Passion and Death of Father Deusto
Critical edition

As a homosexual novel, Passion and Death of Father Deusto It undoubtedly belongs to the tragic mode: there is much anguish, much introspection, much naming-without-naming—“How can I stay here, where everyone says we are... what we are not?”—much shame, and a suicide at the end. This suicide, in fact, allows us to measure the distance between this novel and the homoerotic fictions D'Halmar has already written. Cat y The Smoke's Shadow in the Mirror they were basically elegiac texts that celebrated a primarily Platonic pederasty; they avoid overtly homosexual conflict and end without deaths, but with separations. In contrast, Passion and death..., as with other accounts of The hallucinated where homosexual conflict becomes evident (even if it remains unnamed), it inevitably ends in death, with the homosexual in the role of a sacrificial victim. It would be anachronistic to ask a Latin American writer from the 1920s for a different treatment of the subject, but, moreover, the outcome allows D’Halmar to reach different (and ideologically diverse) readers; in this regard, his ambiguous treatment of the subject is revealing Little oliveSometimes he describes the boy as a “viperous” calculator, attributing to him “the feline precocity of bohemians”; at other times, as a loving and honest being.