47 pages • 1 hour read
Rosaura A Las Diez
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Themes
The Faulty Nature of Presuppositions
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of domestic violence, sex trafficking, anti-gay bias, and ableism.
Though the characters in Rosaura a las diez have highly varied traits and perspectives, they all share a tendency to make assumptions based on very little information. These assumptions are very frequently, if not always, false, and Denevi is therefore highly concerned with highlighting presumptiveness as a dangerous quality.
This dynamic within the book is summarized by Eufrasia Morales’s pithy claim at the end of her testimony, “The rock cast aside by the architects may well prove to be the keystone of the building” (182), in reference to the maid, Elsa, who has been presumed irrelevant by Mrs. Milagros. Throughout her testimony, Mrs. Milagros is openly dismissive of Elsa and speaks of her in derogatory, ableist terms. This tone is exemplified in Elsa’s introduction: “I hired a maid (or more accurately, a mule, since she’s a little slow, poor thing, and lame and half deaf as well)” (20). Presuming Elsa to be wholly incapable because of her disabilities, Mrs. Milagros barely mentions her, even when she is present for key events in the story. If only Mrs. Milagros’s testimony was provided, one might easily forget that Elsa even existed as a character since Mrs. Milagros herself seems to forget this. In a crucial conversation with Rosa, Mrs. Milagros does not consider that Elsa might be eavesdropping and instead unthinkingly abuses her: “Seeing that the maid had remained right there, standing before Rosa, watching her as if she were some kind of rare bug,” she says, “I released my other tensions by getting angry at the poor wretch” (90). These presumptions are both crucially misguided, blinding Mrs. Milagros to essential facts of the story, and malicious.
In contrast, Eufrasia’s account of Elsa is much more even-handed, confirming the error and malice of Mrs. Milagros’s testimony. Though she speaks of Elsa in ableist terms—“She comes and goes through the house like a blob, like a robot, like a big animal guided only by the instinct or habit of flicking a feather duster over the furniture and serving the meals” (176)—Eufrasia’s ableism does not equate to an underestimation of Elsa’s capabilities and importance. By not making any of the faulty presuppositions that Mrs. Milagros does, Eufrasia allows herself to observe Elsa closely and notice her sneaking out of Rosa’s room with the stolen letter. In the end, this observation leads the police inspector to the solution of the case, demonstrating that presumptions can lead to overlooking crucial information.
Accounts of Others as Reflections of Self
Very often, the witnesses’ unreliable narrations reveal more about themselves than they do about Camilo or Rosa. As Espada-Brignoni writes in “Making sense of others,” Denevi’s “characters’ accounts of events alternate between autobiography, biography, and memoir. They speak about what they see in their own lives and imagine in the lives of others” (Espada-Brignoni, 111). Each character views the world through a lens that has been formed by their personal experiences and interests, and oftentimes, they are unable to realize that these lenses obscure their understanding of reality. In fact, readers are encouraged to discern these inaccuracies and consider what they say about the narrator who delivers them.
Mrs. Milagros’s testimony, the first and longest in the book, establishes this dynamic very blatantly. Her report to the police inspector is filled with self-professed biases, not least of which is her disregard for Camilo’s profession and the world of art in general. During her retelling of Camilo’s story, she reaches the point at which Camilo and Rosa meet for the first time and dismissively says, “They talked for an hour, if you can call it talking to sit around stupidly discussing, like a couple of children, whether Googoo paints better than Sensen, or whether Sensen is better than Renwar” (49). Mrs. Milagros’s unabashed (or perhaps unintentional) mispronunciations of the names of famous artists—Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Renoir respectively—reveals that she has no insight into the world of fine arts that is central to solving the mystery. Furthermore, it proves that she cannot fully understand Camilo in the way she thinks she does because she does not believe his conversations about art to be important. Instead, this moment illustrates more clearly Mrs. Milagros’s values as a working-class woman who does not have time for interest in art and values action over cerebral discussions.
David Réguel is a second character whose narration of events is more self-reflective than it is revelatory about others. In his descriptions of Rosa and Camilo, he imagines himself as a psychoanalyst-meets-detective who is capable of discerning truths that are invisible to others. In particular, he takes aim at Camilo’s masculinity, which he believes to be fickle, while simultaneously imagining Rosa as the pinnacle of high-class femininity: “She was one of those fine, sensitive women,” he says, “the great lovers from Goethe, whose bourgeois education, if I make myself clear, in a way, spoils them” (112). Réguel tries to present these thoughts as objective facts, but in reality, they betray his infatuation with Rosa and his concerns about his own masculinity. Furthermore, his formulation of Rosa proves to be comically false when it is revealed that the woman posing as her is, in fact, an uneducated criminal who is extorting Camilo for money. With this, Denevi makes it clear that the facts characters are the most confident about are often not facts at all but reflections of the narrators’ internal worlds.
Fantasies That Bleed Into Reality
One of the book’s most important revelations is Camilo’s claim that Rosa existed only as a fantasy in his head until, miraculously, a woman arrived on the doorstep of La Madrileña claiming to be her. This plot point is the culmination of Denevi’s exploration of the nature of dreams throughout the novel and fulfills Camilo’s unrelenting fear that his all-consuming fantasies will become reality. Camilo admits to the inspector that he fabricated Rosa as a response to the Milagros family’s conviction that he had no sexuality and as a solution to his own loneliness. “Other men dream about becoming millionaires,” he tells the inspector, “I dreamed that a woman loved me” (160). Gradually, he takes gradual steps to make this dream a material reality, forging letters from “Rosa” and painting her portrait. At some point, the fantasy spirals out of control, blurring the line between Camilo’s imagination and reality.
Camilo goes on to explain that he has always tended to let dreams consume his real life, particularly after his father’s death. He asks the rhetorical question:
They say that our dreams express our repressed desires. Not always, not always. Because, for example, when my father died…Repressed desires? Always? Do they mean always? Including the most deeply hidden ones, the vilest, the most immoral ones, even the ones we don’t want to desire? (158).
This reference to “repression,” is an invocation of Freud’s highly influential theory of dreams, which states that dreams can be interpreted to understand a person’s psyche. As Espada-Brignoni reports, in Argentina, “Psychoanalysis was also an important cultural force popularized by several kinds of publications describing Freud’s theory to the general public” (Espada-Brignoni, 115). Indeed, the ubiquity of Freudian theory is evident in David Réguel’s testimony, where he labels both Camilo and Rosa as repressed individuals (112, 115). Given that Rosa is, in fact, an extension of Camilo’s internal world, this observation of Réguel’s takes on a new meaning in retrospect. Rosa is repressed because she herself is a repression, a manifestation of those “hidden,” “vile,” unwanted desires that Camilo hopes to keep hidden away. As Brant writes in “Camilo’s Closet,” Camilo’s fantasies are often the keys to understanding his dishonesties, “The dishonesty and deception takes on a life of its own, multiplying, growing out of control, until the power of its falseness annihilates his own sense of self” (Brant, 13). The expression of repressed desires (the fantasies that bleed into reality) in Rosaura, therefore, is a process of unveiling truths; deeply internalized secrets become uncontrollable and make themselves known to others, even against Camilo’s will.
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