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“She heard a whistle, but neither now nor then did she know whether the man had whistled or someone else. The whistle made her sense danger. It was a call, a warning” (Enríquez 2024: 33). In these lines, Mariana Enriquez narrates the prelude to a rape that will take place in broad daylight in a rural region of Paraná. Now, here the author not only introduces the family curse that will articulate “La desgracia en la cara”, one of the twelve stories that make up her latest anthology of short stories, but also introduces an element of Argentine regional folklore to show the social truth behind the figure of the Pombero as an indoctrinating fiction. Indeed, this sort of rural lascivious goblin that stalks young women during the unproductive hours of the siesta is a recurring figure that stands as an explanation in stories of unwanted pregnancies resulting from sexual offences. In the story, Enriquez uses this creature of Guarani folklore to connect the legends of terror that sow fear among women in rural communities and the devices of social regulation that seek to inject insecurity into feminized subjects to consolidate domestic reclusion. Recovering the legacy of Kuhn's film, La Hora de María y el Pájaro de Oro (1975), as well as the eroticized version starring “Coca” Sarli, Embrujada (1976), Enríquez fuses popular superstitions with slasher cinema to problematize these traditions and how they are complicit in the perpetuation of violence over feminized subjects. In this paper, we will trace these representations and the ways in which contemporary artistic productions strain its uses to delimit its complicity with patriarchal barbarism. At the same time, we will introduce the chronotope of the siesta as a space-time of daytime terror. Insofar as the Pombero is a creature that violates under the sun's midday itch, what we propose is to think about how it puts rape in text as a structural expressive crime that is always a public manifestation of power.
Keywords: Pombero; Regional Gothic; Siesta; Latin-American Gothic; Rape Myths.
Fictions of Analysis:
KUHN, Rodolfo. 1975. La Hora de María y el Pájaro de Oro.
BO, Armando. 1976. Embrujada.
CAULIER, Sebastián. 2009. Los extraños.
ENRIQUEZ, Mariana. 2024. “La desgracia en la cara”, Un lugar soleado para gente sombría.
Buenos Aires: Anagrama.
