«En el profundo espejo del deseo»: Delmira Agustini, Rachilde and the Vampire

Margaret Bruzelius

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.

The nineteenth century fascination with the femme fatale may have reached its apogee in the figure of the Vampire -that marble white, silent woman with luxuriant hair, heavy lidded eyes and blood red lips. Her nocturnal invasion of the daylight world of patriarchal propriety is invoked by artists who wish to escape the deadly trammels of the bourgeoisie (Baudelaire, Swinburne), by those who wish to reaffirm its primacy (Bram Stoker), and by those who cannot make up their minds (Coleridge, who could never finish Christabel). Of course, the history of the «belle dame sans merci» is an old and dishonorable one, and there are many fatal women who are not vampires¹. Nevertheless, the female vampire seems to enshrine the attributes of the fatal woman, and her continuing fascination may be seen in the fact that Bram Stoker's Dracula has never been out of print since 1897, when it was first published.

Although the nightmare fantasy of the power of the female incarnated in the vampire marks the entire nineteenth century, it is most closely associated with the tradition stretching from Poe through Baudelaire to the French and English decadents. This group of poètes maudites includes few women, and in fact it is hard to imagine a woman writer identifying herself with a written legacy in which the female is so unequivocally identified with silence, the literary equivalent of death. Yet within this tradition two women -Rachilde (Mme. Marguerite de la Vallette) in France and Delmira Agustini in Uruguay- managed to create a niche for themselves. Rachilde wrote titillating novels for about fifty years, moving from the immense success of her early work, M. Vénus, to a rather pathetic old age in which newer crimes supplanted her rather retro transgressions². Agustini, in her much briefer career, took the version of decadence offered her by Modernismo, especially as represented by Rubén Darío, and used it to create extraordinarily intense poetry of explicitly sexual female desire. It is perhaps unfair to compare the poet Agustini, whose best work continues to speak with electrifying energy, to an irretrievably dated prose writer such as Rachilde. But both women were able to write within the decadent tradition by taking the image of the vampiric fatal woman and using to create a parodic written persona. It is this ironic, distancing yet complicit stance which allows them to write as women within a tradition which seems by its nature to exclude women writers.

In using the motion of parody to describe these writers' engagement with their tradition I do not mean to suggest that their work is limited to humorous ridicule of the masters. This essay follows the lead of Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody in choosing to emphasize parody as «extended repetition with critical, ironic difference» (TP, 37). Hutcheon sees parody as a fundamental mode of modern aesthetics, and wishes to reclaim the genre from its association with amusing but «minor» work. For her, the artist's use of parody is an ironic appropriation whose ethos (defined as «the ruling intended response achieved by a literary text» (TP, 55)) is not limited to satire or ridicule but can evoke the entire range of human emotion. Within this context, Rachilde and Agustini can be seen as engaged in a fundamentally parodic process which plays on the fact that they are women writers, identified as women on the title pages of their books, writing within a tradition in which women are fatal, brooding creatures who don't say much. By using the image of the vampire woman, whose horror for the male world consists precisely in the fact that she freely expresses not only desire (Darling, let's go to Bloomingdale's) but specifically sexual desire (Darling, let's make love), they are able to create themselves as fatal women who talk. At the beginning of a modern aesthetic which Hutcheon sees as permeated by the idea of parody, Rachilde and Agustini can be read as early experimenters not only in their distanced appropriation of texts but also in their inversion of traditional sex roles.

