Written the same year that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s magnificent film Teorema premiered (on September 7, 1968), Hilda Hilst’s play O visitante , probably written toward the end of that year, may or may not have been inspired by the Italian film. The star of Pasolini’s film, Terence Stamp in the role of Il Visitatore, exudes a hot and angry eroticism that detaches the moorings of sexuality and interpersonal relationships in a staid Milan industrial family, from haughty pater familias to dowdy maid, passing through the mother and various sons, daughters, and cousins. Although Pasolini, despite his own turbulent homoerotic life and perhaps homophobic murder, did not deal much with homosexuality directly in his filmmaking, he certainly did in this, his first major film and international success, based on his own novel by the same name (also released in 1968). ¹ One cannot overlook the fact that Hilst’s play is called O visitante, even though, in the universe of the play, the visitor is, also with a common noun, Corcunda (Corcovado; “Hunchback”). ²

It is not my intent to engage in an examination of the parallels between Pasolini’s novel and film and Hilst’s play, ³ which has had only one modest production. ⁴ Rather, the specter of the major Italian film and text serves to enhance the interest of Hilst’s play and to enrich both its Christological features and the way in which it queers the decent bourgeois family, of which the Brazilian instantiation in the play is every bit as alternately staid and weird as it is in the potential Italian texts.

Playwriting for Hilst was only a fleeting pastime, a transition between her early very successful poetry and her subsequent true métier, the extremely successful and influential experimental—indeed, pornographic, as she herself called them—novels that predominated in the last decades of her life. ⁵ Hilst left eight full-length plays composed between 1967 and 1969, O visitante being the third and one of the four published in 2000 by Editora Nankin; the others remained unpublished until the 2008 Editora Globo edition of all eight under the title of Teatro completo. As such, one is not especially interested in the plays as significant contributions to Brazilian dramatic art. Rather, the brief dalliance with the dramatic form was yet another way for Hilst to work toward her own distinctive literary expression, a discursive form that allowed her to begin configuring narrative worlds that she really only developed in a definitively satisfying way when she settled on short fiction and the novel as predominant literary genres in her oeuvre (without ever abandoning poetry, one must add). Indeed, Alcir Pécora, in his “Nota do organizador,” asserts, first of all, that Hilst’s plays had little to add to the language of university-based protest theater of the period, ⁶ being in the main, works that denounced the oppressions and repressions of the period from the point of view of prevailing left-wing resistant ideologies: indeed one play, Auto da barca de Camiri (1968), has as its backdrop the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.

However, O visitante is “different,” ⁷ and the prefatory note links it to the second part of Hilst’s subsequent novel, Tu não te moves de ti (1980). Be that as it may, as a dramatic text it is distinctively Lorquian. The Lorquian aspects are to be seen both in the mixture of prose and poetry (it is the only Hilst play that makes use of poetry as a form of dramatic dialogue), in the recurrence of certain vital motifs such as the sun and the moon, and, most of all, in the queer challenge to the concept of stable family, fixed gender roles and erotic relationships, and an affective sexuality that raises highly unconventional or scandalous propositions. Aside from leading the reader to recall the nuclear Lorca trilogy, Bodas de sangre (1932), Yerma (1934), and the posthumous Bernarda Alba (1936; not performed until 1945 in Buenos Aires), O visitante , in line with Hilst’s interest in what we call the surreal in most general terms, recalls Lorca’s final great, albeit incomplete play, El público (1929–30; not performed until 1972 in Madrid). However, where El público is a rereading of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, O visitante is, at least in its general outlines, a reformulation of the Christian Annunciation story. ⁸ Teorema is Christological in the way that the Visitor fills each of the members of the modern alienated urban Italian family with sexual grace. By contrast, O visitante is Christological in two ways: the way that Maria’s husband brings impregnation, ⁹ not to Maria, but to her ostensibly sterile mother, Ana (see, however, the following on how Corcunda is also accused by Maria of having sexual relations with her mother) and in the way that the visitor, whom the husband claims to have met along the road as occurs in several major stories of Christ’s miracles, brings sexual grace to Maria’s husband. It is noteworthy that her husband is here called simply Homem and not José. Maria is, apparently, transfixed by the sexual fulfillment of both her husband and her mother in this fashion. In addition to this sort of apparently outrageous retelling of the Marian story, it is likely that Ana will give birth to a third girl child (she senses it will be a girl [p. 177]), also to be named Maria (one other died, as did the respective fathers of the first two Marias). Finally, as sort of a metacommentary on this eccentric retelling of the Marian story, the visitor also ironically gives his name as Meia-Verdade (Half-Truth).

Even as sociohistorical events undermine the model of the Holy Family and cultural alternatives question and even deconstruct it (most notably the constellation of gay marriage partners and the children they are raising), strenuous campaigns promoted by reactionary and ultraconservative forces struggle to maintain the supposed universal—indeed, God-given—legitimacy of the Holy Family formulation (overlooked is the fact that a marriage with the issue of a single child is a formula for economic disaster, which may explain the fact that some allege Jesus had siblings). Even when Mary’s divine conception is acknowledged to be highly irregular (a continual source of waggish humor that includes viewing Joseph, then, as a divine cuckold), it does serve to mystify conception and childbearing as an integral part of this hegemonic social model. ¹⁰ Mary’s entire being is marked by her divine motherhood; she has no other history. Thus, even when the basic facts of human life defy the model of the Holy Family, it continues to be defended as an unquestionable ground zero of human life.

Hilst’s play will have none of this. O visitante anticipates by decades queer revisions of affective relationships that bring into their conjugated universe those based on homoaffective love and desire, along with consequent revisions of the family and other social units. ¹¹ It postulates a realm of lived human experience in which the family includes other sexual dynamics than those associated with the Holy Family model. Indeed, the specific heteronormativity that that model enshrines is noticeably absent from the realm in question. Set in a remote locale—an “almost monastic scene” ¹² (perhaps Hilst had very much in mind her own otherworldly Casa do Sol)—the play postulates an instance of familial society that is somehow separate from and even in defiance of the prevailing model that is likely to be part of the audience’s horizons of sociohistorical knowledge. ¹³ Moreover, the note for the setting ends with a direct allusion to the Nazarene (the geographical locale, of course, of the Holy Family story) and to the Middle Ages, where that story is retold incessantly, including in the auto (religious dramas) and figural or allegorical writing that finds that story in mundane and of...