The Sea as Death and Freedom in Reinaldo Arenas’s El mundo alucinante

Abstract

The life of Friar Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra, characterized by exile and peregrinations through different countries of the Old and the New World, has been fictionalized by the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in his novel El mundo alucinante, which offers a hyperbolic representation of the friar’s feats. Starting from the condemnation issued by the Archibishop Haro y Peralta, Arenas focuses on how Servando was forced to cross the ocean several times, because of his irreverant choice to challenge ecclesiastical and political power. On December 12, 1794, for example, while preaching during the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he asserted that the holy image was not left on the tilma of the Atzec Indian Juan Diego in 1531 as tradition dictates, but on the mantle of Saint Thomas the Apostle around 41 A.D., that is to say, more than 1400 years before Columbus arrived in the New World. This was surely considered heretical but also and, above all, an attack against the Spanish: if Christianity had reached Mexico immediately after Christ’s death, then it was no longer possible to uphold evangelization as the main justification for the Conquest. Since the friar was condemned to serve his sentence in Spain, at Las Caldas convent, the ocean was both a compulsory route to reach the place of exile and a privileged way to recover his freedom. Arenas, who identifies with the Dominican friar for his revolutionary nature and his intolerance against the established power, is particularly stirred by the imprisonment and escapes of this “eighteenth-century Rocambole”, and especially by his escapes across bodies of water because for Cubans the caribbean sea is both a barrier which isolates them and a bridge through which they can flee the island. Drawing on the Spanish lyric tradition, this essay examines the different meanings that water has in Arenas’ novel and focuses, in particular, on the apparently constrating symbolic envisionings of the sea as death and freedom.