The vampire image that both Rachilde and Agustini parody in different ways deserves some further exploration, before their uses of it are examined. The canonical expression of the female vampire is undoubtedly Bram Stoker's Dracula³, although many other writers have created both male and female vampires. Stoker's novel contains two heroines, Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, both of whom are bitten by Dracula. Lucy dies and becomes a vampire but Mina is saved by Van Helsing, the scientist hero of the book who drives Dracula out of England and eventually kills him in Transylvania. As Christopher Craft points out⁴, the novel is divided into three stages: the first, set in Transylvania, where the threat is exposed and Jonathan Harker experiences the intense sexual attraction/repulsion Dracula exerts; the second, in which the count moves to England, takes over Lucy and begins to feed on Mina; and the last, in which he is driven out of England and finally destroyed. Within the sexual economy of Dracula, vampirism seems to represent the threat of a free-floating sexual drive and a concomitant desire for total possession which exists unrestrained by any social proprieties and few physical ones⁵. This sexual energy threatens the men of the novel precisely because it is not limited to traditional heterosexual exchange. Craft points out that Jonathan Harker's initial brush with vampirism, in his interrupted seduction in Transylvania by the three weird sisters who surround Dracula, is not only an inversion of the traditional proprieties of sexual behavior in which the male pursues and the female is pursued, but also a deviated display of the homo-erotic desire which the Count has for Harker⁶. Dracula interrupts the seduction by erupting into the room in which it takes place and driving back the females declaring, «How dare you touch him, any of you? how dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!» (39)⁷. Dracula's invasion of London is seen as a nightmare vision of undifferentiated sexual desire undermining the great city: «he might, among its teeming millions [...] create a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless» (51).

When the Count does move to England, the infection he carries is represented only as a threat to pure English women: on their own soil the band of men who combat Dracula feel no desire for him. But the horror with which the proper gentlemen of Stoker's tale receive the infection of their women with Dracula's greedy desire suggests the depth of threat they perceive in unlicensed -and uncontrollable- female desire. Their counter-attack against the one woman who is fatally infected, Lucy, astonishes in its ferocity. In the castle seduction scene Harker speaks of his «wicked» desire and the vampire's «animal» qualities. This theme is taken up by Seward in his description of Lucy as vampire: «[her] sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and [her] purity to voluptuous wantonness. [...] When Lucy -I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape- saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares [...] As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone» (211). Lucy is a thing, a cat, a devil, a dog. Seward's loving description of the stake used to kill the she-devil is token enough of the strength of his revulsion: «A round wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long. One end of it was hardened by charring in the fire, and was sharpened to a fine point. With this stake came a heavy hammer [...] To me, a doctor's preparation for work of any kind are stimulating and bracing [...]». And his lingering insistence on Lucy's second death makes quite clear the price that must be paid for transgressing sexual laws: «Arthur place the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with all his might. The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips [no wonder]. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered» (216)⁸.

The sadism of Seward's description of Lucy's destruction (one can see why he describes the preparations as «stimulating and bracing») suggests his subliminal awareness that the «thing» that is Lucy may not at all regret her transformation, that the «doctor's work» is not cure but revenge. For beneath the fascination/repulsion exhibited by the proper Victorians for the female vampire's sexual voracity lies another fear: the fear that their women may actually desire to be infected. It is clear that at least part of Lucy wishes to be bitten, that she enjoys Dracula's embrace⁹. For though the female vampire can only be quickened to life by the bite of another's desire, once she is «nosferatu» or undead, she becomes able not only to speak, but also to express desire freely, to move out of her house -the tomb- at night, unaccompanied, to provide for herself, and to disguise herself easily. In other words, she gains a freedom entirely unknown to her living sisters. Moreover, although dead, these women are not even cut off from the possibility of generation, for they can breed new vampires, not through the laborious process of gestation but through their simultaneously fatal and reviving kiss/bite. And though they must obey Dracula, he, like many another seducer of maidens, has little interest in them once they can no longer provide him with blood, and leaves them to their own devices¹⁰.

