Boquitas pintadas, Manuel Puig's second novel, opens with a display of death-an obituary notice that announces the demise of Juan Carlos Etchepare (the small-time, small-town Don Juan who, as we shall see, functions as both a seductive model and a model of seduction in the text).' This written verification of closure on the life of the novel's protagonist seems to offer us a sign of the finite nature of a text which might otherwise appear ready and able to go on forever. For, along with proliferation of distinct narrative and discursive forms within its pages, the generic model which the formal design of Boquitas pintadas is supposed to replicate-the serial(ized) novel (i.e., folletin) named in its subtitle-suggests a text potentially out of control, a text which might threaten to regenerate itself without end.2 Yet, as it turns out, Boquitas pintadas is in many ways a very controlled text, one whose constituent parts have been very carefully organized and articulated by an authorial figure whose own ludic performance and position are also brought to light by it. It is within this meticulously and, yet, playfully ordered network that we come to see a kind of "perfect match" between thematic material and structural machinery. It is, however, a match that ultimately reveals the author, as well as his protagonist, caught in the act, as it were, orchestrating a set of slippery maneuvers that finally signal their own undoing. In fact, Boquitas pintadas seems to be constructed as a kind of play among formal, discursive and thematic paradoxes which provocatively implicate both the author(ity) behind and the literary and cultural traditions which surround the whole text.