The Mask of el Santo – Daniel Rosa Hunter

[La Pequeña; 2024]

Literature is described as ‘taking risks’ when it gives the reader a sense of reflective uncertainty. From within that uncertainty, doors open to possible future worlds. These worlds are constructed from what we might call distillations of the real: fragments of everyday life recorded in notebooks, diaries, letters, photographs, and audiovisual materials. These elements are testimonies of reality, suggesting that reality itself is destabilized by both reading and fiction. When an author appropriates different modes of self-writing or outwardly directed devices to construct a self before the reader, a poetic convention emerges—at times personal, at others collective—that shapes not only the representation of the writer’s experience but also the imagined reader’s journey through the unfolding mystery.

This raises an intriguing question: What happens when, in autofiction—a narrative form that merges author’s identity with that of the character and narrator—the writer adopts the persona of a masked figure from the world of professional wrestling? Does an autobiographical pact still hold between writer and reader when authorship is veiled, not only by the imprint of other texts but also by the influence of popular culture? And what unfolds when a writer turns to notes scribbled in a notebook or the daily entries of a personal journal to document the transformations brought about by this new, disguised identity? These are just some of the questions that emerge in Daniel Rosa Hunter’s La máscara del santo (The Mask of el Santo). This book leads the reader into a state of reflective drift: navigating the vast ocean of everyday life through the lens of the literary.

In this work, edited and printed by the Puerto Rican publishing house La Pequeña, Daniel Rosa Hunter suggests a world in which a writer’s life merges not with what he is writing but rather with what he is reading. A scholar of Mario Levrero’s work and an avid reader of Enrique Vila-Matas, Mercedes Halfon, Tamara Kamenszain, Alejandro Zambra, and Clarice Lispector, Hunter devises an experiment to prove this hypothesis: he will lock himself in his apartment and spend his days reading and documenting in a survival diary of sorts, all without ever turning on a single light.

As The Mask of el Santo takes shape, so do a series of self-imposed experimental protocols that Daniel, a recent Puerto Rican graduate of a Master’s program in Literature in Madrid, sets out to execute. He takes on a regimen of expressive devices that provide the book’s structure: an epilogue, notebook entries each titled “Discourse on the mask” (Discurso de la Máscara), and fragmentary notes broken down by the hour and organized by date that chronologizes and contextualizes changes in both the writer’s body and subjective experience. Daniel is at once conducting and recording his experiment.         

As these protocols are carried out, something occurs that amplifies the possibility for experimentation. While alone in his apartment, Daniel begins wearing a luchador mask—an emblematic piece closely tied to the spectacle of professional wrestling that his friend Antonio had brought him from Mexico. This mask is not only an object designed to conceal and transform identity, but also part of a broader world of popular theater with its own logic and rules of production. In the first chapter of Mythologies, the french semiotician Roland Barthes describes this world as a form of exaggerated entertainment, where what truly matters is not what one believes, but what can be visually perceived. In The Mask of el Santo, the author’s masked face serves as a vehicle for symbolic expression, inviting the reader to rethink some of the principles of the so-called “autobiographical pact,” as conceived by french literary critic Philippe Lejeune in the field of literary theory.

“I’ve always wanted to be someone else,” Daniel says in the first Discurso de la Máscara. As the experiment develops, and his diary entries alongside it, Daniel begins to distill the real in order to create his own “reality”, venturing into fiction. At one point, while reflecting on a collection of Polaroid photographs on the wall of his apartment, Daniel recalls the moment captured in a particular image:

“It’s me, wearing the mask of el Santo, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror—just like I’m doing now.”

Daniel’s contemplation—born from the memory of an image while simultaneously recognizing himself wearing the mask in front of the mirror—begins to unravel the relationship between reader and author. In the disguised self, gazing at its own reflection, an ambiguous pact is established—what Spanish literary critic Manuel Alberca terms an “anti-autobiographical pact”—where the identity of the mask merges with the figure of the author, the character, and the narrator.

In this introspective moment before the mirror, the principle of truthfulness associated with the “autobiographical pact” is sharply transgressed, giving way to autofiction and provoking both perplexity and ambiguity in the reader. As Daniel stands masked before his own reflection, a metaliterary homage takes shape, one that echoes figures like Emilio Renzi and Arturo Belano from the works of Ricardo Piglia and Roberto Bolaño. These characters, transcending conventional notions of authorship, embody both what the writer aspires to become and what the author has managed to escape.

However, the plot of The Mask of el Santo does not remain entirely confined to the space of the apartment. Hunter juxtaposes multiple fictional realms—understood as his own memory woven through different temporalities and global latitudes—throughout the entire textual framework. Beyond Daniel’s experiment, The Mask of el Santo features stories and quotes transcribed from his readings, writing exercises, rewritings, and literary appropriations. These elements are supported by a structure that may seem simple at first glance but is, in reality, profoundly complex. This text, published thanks to the editorial work of Puerto Rican authors Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón and Juanluís Ramos, constructs a labyrinth where the reader explores the reverse side of Daniel’s experiment, his experience transformed into art. It is no surprise that a life deeply entwined with reading offers a book with many literary entry points, but whose metaliterary introspections, intersections, and entanglements, make exit far more complicated. 