Both Rachilde and Agustini clearly perceive and respond to the vampire's freedom. While the men of Stoker's tale keep emphasizing the fact that the vampires are cut off from God's grace, for writers firmly entrenched in the tradition of «poètes maudites» damnation may simply be the price one pays for writing. And the female vampire, unlike many other fatal women, is firmly associated with the ability to speak, to seduce with language -to write. Only at the moment of becoming a vampire (of human death) can Lucy speak her desire clearly, when she says to her fiancé, «Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!» (161) (at this point Van Helsing hurls him across the room to protect him from harm). And in her appearance later as a vampire, it is not only the fact that a child is «flung to the ground» with «a callous motion», that horrifies the men, it is also Lucy's open attempt to speak and show desire: «[s]he still advanced [...] and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said: "Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!" There was something diabolically sweet in her tones» (211). When Rachilde creates Raoule, the demi-vierge who keeps a male mistress, she produces a female vampire, not one in thrall to a higher power, but one who is herself Dracula. And Agustini creates a poetic persona as a monstrous female, a revenant who summons the male she desires from the grave.

Rachilde's M. Vénus tells the story of Raoule de la Vénérande, last scion of a noble house, who falls in love with the brother of her fleuriste, Jacques Silvert, who himself makes flowers, although he calls himself a painter. Overwhelmed by her desire for him, she establishes him in an ornately decorated atelier. She gradually comes to dominate and feminize him entirely, so that he wears robes and nighties, and she comes to make love to him dressed in male attire. After some struggle, he ceases even to wish to make love to her in what one might call the «normal» way and insists on her treating him as a woman. Raoule contrives to introduce him into society, and finally marries him. After the marriage Jacques becomes attracted to another man, de Raittolbe, and makes an attempt to seduce him in his female dress. Raoule, on discovering this intrigue, contrives to have de Raittolbe fight a duel with Jacques, who is killed. The story ends with Raoule a recluse in her ancestral mansion, where she has created a shrine to her dead lover. He lies, like Sleeping Beauty, a wax figure adorned with the real finger nails of Jacques: «Sur la couche en forme de conque [...] repose un mannequin de cire revêtu d'un épiderme de caoutchouc transparent. Les cheveux roux, les cils blonds, le duvet d'or de la poitrine sont naturels; les dents qui ornent la bouche, les ongles des mains et des pieds ont été arrachés à un cadavre. [It is clear from an earlier passage that the cadaver is Jacques'.] Les yeux en émail ont un adorable regard» (M. Vénus, 287)¹¹.

Although Rachilde's novel clearly revels in its parodic reversal of the conventions of romantic tales, little has changed except for the sex of the seducer and the seduced. One example of the prose used to describe Jacques' enticing male beauty will establish the genre in and against which Rachilde is working: «Les lueurs douces [...] tombaient mollement sur ses chairs blondes, toutes duvetées comme la peau d'une pêche. [...] Digne de la Vénus Callipyge, cette chute de reins où la ligne de l'épine dorsale fuyait dans un méplat voluptueux et se redressait, ferme, grasse, en deux contours adorables [...]» (63). Jacques is described throughout as blonde and gold, stupid, a bit pudgy («grasse»), and after a brief period of unease, completely submissive; in short, the perfect woman.

Raoule, on the other hand, has many of the standard traits of the fatal, «other» woman. Her suitor, de Raittolbe, calls her «un agréable monstre», adding «l'étude du fauve n'a de charmes réels qu'en Algérie» (80). She has driven all her lovers either mad or off on distant travels (one has gone off to Norway «[pour] essayer des réfrigérants» (75)). But she also shares a great deal with Dracula: she is pale, dark-haired, black eyed, and imperious: «Merveilleusement tracés, les sourcils avaient une tendance marquée à se rejoindre dans le pli impérieux d'une volonté constante. Les lèvres [étaient] minces [...] [l]es cheveux étaient bruns [...] et concuraient au parfait ovale d'un visage teinté de ce bistre italien qui pâlit aux lumières. Très noirs, avec des reflets métalliques sous de longs cils recourbés, les yeux devenaient deux braises quand la passion les alluma» (36). In contrast to Jacques, who looks as edible as a peach, Raoule is drawn in dark lines, her eyebrows are marked, her face has a brown tint, and her eyes have a metallic glint that turns to red, just as Dracula's eyes also glare red¹². She wears dark, almost masculine clothes with military trim: «[...] vêtue d'un fourreau de drap noir à queue tortueuse, tout passementé de brandebourgs. Aucun bijou [...] ne scintillait porur égayer ce costume presque masculin» (58). Although she is an urban creature, she lives, like Dracula, in a dark and ancient ancestral mansion. And like him, she also is marked as the last descendent of an ancient line; she can have no «natural» issue.

