Sacrificio en el Monte Moriah (Sacrifice on Mount Moriah, 1969) and David y Jonatán. Tito y Berenice (1970); and futuristic events in El apartamento (The Apartment, 1965).
1 SPRING Dreaming the Nation: Rene Marqués's Los soles truncos Margarita Vargas [En] la vida pública puertorriqueña actual... el hombre [ha quedado reducido a la] triste figura de ex pater familiae ante el avance agresivo de la mujer en todas las esferas en que él fuera una vez - nostálgico pasado! - dueño y señor. (Marqués Ensayos 171). A review of Marqués's political writings reveals a desire for an independent nation with a centralized government and a man as chief of state. 1 His nostalgia for strong male leaders is evident in his contention that Puerto Rico lost its "last cultural bastion" of male prowess known as machismo to the adoption of a type of Anglo-Saxon matriarchal system in Marqués believed that with machismo - a Creole version of the fusion and adaptation of Spanish honor and Roman pater familiae - it would be possible to combat the collective docility that invaded Puerto Rico in the 1920s. 3 For him Puerto Rico, as a Commonwealth of the United States, was a psychological synthesis of the weak, timid and docile man, 4 and he argued that the docility would not disappear until Puerto Rico obtained its independence. What Marqués longed for was a country that could be defined within the confines of nation, that is, a country with a single pure language, economic self-sufficiency, and a family structure where Man reigned supreme. The language Marqués considered autochthonous to Puerto Rico was that of Spain, his motherland. As Juan G. Gelpí-Pérez points out, Marqués was obsessed with founding a pure discourse that negated and disdained all types of linguistic contamination and barbarisms. 5 For example, he finds that
2 42 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW in Marqués's short stories there are neither guaguas nor grama, but rather autobuses and céspedes ( Desorden 178). The first two are terms Puerto Ricans generally use for buses and grass, whereas the other two conform to a more "standard" Spanish. 6 1 argue that because of its conservative view of reality, Marqués's rigid adherence to the notion of linguistic purity mirrors the characters' loyalty in Los soles truncos (1958) to aristocratic notions of lineage and skewed views of pure blood. Marqués is aware of the importance of language as he shapes his new Puerto Rico for, as Benedict Anderson has shown, "a defining feature of the nation is the standardisation of one unitary language" (McLeod 72). However, Marqués remains blind to the fact that opting for a standard form of Spanish over a more organic development of the language denies Puerto Rico its self-creation and adheres to a colonial mentality that values the foreign and the elite over the indigenous. 7 My reading of Los soles truncos shows that Marqués lays out this hegemonic political ideology through a mistrust of women in leadership positions. This is evident in his depiction of the Burkhart sisters in two different moments of their life: first as the three privileged daughters of a European gentleman farmer, 8 and then as three orphans attempting to hold on to the vestiges of a system no longer in place. These familial moments coincide with Puerto Rico's political status first as a Spanish colony and then as a Commonwealth of the United States, which sets up the Burkhart family as a metaphor for Puerto Rico. 9 During the colonial period the Burkharts represent a semi-ideal version of the family / nation with the male still as head of household, while as a Commonwealth - with the father and mother no longer present - what is depicted is a grotesque, emasculated residue of a family. The monstrosity of this portrait is the effect of a familiar concept of nationhood as a "'virile' institution, a brotherhood of men" (Irwin 13). In Los soles truncos the family's past is presented through the eyes of three women who have an idealized memory of a time when "life was secure." 10 Their memory portrays the Burkharts as an aristocratic family made up of a "Nordic god," his beautiful Andalusian wife, and three daughters properly educated in Europe, in Strasbourg to be more specific. The portrait's backdrop includes sumptuous real estate and family heirlooms suitable to their class. The family unit mirrors a distorted concept of nation in which man still rules, albeit within a colonial system, and with a wife who challenges his decisions. x l While Marqués's politics confirm his advocacy for a patriarchal model of nation, his criticism of the flaws within the lineage system indicates that he objects to the racialized aspects of the social structure. In an essay
