while interspersing information about his biography. There are two levels of information: that given by Cabral in his conversations, and that provided by Guerriero. In the information that Guerriero gives us, she anticipates using prolepsis what the singer-songwriter’s life will be like, which is a life that we will discover later. These are prolepses that sound almost like prophecies.

-I have no memories of that time. I was not interested in anything. I just wanted to sleep and die in my sleep. I didn’t want to live. Waking up was a torture. It seemed to me that life would always be like that.

But life was something else (2013: 200).

The prolepsis is a resource that Guerriero uses to provide small doses of information that sustain the story on a narrative thread of constant tension.

In addition, Guerriero is capable of narrating the future to us from the past, or in other words, within an analepsis she introduces a prolepsis; or from the future she returns to the past, so that within a prolepsis she introduces an analepsis. Mastery in achieving these leaps across time is one of the identifying features of her writing. Following is an example of a paragraph created as an analepsis with a leap into the future, or a prolepsis, but which is still in the past, which is found in the work entitled Facundo Cabral, Soy leyenda (Facundo Cabral, I am a legend):

Two days later he returned to Tierra del Fuego by plane with a job offer for his mother as a custodian in a school in Tandil, in the south of the Buenos Aires Province. Thus, Facundo began to live in a city where, four years later and at the light of a candle, he would begin to discover sex at the hand of Mirna, the shoemaker’s daughter, on the worn fabric of a very green sofa (2013: 201).

3.2.2. Time: temporary distortions of duration

In terms of temporary distortions of duration, Genette distinguishes the summary story, or the story in which time is accelerated; the descriptive pause, in which time stops or freezes; the temporal ellipsis, or omission in the sequence of narrative discourse of segments of the story being told. The latter can be explicit, with an indication of the time elapsed, “two years later...”; it can be implicit, as it is not stated in the text but can be inferred; and hypothetical, as it is impossible to locate and is revealed a posteriori (1989: 144-171).

According to Genette, in the classic fictional narrative there is a rhythm that emerges from the opposition and alternation between non-dramatic summary stories that would have the function of keeping the reader waiting and being a liaison with dramatic scenes that play a decisive role in the action. As we will see below, Leila Guerriero’s story does not leave any of the traditional narrative movements untouched, so that her texts acquire a special rhythm, which goes even beyond the rhythm of the classic fictional narrative of which Genette speaks.

To understand from where the rhythm proceeds, it is necessary to first understand the concept of frequency. Genette explains (1989: 172) that narrative frequency can be defined as the relations of frequency between narrative and diegesis. An event is not only likely to occur, but can also be reproduced or repeated. We can say that a story can narrate:

once what happened once: this would be a singulative scene

n times what has happened n times: this would be a repetition of a singulative scene