Although Raoule and Dracula share the inevitable similarity of figures generated in the horror tradition inaugurated by Poe, Rachilde explicitly invokes the vampire in the central scene of Jacques' sexual submission. Raoule is compared to a monster, and Jacques' downfall is sealed with a bite/kiss as was Lucy's: «Raoule l'embrassait sur ses cheveux d'or [...] voulant lui insuffler sa passion monstre [...] Ses lèvres impérieuses lui firent courber la tête en avant, et derrière la nuque elle le mordit à plein bouche» (123). Jacques' resistance to her «passion monstre» is to attempt one last time to assert his masculine way to make love, but Raoule's body then becomes like that of a dead woman: «Lorsqu'il l'embrassa, il lui semblait qu'un corps de marbre glissait entre les draps; il eut la sensation désagréable d'un frôlement de bête morte [...]» (127). Like Dracula, Raoule is both dead and alive, animal and human («un frôlement de bête morte»). Only when Jacques gives in entirely, «fais de moi ce que tu voudras à présent [...]» does she use her «science maudite» and fall on him with her «flancs gonflés d'ardeurs sauvages» (129)¹³. She is the evil genius, and he is her toy, her «thing», as Lucy is Dracula's. Finally, like a vampire, Raoule creates her own «undead», the effigy of Jacques in wax. In his secret tomb she comes to mourn him, dressed sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman. She retains a capacity to transform herself, and a limited capacity to transform him into a semblance of a living being, for the dummy is equipped with a special spring which animates its mouth when Raoule kisses it: «Un ressort, disposé à l'intérieur des flancs[!], correspond à la bouche et l'anime» (287).

The delicious horror with which Rachilde's book was received -it was banned in Belgium and an investigation of Rachilde was begun by judicial authorities in Paris- stems not only from the fact that sex roles in it are reversed, but that this reversal is accomplished by a woman protagonist imagined by a woman author. Rachilde was accused of having invented a «new vice», (which promted Verlaine to remark: «Ah! ma chère enfant, si vous aviez inventé un vice de plus, vous seriez un bienfaiteur de l'humanité!» (quoted in Dauphiné, 32))¹⁴. Rachilde fueled the suspicion that the novel was autobiographic by wearing male dress (although all the surviving photographs of her that I have seen show her in simply cut dresses), cropping her long hair and having a calling card printed with the legend «Rachilde, homme de lettres». But, as Maurice Barrès points out («Mademoiselle Baudelaire», Chroniques, Feb, 1887), Rachilde's sexual vapourings have something of a schoolgirl quality, «on dirait une petite fille qui fume la pipe en peinturlant avec soin les images d'Epinal» (79). Her work has dated because its «perversité cérébrale» (to quote Barrès again) consists in merely inverting all the «shocking» literary conventions of her day, conventions which we no longer share.