4 44 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW rosewood baby grand piano, and a marble console. Surrounded by their family heirlooms and their memories, the women remain trapped in a fairy tale that thwarts their imagination and inhibits any possibility of change. When the three characters first appear on stage they have already lived a full life, and in fact, one of them has just died. The play conforms to the traditional unities of time and place by limiting the main action (Hortensia's death and the funeral arrangements) to the dilapidated mansion on the Calle del Cristo. However, through the use of temporal displacements, 13 the play simultaneously adopts Brecht's concept of epic drama by covering a 70-year historical span. 14 A trinity of two being theologically and mathematically impossible, forces the survivors to give up their mission of defying the pernicious effects of time. Moreover, since the number two is associated with the 'Magna Mater,'who represents life and the whole earth as a holy being, keeping the two sisters alive would go against Marqués's masculinist political project and against the tripartite structure of the play (Cirlot 232). I5 Therefore, the two sisters must set the house on fire and follow Hortensia to the other world. This decision, and Marqués's description of the living room at the end as a "purifying inferno," has allowed critics to read the play as "an allegory of Puerto Rico's collective guilt and expiation after centuries of domination by foreign powers" (McMurray 210; Dauster 110). However, a reading based on Marqués's politics, which equates the family to the nation, reads the sisters' resolution to die as their only option rather than as an act of atonement. No longer able to preserve the house and pay their taxes, the sisters burn themselves, the house, and their remaining belongings to the ground rather than surrender their last piece of property to the government. Inés describes a bleak future for the house in order to convince Emilia that they have but one choice. When Emilia wonders if the new government will take the house and destroy it, Inés responds: Peor, Emilia. Conservarán la casa, profanándola. [...] Reconstruir, dicen ellos. Como si tuvieran el poder del tiempo. Jugarán al pasado disfrazando de vejez nueva la casa en ruinas de los soles truncos. [...] Y el tiempo de ellos entrará en la casa, y la casa se llenará de voces extrañas que ahogarán las palabras nuestras, todas las palabras de nuestras vidas. Y sobre el dolor de Hortensia, y el tuyo, Emilia, y el mío, se elevará la risa de los turistas, la digestión ruidosa de
7 SPRING their father's death: "Aquí estábamos las tres, llorando. Reunidas como siempre en la gran sala. Las tres puertas de dos hojas cerradas como siempre sobre el balcón. Los tres soles truncos oponiendo al sol sus colores: azul, amarillo, rojo" (47-48). In her reading of the short story on which the play is based, Esther Rodriguez Ramos assigns a specific primary color to each of the sisters. 24 While each color marks their individuality, their contiguity conflates the three of them into a semi-circle, which, according to Cirlot is made up of three points that comprise birth, zenith, and descent. Moreover, the number three symbolizes spiritual synthesis and represents the solution of the conflict posed by dualism (232), which Marqués clearly wants to avoid. Rodriguez sets up the following correlations: Hortensia, a quien por su belleza hubiera podido corresponder el rojo evocador de la sensualidad, se asocia más bien con el amarillo, el color al que ella se adelanta con su muerte. A Emilia... corresponde el azul o el tiempo del ensueño. A Inés, la hermana fea... corresponde el rojo del fuego que las consume a las tres y en el que, casi postumamente, adquiere su máximo enaltecimiento. (73) 25 Some critics have interpreted the fanlights as "setting suns," as a symbol of the end of the lives of the three sisters, which coincides with Cirlot's interpretation of the a semi-circle. For Howard M. Fraser "the lights acquire symbolic meaning during the play as the eldest of the sisters prophetically interprets them as setting suns. This metaphor establishes a connection between the fanlights and the sisters whose lives, in decline, move inexorably toward a final descent" (7). Arce de Vázquez asserts: "El semicírculo con su abanico de cristales evoca la figura del sol poniente cuando se hunde en el horizonte y lanza sus últimos rayos luminosos. Representa a las tres hermanas en su frustración amorosa, vejez y ruina, decididas a hundirse voluntariamente en el mar de la muerte" (66). Gil concurs that the sun's appearance and disappearance is always represented as a semicircle and that the sun in Los soles truncos is the setting sun. 26 However, Gil reads this setting sun primarily as a reference to the end of a social class, that is, of the European aristocracy that ruled in Puerto Rico during Spanish colonial times. 27 For me, the relevance of the sun is also tied to the gender tensions in the play and specifically the gender roles the three sisters perform. Even though the play does not present many opportunities to see male / female interactions, the women's identities remain defined in relation to the two males in their past: papá Burkhart and the alférez.
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