These Women Persist Against Fate, Living by Same Code as Men

THE WISE WOMEN OF HAVANA

A Novel

By Jose Raul Bernardo

HarperCollins/Rayo

324 pages; $24.95

In his first novel, “The Secret of the Bulls,” Jose Raul Bernardo vividly depicted the high cost of machismo culture in his native Cuba--and the subtle yet courageous ways in which a wise and loving woman could mitigate its excesses. In his latest novel, “The Wise Women of Havana,” Bernardo not only returns to this theme, but even to the same family: genial, blond Maximiliano, a spirited, freethinking, music- and poetry-loving butcher of German descent, and his gentle, charming and wise wife Dolores, who was spurned by her family for marrying a man they deemed below her station.

By now, it is 1938: Cuba is suffering from the Great Depression and Maximiliano and Dolores’ youngest child, the curvaceous blond Marguita, has just married handsome young Lorenzo, who works at a bookstore. Madly in love, the young couple has moved in with his parents’ family: stiff, formal Spaniards who came to Cuba in 1902, grew successful in the wine business only to suffer a severe financial setback in the Depression. Living with his family will enable Lorenzo to save on rent while helping out his parents with a weekly stipend. Reserved, rather somber, Lorenzo’s relatives could not be more different from Marguita’s fun-loving, emotionally demonstrative Cuban folks.

But, although Marguita is prepared to make some adjustments, it soon becomes clear that the situation is intolerable when, one night, as the young newlyweds are engaged in passionate lovemaking, Marguita is shocked to see Lorenzo’s solemn, horse-faced spinster sister Lolo standing in the doorway staring at them. Without further ado, Marguita, her husband in tow, moves back to the barrio to live near her parents. The ever-helpful Dolores helps them settle in, happy to have her favorite child so close by again. But a feud has been born. Marguita’s heart burns with the desire for revenge, and not even Dolores seems able to persuade her to forgive her sister-in-law.

For men, we learn, are not the only ones infected by the unwritten code of honor, pride and vengeance. Marguita feels the same need: “This is what her criollo heart keeps telling her she must do: Avenge yourself. This is what the criollo world in which she has lived all her life commands her to do: Avenge yourself. Affronts must be paid for--the criollo code demands it--for only then can the affronted person live honorably. This is the same code that forces a man to cleanse his soiled honor by killing not only his adulterous wife but her lover as well. Criollo men are not the only ones who have to live by this code. Criollo women must, too.”

But there are other values--wiser, more compassionate and even more strongly held. These are the values that guide Dolores’ actions and that she tries to pass on to her charming but stubborn daughter. At the same time, the reader (unlike Marguita, Lorenzo, Dolores and the rest of the family) also gets to learn about Lolo’s lonely existence, her shyness, her sense of inferiority. Tall, slender and striking, Lolo has a good job as a telephone operator but has no idea how to cope with the impudent fellows who leer at her on the streets. Only when she meets a gentle, attractive young priest does she begin to feel the stirrings of love. But a priest?

Bernardo builds his novel from the literary equivalent of solid blocks of vivid, contrasting colors: the groom’s staid Spanish family, the bride’s gregarious Cuban one; the pious priest, the freethinking butcher; the privations of the Great Depression, the miraculous abundance of food and drink at communal feasts. But unlike fiction that relies on crude contrasts between good and bad, black and white, “The Wise Women of Havana” shows a painterly delight in the sheer variety of colors, and suggests ways in which contrasting hues can be shaped into a harmonious pattern, not so much by the designing hand of Fate, but by the sagacity and persistence of women (and men) like Dolores.

Indeed, although it touches upon a number of somber, highly fraught areas of experience, including jealousy, revenge, unwanted pregnancy, economic hardship and forbidden passion, there is an almost fairy-tale quality to the narration and story line. Occasionally, Bernardo finds himself on the wrong side of the line between genuine sentiment and facile sentimentality, but certainly not often enough to mar the reader’s enjoyment of the story he tells so winningly.

Appropriately, the novel is also available in a Spanish edition: “Las Sabias Mujeres de la Habana.” With its clear language, soothingly repetitive sentence patterns and dramatic story, it might also be a good book in both versions for English-speaking readers who are learning Spanish and Spanish-speaking readers learning English.