Rachilde's effort to create a parodic inversion of the genres of romantic fiction and of the vampiric fatal woman finds an echo in the work of Agustini. Agustini may have read M. Vénus, as she and the circle of writers she knew were familiar with the writing of French decadence, and a «decadent» sucés de scandale like M. Vénus may well have been in circulation among her friends¹⁵. Whether Agustini have read M. Vénus or not, she would have known something about Rachilde, as Rubén Darío, the champion of Modernismo, had included her -the lone woman- in his book Los Raros (publ. 1896), a collection of essays on the figures that either influenced or belonged to decadent/symbolist circles in Paris¹⁶. Darío's description of Rachilde can be read as a blueprint for the literary femme fatale. He begins: «Trato de una mujer extraña y escabrosa, de un espíritu único esfingamente solitario [...] de un "caso" curiosísimo y turbador [...] satánica flor de decadencia picantemente perfumada, misteriosa y hechicera y mala como un pecado» (Los Raros, Madrid 1918, 123, all subsequent references are to this edition). Throughout Darío's essay author and work are conflated: Rachilde's novels are always read as the work of a woman -a devotée of the Eleusinian mysteries¹⁷ or a Vestal Virgin¹⁸. Darío's descriptions of Raoule and of Rachilde echo each other. Raoule is «una especie de mademoiselle Des Esseintes [...] de la familia de Nerón, y de aquel legendario y terrible Gilles de Laval [...] un amante vampirizada» (127-8)¹⁹. Rachilde is described as a virgin whose dreams are possessed by the devil in a lurid passage:

Imaginaos el dulce y puro sueño de una virgen, lleno de blandura, de delicadeza, de suavidad, una fiesta eucarística, una pascua de lirios y de cisnes. Entonces un diablo -Behemot quizá-, el mismo de Tamar, el mismo de Halagabal, el mismo de las posesas de Lodun, el mismo de Sade, el mismo de las misas negras, aparece. Y en aquel sueño casto y blanco hace brotar la roja flora de las aberraciones sexuales, los extractos y aromas que atraen a íncubos y súcubos, las visiones locas de incógnitos y desoladores vicios, los besos ponzoñosos y embrujados, el crepúsculo misterioso en que se juntan y confunden el amor, el dolor y la muerte.

La virgen tentada o poseída por el Maligno, escribe las visiones de sus sueños. De ahí estos libros [...]

If Raoule belongs to Nero and Gilles de Laval (the original Bluebeard), Darío associates Rachilde with Tamar, Halagabal, the black mass and the Marquis de Sade!

Darío's description of Rachilde is of importance only as a succinct statement of the image of a woman writer as femme fatale, as demon, as possessed by the devil -an image that Agustini herself certainly played up to. The fervid abandon with which Darío festoons his paragraph with incubi and sucubi, mysterious crepuscular sins, death, dreams, pain and love are echoed in Agustini's own summoning of her phantom lover. The telling difference is, of course, the sex of the writer. Darío can easily fit Rachilde into a tradition of fatal woman and dismiss her writing as the devil speaking through her; Agustini, like Rachilde, must create herself as the fatal woman who speaks. Darío may been able to fool himself that Rachilde wrote in an hypnotic trance; Agustini could permit herself no such illusion.

Agustini published three books in her lifetime, El Libro Blanco (1907), Cantos de la Mañana (1910), and Los Cálices Vacíos (1913)²⁰. In her poetry she constructs a female voice which gradually frees itself to express female sexual desire. Where Rachilde's novels are limited by her inability to do more than directly invert the clichés of her time, Agustini's enthusiastic adoption of the persona of the vampire lover infuses the shopworn images of the symbolists with new life. Her work is saturated with the image of the fatal woman, the dreamer possessed, but with the essential, and inherently parodic, difference that this fatal woman is not the creation of male desire and fear, but of a female desire that authorizes itself. Agustini's astonishing accomplishment is to create her own voice solely through manipulation of the standard bric-à-brac of the decadent movement -antique statues, swans, lakes, moonlight, Salomé, the sphinx- all the familiar paraphernalia of the symbolists and decadents gain new life as the fatal woman herself, the «poetisa/pitonisa» summons them.