This is what Daniel posits in the third Discurso de la Máscara, where his literary creation is closely tied to a poetic practice. In his apartment, which he sees as a study or creative laboratory, Daniel writes a testimony of his creation—evidence of the laborious process that brings the work into being. That is, the hands typing on a computer, the gaze resting on the surface of a book, the impulse to conceal a face behind a mask, and the body beginning to inhabit new folds of sensibility. The Mask of el Santo constructs a “self” that relentlessly follows itself.

I don’t know what kind of ideas come to mind, but this has nothing to do with infidelities, orgies, drugs, wild parties, or any of that crazy stuff. No. I literally want to do an experiment. With a method. With a control group and a test group (my memory of high school science is fuzzy, but we’ll do our best).

Then it came to me, almost like a revelation: I was sitting on the toilet, taking a shit—or maybe I had already taken a shit and was just sitting there, thinking, staring at my phone, soaking in my own laziness, my own stench. I realized I hadn’t turned on the light when I came in (it was a little after one, I think). A beautiful light was filtering through the window, lighting up the whole bathroom in this soft, clean glow—it made me feel like I was underwater.

Immediately, this poem came to me. I wrote it down in my Notes app, and now, with some shame, I transcribe it here:

There is a divine light in the bathroom

If I weren’t writing this

And shitting

I would read until sundown

And remain in the darkness

Of night

Here in the bathroom

Separating letters from shadows

So it occurred to me that maybe I could try it: spend all the time that I had the apartment to myself without turning on the lights. That is, rely entirely on sunlight and moonlight.

Obviously—as you’re probably already thinking—at night, other things would light the place besides the moon: the streetlights, the glow from my neighbors’ apartments (especially the kitchen light from the third-floor unit on the left—that infernally pale bulb that reminds me of a hospital waiting room), cars, ambulances, maybe a fire somewhere, a meteor, a flying saucer… who knows. Life has made a point of reminding me that anything is possible.

Just now it occurred to me, for example, that the fridge has a light—so I’ll have to find a way to turn that off. Maybe there’s a switch in the back. I’d rather not unplug it.

Ah, right—the hypothesis. Well, I’m not entirely sure. For now, the challenge is simply to write a survival diary of sorts, and to read and exist without ever turning on a single light.

No sé qué ideas vienen a la mente, pero nada de infidelidades u orgías o drogas o fiestas estruendosas o cualquier otra cosa loca. No. Yo quiero literalmente hacer un experimento. Con Métoda. Con un grupo control y otro no-control (mi memoria de la clase de ciencias en highschool es vaga, pero lo intentamos). Y se me ocurrió esto, casi como una revelación: estaba sentado en el inodoro cagando o ya había cagado y me quedaba ahí pensando, usando el teléfono, bañando en mi propia peste, mi propia pereza. Y noté que no había encendido la liz al entrar (eran las una y pico, creo). Se filtraba una luz hermosa por la ventana, iluminaba todo el baño de manera difusa y limpia, daba la sensación de estar bajo el agua. Inmediatamente se produjo este poema que anoté en los Notes y ahora transcribo aquí con vergüenza:

Hace una luz divina en el baño

Y si no estuviera escribiendo esto

Y cagando

Leería hasta que la luz muera

Me quedaría en la oscuridad

De noche

Aquíi en al baño

Separando las letras de las sombras

Entonces se me ocurrió que quizás pudiera hacer eso: estar todo el tiempo que tuviese el apartamento para mí sin encender una sola luz. Es decir, depender exclusivamente de la luz del sol y de la luna. Obviamente, como quizás ya se está pensando, en la noche me estarián alumbrando otras cosas aparte de la luna: los focos, la luz que sale del apartamento de mis vecinos (especialmente la de la cocina del tercero izquierda, esa bombilla tan infernalmente pálida que me acuerda a la sala de un hospital), los carros cuando pasen, las ambulancias, algún fuego, algún meteorito, platillos voladores, quién sabe. La vida se ha encargado de reafirmar el hecho de que puede suceder cualquier cosa.

Ahora se me ocurre, por ejemplo, que la nevera tiene luz, así que tendré que apagarla de alguna forma. Quizás haya un switch detrás. No quisiera desenchufarla.

Ah, claro, la hipótesis. Pues, no lo sé. Por ahora el reto es escribir esta especie de diario de subsistencia y leer y existir sin encender una sola luz.

The Mask of el Santo is an artifact of daring and courageous poetics, one that is also deeply reflective. Without a doubt, this book—which might be considered a scene of sustained reading over time—will spark significant discussion in Puerto Rican literary circles. As Ricardo Piglia declared in El Último Lector: “Reading is not just a practice; it is a way of life.“

Rodney Lebrón Rivera (Las Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1991) pursued graduate studies in history at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, and obtained a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Princeton University. Heather Houde is a Philadelphia based artist, writer, and translator. Her creative education has been primarily self taught, through many books, hours in her studio, and by way of osmosis from her friends. Her writing and translation has appeared in Gathering of the Tribes, Latin American Literature Today, The Common, and Southwest Review. Her first book of short stories titled Thin Skinnedwas published in 2022 by Antípoda. Her translation of Gabriel Carle’s Bad Seedwas published by Feminist Press in 2024. By day, she builds websites.