“Merdre!” exclaims Pa Ubu entering the first scene of Ubu Rex, the classic of grotesque classics written by Alfred Jarry, and first performed in December 1896 in Paris. “Shit!” with the R embedded between the last syllable, is the password of the play’s central character, a captain of dragons whom his wife, Ma Ubu, convinces to kill King Wenceslas of Poland and seize total power. The plan is carried out with the help of Captain Bordure, who has promised to cut the monarch in pieces “from head to tail,” which indeed happens during an official parade. The plan is magnificently executed and the kingdom of Poland, which is like saying Latin America without borders, is now ruled by Ubu Rex with the help of Ma Ubu, a sort of ambitious matriarch who together with Captain Bordure persuades the new monarch to be generous, distributing food and money to the subjects of the kingdom to ensure the loyalty of the people to the new regime. Corruption then invades the court: Pa Ubu threatens to kill all those who oppose him, drowns the peasants with new taxes, imprisons Bordure for conspiring, and creates his personal guard to intimidate opponents. But Bordure escapes and goes into exile, where he organizes an invading army in Russia that has its decisive battlefield in Ukraine, where Ubu hopes to face the troops commanded by Brougelas, the surviving son of the family massacre against Wenceslas and eventual heir to the throne. All is intrigue, confusion, nepotism, hallway betrayals, insults, and chaos squared.
The aesthetics of the ridiculous has been born in the portrayal of power and contemporary politics. And it has done so with a masterpiece (“the most extraordinary thing that has been seen in theater for a long time,” wrote André Gide at the time) that reality will copy ad nauseam after the scandal provoked at the Théâtre de L’Oeuvre where Jarry premiered his play “from nowhere,” as he described the Poland where the events take place. And the playful clarity of Ubu blinds to the point of being involuntarily imitated by men and women of any latitude every time a new redeemer adds novel variants to the central features of the character, that endearing idiot who occupies the cycle of the four plays written by Jarry in his pataphysics of power. The most recent contribution to this saga, no doubt, comes from the Miraflores Palace in Caracas, the seat of the Venezuelan Government where Nicolás Maduro decided to get himself reelected for a third consecutive term, making it clear that he is not willing to play secondary roles in this new staging of Ubu Rex.
It would be more comical than tragic to reproduce Maduro’s appearances since the night of July 28 declaring his victory and threatening anyone who does not want to recognize him as president-elect with a slapfight in Bolivar Square. Maduro does not make theater but goes from the reality of the theater to the theater of reality without modifying in the least his dramatic approach before the cameras and the official podium. All of which gives way to caricature and deformity “without time, without place, and without any shame for showing what one tries to hide,” as Jarry said of his creature Ubu. This is the libretto used by Maduro. His pathetic grunts, his wild accusations, his empty rhetoric, his tenacious denial of the reality that surrounds him, the many disguises he adopts dressed as a Venezuelan flag, a farmer, an evening suit, an office suit, vacationer in a guayabera, combative leader with a beret on and his fist raised, are the visible signs of the defeat of a man overwhelmed and with no way out in his struggle to embody the power that is slipping from his hands. His is a countercultural act that implodes from beginning to end, in the upside down of politics. This is how one can understand that he breaks relations with half of the countries that make up the current Latin American Poland, thus decreeing the automatic exile of more than six million Venezuelans who have emigrated for political or economic reasons to the countries that have doubted his surprising electoral triumph. A pataphysical gesture if ever there was one because uselessness and absurdity combine harmoniously with his announcements of banning social networks, the mocking photos against him, the protests in the streets to the cry of “the people united” who, supposedly, is his support base.
Maduro in the role of Ubu is as fantastic as you can imagine in an actor. You can’t ask for more, really. And yet, it happens. Unexpectedly, Ubu is not alone in his representation of victory. He is accompanied by an entourage of observers hired by Ma Ubu to declare the fair results that appoint him King for another six-year term at the helm of Poland’s affairs. And then there is also the left, or a part of the left, which claims to be with Ubu. The Latin American left, which has suffered the unimaginable under right-wing dictatorships and the black hand of authoritarianism, is reluctant to distance itself from the fraud! But that’s the way things are in this part of the Bolivarian territory, Maduro thought. The grotesque rules the hearts to the advantage of the right and the memory of King Wenceslas who is reborn from the ashes, it must be said. Unless the Bermuda triangle created by Lula, AMLO, and Petro is an intermission in search of the gap through which to move towards a recognition of the popular vote. Mysteries of politics, where Ubu’s dignified retreat to share power should not be ruled out. This was, after all, what happened in Chile with Pinochet when he lost the 1988 plebiscite that immortalized him as president for life. Since you cannot win in votes, you win in impunity.
The fraud in Miraflores and its partial recognition says many things. Some of them are ugly to say out loud and some others give food for serious reflection on the pataphysical left of the 21st century. But who could be saved from this charade when Wenceslas’ troops are sweeping Ukraine and Maduro accuses international Zionism of being behind a coup d’état against him, with Chilean Gabriel Boric leading the assault in a conspiracy à la Captain Bordure? The abuse, the discursive delirium, the loud boasting, and above all the verbal eagerness to show himself at the level of his mentor, Hugo Chávez, is what makes Maduro an ultra-parodic Ubu, like some kind of anthropological event where we discover something we did not know we were.
Against those who consider Boric’s exceptional reaction in rejecting fraud and asking for transparency as irrelevant because of its obviousness, his distancing from the pataphysical chorus does not fall on deaf ears. The future of the left not only in Chile but in Latin America could be in his hands, much more than in those of any of his competitors. His gesture arises from a realization as timely as it is necessary: the left cannot lend itself to fraud, because then the left is that fraud and democracy is only a means to reach a dictatorship and perpetuate itself in it. Perhaps seeking to prevent this absolutist turn that fills the yearnings of an extreme left in its search for justice, Boric went ahead and said no, we better count the votes, show them, and there we will see who won and what can be done.
The proposal is humble and seems simple, but it will have consequences for the future. Fortunately for the left in the region, Boric’s position saves the face of a historical ideology that in Miraflores has lived one of its less happy moments with a false victory. The only possible response to such misfortune was foreshadowed by Ubu himself in the fifth and last act of Jarry’s hilarious masterpiece. The scene is paradoxical. Our hero has lost the battle against Brougelas, heir to the titles of nobility of the former King, and now marches into exile before the advancing enemy troops. On the ship that takes him away forever from Poland, Ma Ubu remarks that Wenceslas’ son will have himself crowned immediately following the routine of power. “Je ne la lui envie pas sa couronne” (“He knows what he can do with his crown!”), Ubu replies with a touch of good sense.
It’s time to turn up the volume and pay attention to Ubu’s bare words when the parody ends.