Agustini first sketches her stance as the poet/vampire who summons up the object of her desire in «Misterio: Ven...» from El Libro Blanco (Poesías Completas, 81, all further cites from this edition): «Ven, oye, yo te evoco, / extraño amado de mi musa extraña, / ven, tú, el que meces los enigmas hondos / en el vibrar de las pupilas cálidas». Here the woman speaks and commands her demon lover to appear, «Come, listen, I conjure you». The poet's word brings her lover back from the grave: «Ven, tú, el que imprimes un solemne ritmo / al parpadeo de la tumba helada [...] el poeta abrumador, que pulsas / la lira del silencio». The muse/incubus who will respond to the vampire's call will seal the fate of both with a kiss; the penetrating kiss of the vampire: «Ven... acércate más... clava en mis labios / tus fríos labios de ámbar». This kiss brings with it the standard enervation of the touch of the vampire, and the knowledge of «dark sins»: «¡Guste yo en ellos el sabor ignoto / de la esencia enervante de tu alma!...».

In this early poem Agustini clearly suggests the qualities of the female voice that she seeks to create. Both she and the lover she summons share vampiric qualities, especially in their unappeasable sexual thirst. Agustini accepts the fact that the possibilities of this desire are limited by the clichés of the genre: desire exists as a night-time event brought into being in a dream; for her, a sunlit sexual encounter remains impossible. Moreover, a daylit lover would destroy the poet herself, whose voice depends on the spectral nature of her sexual encounters. In a later poem «¡Oh Tú!» (61) Agustini conjures up a vision of this impossible sunlit encounter. The poem begins by describing the poet in her melancholy tower, «Yo vivía en la torre inclinada / de la Melancolía...». The tower is furnished with the standard claptrap of fatal places: dampness, spiders and an owl, «Las arañas del tedio, las arañas más grises, / en silencio y en gris tejían y tejían. / ¡Oh, la húmeda torre, / llena de la presencia / siniestra de un gran búho». It incubates a large, infertile egg -the poet?- whose eyes strain outward, «Eternamente incuba un gran huevo infecundo, / incrustadas las raras pupilas más allá». In its confines the poet «inclinada a mí misma» («la torre inclinada») contemplates the abyss «yo temblaba / del horror de mi sima»²¹.

Having set the stage, in the last stanza the poet invokes her lover as in «Visión» except that here he appears to be real, at least initially: «¡Oh Tú que me arrancaste a la torre más fuerte!». But this vision of liberation stumbles as the poet goes on not only to suggest that this sunlit Tú can never exist, but also that she would not wish to be liberated: «¡Tú que en mí todo puedes, / en mí debes ser Dios!». The use of deber suggests not only must, but should, with the implication that lover might not be god. This uncertainty is reinforced by Agustini's subsequent use of the future in describing herself: «Soy el cáliz brillante que colmarás, Señor», as if to place the moment of fulfilling liberation in some indefinite future day of jubilee; we have by this time abandoned the Tú who pulled the poet out of her melancholy tower. Even this postponed, conditional liberation is described in oxymoronic terms as «el Bien que hace mal» to the poet who is both «caída y erguida»²². The image used for the poet, a lily at the feet of the god is not an image of empowerment but of total powerlessness. The poem ends by equating even the dream of a sunlit embrace with sin: «Perdón, perdón si peco alguna vez, soñando / que me abrazas con alas, ¡todo mío! en el Sol...». For Agustini, the embrace of the sunlit god contained in her allusion to the fertile, sunlit story of Leda and the swan («me abrazas con alas») has become a sin against the voice which she has adopted. The poet remains within her tower as the poem trails off into an ellipsis, the suspension of the expressible.

