On 2 April 1982 the ruling Argentinian military junta of General Leopoldo Galtieri decided to distract attention from their violent repression and economic misconduct at home by invading the nearby Falkland Islands, one of the few remaining microcrumbs of the once-mighty British Empire, something the aggressor nation’s feted star of absurdist fiction Jorge Luis Borges memorably compared to “a fight between two bald men over a comb”. For similar failures of tact, Borges had already once been ‘promoted’ from his privileged role as a librarian into the deliberately unsuitable position of Official Inspector of Rabbits at a Buenos Aires marketplace, a fate fit for one of his own characters.
Perhaps not wanting to one day end up in an even weirder job, Borges never penned any direct satires of his country’s many post-war dictators, but one of his literary progeny, Luisa Valenzuela, dared do so in her 1983 magic realist allegory The Lizard’s Tail, a fable so fantastic that non-natives would struggle to perceive it is based on actual domestic political reality. Telling the story of a sinister, baby-eating figure named The Sorcerer and his quest to usurp all political rivals, the book features many unlikely events, from a national ban on mirrors to a magic fart so powerful it sets a whole swamp afire. Unlikeliest of all, this “necromant of confused gonads” is a hermaphroditic “magician of mere hormonal transformations” who self-identifies using the “mutant pronoun” s/he (how prophetic …), and possesses a holy “testicular trinity” of no fewer than three balls, one of which is his own sister, Estrella, in embryonic sperm-sack form. Via a process of “Theocopulation”, the triscrotal Sorcerer aims to self-impregnate him/herself to regenerate, Phœnix-style – an abortive procedure which ultimately only unleashes a massive river of blood upon the land.
To us, all of this may seem as random as transmogrifying a literary genius like Borges into a rabbit inspector, but to an Argentine reader, the novel’s strange testicular trinity is clearly an obscene and mocking metaphor for recently pressing home affairs. The plot centres upon not only a triad of testes, but also a triad of three other main characters corresponding to them: A kind of political love-triangle prevails, involving figures named The Generalissimo and (two sides of the same ball) his deceased wife, The Dead Woman, and her younger living replacement, The Intruder. These would have been immediately recognisable to Valenzuela’s compatriots as being Argentina’s former military dictator General Juan Domingo Perón, his late wife Eva/Evita Perón, and his next spouse, Isabel Perón, who replaced Juan as President following his death in 1974 (thus magically morphing into his feminine side). As for The Sorcerer himself… we shall not unmask him just yet, but when Isabel rose to power, this dark mage was the true authority behind The Intruder’s throne: a mass-murdering astrologer obsessed with pyramids, triangles and other such occult manifestations of the magic number three.
