Latin America’s Life-Affirming Women

A fatal shooting lies at the heart of noted Chilean writer Marcela Serrano’s latest novel. The heroine, Violeta Dasinski, kills her abusive husband, Eduardo. This act of violence transforms the lives of Violeta and her lifelong friend Josefa Ferrer, the narrator. But the way Serrano tells the story, the shooting is oddly muffled, almost insignificant, like the speck of grit in an oyster shell that gives rise to layers of pearl.

In the beginning, we know only that something terrible has happened and that Violeta has been arrested. The year is 1991. The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile has ebbed, but we still aren’t sure that Violeta, an outspoken adherent of left-wing causes, isn’t in some kind of political trouble.

This ambiguity is surely intentional. If someone else hadn’t already said “the personal is political,” Serrano would have coined the phrase in this novel. When Eduardo, a famous writer, tells Violeta, “In this house the intellectual is me,” he isn’t just being a chauvinist pig; he’s expressing something soulless and heartless that made the dictatorship possible.

Josefa, an international singing star, exploits her celebrity to get past the police guarding Violeta’s house and retrieve her friend’s notebooks. Grief-stricken--and guilty for being too absorbed in her career to notice Violeta’s pain--Josefa alternates passages from the notebooks with her own memories. She discovers that she can’t keep their two lives separate.

Eduardo’s cruelties are noted, but in passing. Far more important are the weeks of happiness that Violeta, Josefa and their families enjoyed each summer vacation in a rented “mill house” by a lake in Chile’s mountainous south. For both women, this place represented a promise of utopia or, in Violeta’s words, a “last forest” where human beings could recover a lost personal and social balance.

By the time we find out for sure why Violeta was arrested, at the end of the novel’s first part, it’s no surprise. The shooting occurs offstage, Violeta’s trial likewise--and Josefa’s lawyer husband, Andres, has surprisingly little trouble getting her acquitted, after which Violeta leaves Chile for Central America.

Serrano then gives us an “intermission,” in which a chorus of female ancestral spirits, “we others,” narrate the story of Violeta’s grandmother, Carlota, widowed in a 1939 earthquake, and her mother, Cayetana, who followed a green-eyed revolutionary to their deaths in Guatemala in the 1960s. This is where the novel picks up momentum. Time flows more evenly, scenes are less fragmented, and Serrano establishes her theme: The strength of Latin American women, drawn from both Spanish and native roots, is great enough to overcome their suffering.

In the third part, Josefa is worn out by celebrity and estranged from her children; she fears that Andres, once the ideal husband, is unfaithful. So she journeys to the old colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, to share, if she can, in Violeta’s redemption. Violeta and her American lover, Bob, have a charmingly restored home; Violeta has achieved artistic success weaving tapestries; there’s even a nice Mexican guy around so that Josefa can balance Andres’ presumed affair with one of her own. It’s the “last forest” again, minus their youthful Marxist dreams of changing the world.

Serrano’s vision of Antigua is vivid and life-affirming. The bitter residue of those dreams, however, stains it--and this can’t be intentional. Something humorless and portentous and showoffy, intellectualism to the point of parody, disfigures Serrano’s characters whenever they talk about ideas. They are dead on the page when they try to sum up the predicament of the modern woman, in contrast to how alive they can be when--in the push and pull of love, work, children, parents, the demands of the outer world and the yearning for privacy--they embody it themselves.