Perhaps the strongest expression of the vampiric encounter is contained in «Visión» (44). As in «Misterio: ven...» the poet imagines herself in a vampiric embrace, with the demon she has summoned brooding over her and this encounter also ends in failure -the buffet of the winged lover is never felt. The poem exists only as the expression of desire: fulfillment, the moment when the poet leaves the tower, equals silence. «Visión» begins with a question, as the poet is unable to distinguish waking from dreaming: «¿Acaso fue en un marco de ilusión, / o en el profundo espejo del deseo, / o fue divina y simplemente en vida / que yo te vi velar mi sueño la otra noche?». The lover is evoked not in the sunlit terms of «¡Oh Tú!» but as a grotesque midnight growth, a giant mushroom, a being that is neither dead nor alive: «taciturno a mi lado apareciste / como un hongo gigante, muerto y vivo». In an incantatory, repetitive passage the poet evokes the demon lover looming over the sleeping poet as if to feed on her in the same way that Dracula looms over the sleeping Lucy: «te inclinabas a mí [...] como a la copa de cristal de un lago / [...] como un enfermo / de la vida a los opios infalibles». In an inversion of the Christian sacrament that brings life (Take, eat, this is my body [...]) the phantom yearns toward the sleeper «como el creyente / a la oblea de cielo de la hostia...». The following three line interjection, -«Gota de nieve con sabor de estrellas / que alimenta los lirios de la Carne, / chispa de Dios que estrella los espíritus»- describes not only the host but the sleeping poet as well, since they are identified as the objects of desire of the phantom (who is himself dramed by the poet). In the final two comparisons of this incantatory passage, the phantom realizes that only the sleeper can bring him to life, «Te inclinabas a mí como si fuera / mi cuerpo la inicial de tu destino / en la página oscura de mi lecho» and that through her he can achieve transcendence, «te inclinabas a mí como al milagro / de una ventana abierta al más allá».

The poet answers her invocation of male desire looming over the recumbent female with a vision of herself as serpent: «Y era mi mirada una culebra [...] y era me deseo una culebra» as if to equate sight and desire. The lover is white, he is «cisne» and «la estatua de lirios de tu cuerpo», while the poet is a snake gliding in the shadow, «glisando entre los riscos de la sombra [...]». The identification of woman, especially sexually desirous woman, with the snake, is, of course, an ancient image and one that would be well-known to Agustini, as she demonstrates in another poem where she overtly identifies herself with the triumphant and desiring snake («Serpentina», which begins, «En mis sueños de amor ¡yo soy serpiente!» (159)). Here Agustini authorizes herself as a fatal woman, as lamia, to express her desire, and indeed the link of sexual desire to writing is clear not only in the image of the lover who sees in the poet «la inicial de tu destino / en la página oscura de mi lecho» but in the image of printing used to describe their union, «Toda tu vida se imprimió en mi vida...». It is Agustini who writes, who is the black snake of letters on the white page of the lover's body.

But this vision of marking and interpenetration ends in failure. The embrace of the poet and her lover is never realized as Agustini again evokes the image of Leda and the swan in her failed encounter:

Yo esperaba suspensa el aletazo

del abrazo magnífico; un abrazo

de cuatro brazos que la gloria viste

de fiebre y de milagro, ¡será un vuelo!

Y pueden ser los hechizados brazos

cuatro raíces de una raza nueva.

The returned embrace «un abrazo de cuatro brazos» can be imagined, but not experienced; it remains in the future tense, «será un vuelo». Nevertheless, although the new race cannot appear, the poet remains in control of her phantom lover, for as she explores the failure of her desire she opens the eyes of her lover to determine the cause of her failure: «te abrí los ojos como un alma, vi / ¡que te hacías atrás y te envolvías / en yo no sé qué pliegue inmenso de la sombra!». And in fact the returned gaze of the phantom is the sign of the necessary failure, for when the lover has eyes of his own (before he has been a mushroom, a tower, a willow, a looming, but eyeless presence) he is no longer the mirror of Agustini's desire, «el profundo espejo del deseo», but a living entity whose opaqueness escapes the poet's desire to possess and be possessed. When she sees his eyes, even if she herself opens them, the lover disappears into an immense fold of darkness.

