A foxy hero returns to duel with his inner selves

The setting is a rocky, sage-scented mesa in 18th century California. An evil Spanish governor sits in his mansion, and as a slave girl brings his evening’s claret his rheumy eyes narrow upon her lavish cleavage. In one hand, he clutches a pernicious writ, a mandamus that will send some innocent monk or mestizo to the stake. In the other, he fondles his pen with smooth white fingers. He dips the quill into his inkwell; he raises it into the air, preparing to anoint the malicious missive with his signature.

But then -- just in time! -- comes the sound of breaking glass. A black-masked figure wearing a cape and very tight pants comes hurtling through a window. The bandit cries, “Halt, you swine, at once!” -- and miraculously flicks both pen and paper from the governor’s clutches with the wicked tongue of a bullwhip. A rapturous fencing match ensues; the governor is, of course, no match for the intruder. As our hero stalks in a circle around his prey, knocking the weapon from his opponent’s flabby hand, he goes a step too far in his pursuit of justice. The masked man raises his sword over the quaking governor and with three rapid swipes carves the letter Z in the loser’s pallid cheek. Suddenly, we understand: Our vigilante is no uncomplicated savior. He is half-mad, as well as on the side of Right. His actions border on the disgusting. He is dangerous, uncontrolled. We should fear him.

He is ... Zorro!

The iconic author Isabel Allende (demiurge of “The House of the Spirits” and “Eva Luna”) has taken as her subject for her latest novel this intriguing figure, who has been haunting fans of pulp fiction since he first appeared in serial thrillers back in the early 1900s. In her hands, Zorro is the alter ego of the Spanish Indian magnifico Diego de la Vega and he emerges as a bundle of disturbing contradictions between light and shade, proportion and passion. It is within these tensions that the character is revealed as a classical hero whose fractured personality is of the kind described by no less than Friedrich Nietzsche, who limned the eternal battle between our Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in “The Birth of Tragedy.”

Diego de la Vega, whose adventures take him from the conquered lands of California to the tyrant-littered landscape of post-Napoleonic Spain, already bears a split ancestral personality on the day of his birth, as he is the heir of a California patron, Alejandro de la Vega, and the native warrior Toypurnia. Sent by his father for seasoning at the Spanish royal court, Diego soon learns that the atrocities he witnessed in Pueblo de Los Angeles -- bloody pirate raids, the mistreatment of Indians at the hands of the church -- find their equals in Barcelona. First, Napoleon’s lackey, Monsieur Roland Duchamps, hurls members of the secret Spanish resistance group known as La Justicia into the Chateau d’If-like dungeon La Ciudadela; after the French lose Spain, the despotic Ferdinand VII and his lieutenant Rafael Moncada throw French sympathizers into the same black hole. The victims of this second purge include Tomas de Romeu, the father of Diego’s beloved, Juliana, as well as Manuel Escalante, Diego’s ferocious fencing instructor.

Something, then, is rotten in the state of Spain, and Diego cannot in good conscience ignore these outrages. Yet he soon takes a strange turn as a hero, one that makes him a literary cousin of the equally contradictory Sir Percy Blakeney in Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s fabulous “The Scarlet Pimpernel.”

By day, Allende’s narrator tells us, Diego attempts to rectify the sovereign’s oppression of the poor by observing two similar codes of honor: The first is the Shoshone rule of okahue, which encompasses the “five basic virtues: honor, justice, respect, dignity, and courage.” His second ethical guide comes from the world of swordfighting, introduced to him by Escalante, who shows Diego that “fencing was not only skill in handling the epee and the sword, but also a spiritual art.”

