2 ?b90

131
appearing in the dream; he rightly draws attention to the introduction
to the passage (,, Esa noche volvieron las pesadillas a cabalgar de nuevo
las Erinnias" (1,196) which refers to "Las Furias o Eumenides, cuya
47
funcidn, entre otrast era la de castigar a los parricidas. " As we
have already observed, Santi points out the presence of the Erinnias
image in Cemi's night of illness. Here, however, the critic links it
with the Colonel's comments on Cemi's persistent nightmares which he
(the Colonel) refuses to take seriously:
para no hacer acopio de laberintos, como despuds,
desdichadamente, harlan los padres con los hijos,
convirtiendo una etapa en un sistema y llevando
aquellos presuntos Edipos de bolsillo a enfrentarse
con la cara pecosa del siquiatra y comenzando alli
realmente la danza decapitada de horribles complejos
(1,200-201)
Lezama's thinly-veiled reference to Freudian theory is surely a warning
to the unwary that Cemi's condition of mind is not psychotic. He suffers
not from an easily-defined oedipal complex, but rather from a poetic in-
tuition which leads him on inexorably to cultivate those qualities inhe-
rent in his mother's gentle personality. The Erinnias are mentioned in
order to implant in the reader's mind the concept of the father being
replaced by the son; it is present in the child's imagination largely
because of the image of the preserved corpse crumbling to dust, that is,
an image of life disintegrating in an instant.
Santa Flora's waxen perfection exudes an aura of concrete reality
which confuses Cemi even more, until he is convinced that the religious
image is the body of the dead saint. Lezama is unusually explicit in
his description of Cemi's lack of understanding, putting much emphasis
on his tender years: "iba descubriendo los objetos,, pero sin tener una
masa en extenso que fuera propicia a la formaci6n de anAlogos ya los
agrupamientos de las desemejanzas en torno a ndcleos de distribuci6n y
-de. nuevos ordenamientos" (1,198). In other words,, his immature mind