The sense of a vampiric encounter in these poems is inescapable. But in her conflation of the image of the dark lover who is associated with bats and night with the story of the god/swan of Leda, Agustini has written the female answer to the swan written by Darío and the French symbolists²³ and given a parodic twist to the image of the fatal woman. She uses the same technique in her adoption of the figure of Salomé, another popular representative of the fatal woman. As in her use of the image of the vampire and of Leda, Salomé exists in her texts as a submerged theme, one of the monsters in the lake that stands for the poet's vision of herself: «el cristal de las aguas dormidas / refleja un dios o un monstruo» («La Ruptura» 66). In «Lo Inefable» (67) Agustini's poetic voice again asserts the half-dead, half-alive posture of the vampire and ends by invoking the desire of Salomé for the head of the man she loved. The poet begins by asserting her strangeness, she is neither dead, not alive: «Yo muero extrañamente... No me mata la vida, / no me mata la Muerte, no me mata el Amor». She is being killed by a thought which cannot express itself, «muero de un pensamiento mudo como una herida». «This» «pensamiento inmenso» like a monstrous pregnancy, has taken over the poet's life and is devouring her, «devorando alma y carne» and can never come to fruition «no alcanza a dar flor»²⁴. Agustini again invokes the vampire as she compares this thought to a seed nailed to her entrails by a bite, «trágica simiente / clavada en las entrañas como un diente feroz!». And as always with Agustini, the poem ends in a vision expressed in the future tense of possibility highly mediated by doubt: «Pero arrancarla un día en una flor que abriera / milagrosa, inviolable... ¡Ah, más grande no fuera / tener entre las manos la cabeza de Dios!». Salomé, of course, received for her dancing the head of John the Baptist, God's representative. Agustini suggests here not only that the price to pay for the «miraculous, inviolable» flower is damnation but in the phrase «más grande no fuera», that this resolution is impossible.

Agustini's effort to appropriate the fatal woman, the vampire, Salomé as expressions of her own desire end always in failure: the daylit embrace of Leda and the swan can not exist for her. In a short untitled poem which begins «La intensa realidad de un sueño lúgubre» she makes clear the dilemma on which her poetic voice is based. As so often in her poetry, the poem begins by invoking a dream moment of total yearning, total possession:

La intensa realidad de un sueño lúgubre

puso en mis manos tu cabeza muerta;

yo la apresaba como hambriento buitre...

y con más alma que en la Vida, trémula,

¡le sonreía como nadie nunca!...

   ¡Era tan mía cuando estaba muerta!

The poet holds her lover's dead head which she clutches with the voraciousness of a vulture. She has more life in her dream than she has in life, and can smile as no one else can. This is a dream of total possession, and total frustration, since the poet can only hold part of the lover, even in dream he escapes her. The second verse makes clear the defeat of the dreamer:

Hoy he visto en la Vida, bella, impávida,

como un triunfo estatuario, tu cabeza.

Más frío me dio así que en el idilio

fúnebre aquél, al estrecharla muerta...

¡Y así la lloro hasta agotar mi vida...

así tan viva cuando me es ajena!

The head (still unattached to a body) is now seen in life as untouchable, as lifeless as a statue. As it gains in life, it recedes from the poet, and she is left to weep in an agony of hopeless desire.

Agustini entitled the last group of verses published in her lifetime Los Cálices Vacíos. This negative image of the empty flower, which as we have seen in «¡Oh, Tú!» can never be filled, suggests the limitation inherent in Agustini's stance toward her tradition. For although she was able to use the stereotypical image of the femme fatale to create her own voice, the limitation of the parodic is its essential conservatism; Agustini was never able to imagine a new way to express desire. Barrès unkind remark about Rachilde, «on dirait une petite fille qui fume la pipe en peintulant» can be applied to Agustini as well. She is able to give Lucy a voice of her own, she has written desire on the white body of the lover she conjures up, she is both the vampire and the bitten. But she is nevertheless caught in an image of female desire as fatality which is limited by a fundamental aridity. Perhaps, had she lived, she would have been able to move beyond Lucy, beyond Salomé into the sunlit world which she could perceive, but not write.

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