Following these principles, Diego combats Moncada and other totalitarians with a cool head. When Moncada tries to coerce the gorgeous Juliana into marrying him by promising to release her father from La Ciudadela and then -- gasp! -- grabs “a fragrant, silken fistful [of her hair] and kiss[es] her hard on the mouth,” Diego bursts “into the library with his sword in hand, puffing with indignation.... [But at] last he was in control of his impulsive temperament, something his maestro had emphasized from the beginning.” In this controlled state of mind, Diego manages to disarm Moncada and set the tip of his sword to his rival’s chest. True to the teachings of okahue, he does not kill his victim:

“ ‘For the second time, I have the pleasure of sparing your life, Senor Moncada. I hope this will not become a habit,’ he said, lowering his sword.”

Once Diego takes on the night-crawler identity of Zorro, however, his restraint evaporates. When his sensei Escalante is imprisoned for being a member of La Justicia, Zorro springs him, and the guards feel his lawless wrath: “The sensation [Zorro] experienced as steel pierced flesh was indescribable. He was suffused with a blend of unholy exaltation, repugnance, and triumph; he lost all notion of reality and was transformed into an animal.”

Later, Diego begins to distance himself further from Zorro by acting the part of a fop, a la Pimpernel (“he started imitating the precious mannerisms and tight trousers of ... an effeminate artiste”), a device that allows Allende to add an ambiguous layer of straight-gay conflict to the racial dichotomies that beat at the heart of the novel. It additionally helps deepen her accessible, philosophic theme, first described by Nietzsche in 1871: that characters in high tragedy (and real life!) are torn between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. The former instinct propels heroes toward order, beauty and rationality, which Nietzsche associates with the god of light; the latter inclination drives them toward chaos and ecstasy, personified by the god of wine.

Like Oedipus (as well as Heathcliff, Michael Keaton’s Batman, “The Count of Monte Cristo’s” Edmund Dantes, among others), Allende’s Zorro is forged in these crucibles of harmony and misrule.

“Until that moment [when Diego fights with Moncada] Diego had not been conscious of his dual personality,” Allende writes so piquantly of her character. “[O]ne part Diego de la Vega, elegant, affected, hypochondriac, and the other part El Zorro, audacious, daring, playful. He supposed that his true character lay somewhere in between.”

As Allende plays the part of a medicine woman, drugging us with sword ripostes and lightning-quick escapes on foaming steeds, she teaches us about these excruciating boxing matches between Freud’s id and superego. The lesson is also plastic enough to reach the panoramas of colonial history. The struggle between Diego’s okahue and Zorro’s beastliness is a miniature enactment of the battle exploding all around our swashbuckler. Today, the changeable Dionysus is our darling, and we are bored with the peaceable Apollo, but Zorro likewise reveals the wine god’s less pretty mysteries: He inspires the upheavals of colonialism, brutal revolution and the vacuum these forces create, which can give rise to tyranny, either in the Americas or Napoleon’s Europe.

The one place where the novel’s theme seems more muted, it should be noted, is between the lavender-scented bedsheets clinging to the plush-bosomed ladies who populate its pages.

We can forgive a Dionysian hero any amount of jubilant bloodshed, but if for even a moment he forces himself upon a woman -- as the rake Moncada did -- he loses all credibility. Allende makes sure that Zorro never explicitly violates this cardinal rule of adventure fiction. Diego/Zorro is chastely devoted to the sloe-eyed Juliana (who runs off ungratefully with a pirate). Moreover, to the extent that we might suspect Zorro’s tight pants of peeling off far too freely in the presence of panting virgins, this is only hinted at, occurring off screen:

“Carnal love is one aspect of Zorro’s legend that he has not authorized me to divulge ....[but] I would swear that as soon as he jumps from the balcony to terra firma, he forgets the lady he was embracing only moments before.”

This is where Allende’s discreetly subversive talent really shows, for the tensions described by Nietzsche should never be neatly reconciled. Human beings and history are always multiply faced, despite our nearly magical capacity to deny that this is so. While reading “Zorro” then, you are sure that you are enjoying the story of the best kind of hero. But there is a second tale here, written as if in invisible ink, of the ugly side of Dionysus and the essential strangeness of Apollo. So you turn the pages, cheering on the masked man. You love him. You want him.

But then Allende nudges you, and you aren’t quite so sure. *