Lima la horrible
By Sebastián Salazar Bondy
1664
Lima la horrible (1964;
Lima the horrible) represents the epitome of Sebastián Salazar Bondy’s literary
and journalistic career. During his short but productive life, Salazar Bondy
(1924–65) focused on two concerns: the literary activity and development of
Peru, and its political and social situation. Lima la horrible is an essay in
book form, consisting of 11 chapters. It belongs to a wave of essays with the
objective of defining the ethos of a nation and its peoples through
introspective analysis. Psychoanalysis provided the apparatus with which
Spanish American essayists scrutinized their continent, though most limited
themselves to one country in their analysis. Only two well-known essays focused
on cities: Salazar Bondy’s Lima la horrible and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s La
cabeza de Goliat (1940; The head of Goliath). These essays attempt to define
the idiosyncrasy of Lima and Buenos Aires, both nonrepresentative capitals of
their respective countries.
Within the Peruvian ambit, Lima la horrible belongs to a minority left-oriented
movement whose most distinctive figure, José Carlos Mariátegui, was the founder
of the Peruvian Socialist Party (1895–1930). After its publication, Lima la
horrible was used by the leftist factions to awaken a social consciousness in
Peru. It represents the harshest criticism ever undertaken against the Peruvian
oligarchy. Salazar Bondy dissects, step by step, each facet of what he
designates the Limean deceit, denouncing the ideology underlying the pyramidal
system wherein the poor are throttled and the rich swell.
According to Salazar Bondy, Lima has successfully perpetuated the historical
period in which, as the capital of a viceroyalty, it took delight in its
exquisite luxuries, realized by the exploitation and ostracism of the native
Peruvians. The aristocracy of yesterday (“hawkers who would buy titles”) has
become today’s oligarchy. The caste that holds the economic and political reins
of power in Peru has adopted and imposed as a national ideology a chimera that
Salazar Bondy calls “Colonial Arcadia,” in order to preserve its hegemony,
denying a voice to both Indian and mestizo in the historical dialogue.
Consequently, the Limean lacks authenticity. Salazar Bondy believes tbat, based
on the invention of an archetype, Lima has fabricated a system of values and
traditions that constitutes the Limean identity or criollismo. The criollo is
an amalgam of appearances: he is so enmeshed in this act of representation that
his true being has been all but lost.
If Lima’s apogee was the vice-royal period, it successfully survives as a
nostalgic reproduction, still overlooking the abysmal difference between the
privileged and the indigent, the incongruity between myth and reality. Salazar
Bondy demythologizes famous Limean figures such as Ricardo Palma, Saint Rosa de
Lima, and Saint Martin de Porres. Ricardo Palma, a renowned realistic writer,
was the author, perhaps unintentionally, of the colonial chimera. By fusing
fiction and history, Palma created the literary apparatus that asserts
yesterday’s glory and denies the present. As to the inherited image of the
saints, it has been adulterated and transformed. The embellishment of their
iconography is repeated in the Limean folklore as an affirmation of the beauty
and luxury of a period, and not as an anomaly of the times, which would be what
the two saints truly denote.
Another Peruvian source of pride Salazar Bondy deconstructs is the Cuzco School
of Painting, the most famous in colonial times. According to the author, this
school represents another mode used by the Spaniards to impose their own
reality onto the Indians, in order to erase their native identity. If what was
native and telluric formed part of a painting, it appeared to replace the
European icons that signified evil. The psychological consequences were
devastating. The identity crisis caused by this imposition is still reflected
in two Peruvian expressions: perricholista and huachafo. Both embody the obsession
with Otherness. The former refers to the lowermiddle-class individual who
foolishly assumes a disguise in real life in imitation of the upper class,
rendering himself ridiculous and the target of endless derision. The latter
defines the person who sells his mind and soul as an answer to the imperative
desire to belong to the aristocracy. The difference between the two expressions
is that the huachafo is too low in the social hierarchy ever to become an
aristocrat, while the perricholista can become one if he pays the price.
A third figure from the Colonial Arcadia that Salazar Bondy analyzes is the
tapada, or the mysterious colonial lady (she hides behind a shawl, exposing
only one eye), the ironic pillar of a conservative society. She is repressed and
almost illiterate, and her role in society was to be beautiful. She lived
behind the shadow of a most desirable husband, rich and influential,
vicariously enjoying his power. Salazar Bondy argues that the modern Limean
woman has kept this role despite her education, mundane manners, and
profession. Her goal has remained to achieve a marriage of convenience. This
woman has not come to be an independent and emancipated individual because the
chains from the past have not been broken; her situation represents another
remnant of the colonial chimera.
Salazar Bondy begins and ends his essay by emphasizing the dramatic disjunction
of Peru. The exploitation of and discrimination against ethnic groups, the
growing belt of pauperization strangling Lima, make unbearable the prolongation
of the Colonial Arcadia. The vote against the past, which Mariategui would once
have cast, becomes Salazar Bondy’s. The antithesis of the Arcadia belongs to
the youth who can and should initiate a dialogue between the present and its true
reality.
VERÓNICA SAUNERO-WARD
With affection,
Ruben
