Esquivel respins a tale from Mexico’s complex beginnings

Malinche

A Novel

Laura Esquivel

Translated from the Spanish by Ernesto Mestre-Reed

Illustrations by Jordi Castells

Atria Books: 194 pp., $22.95

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NO other female Mexican writer is more familiar to American readers than Laura Esquivel, whose first novel, “Like Water for Chocolate,” sold more than 3 million copies and inspired a popular feature film. Ever since that blockbuster’s 1992 publication, Esquivel’s ardent fans have been eager for more of the same quirky enchantment. But the next novels she published in the U.S. -- “The Law of Love” (1996) and “Swift as Desire” (2001) -- were disappointing.

Although Esquivel’s writing is always ambitious and inventive, in those books the mild flaws that were no big deal in “Chocolate” -- thin characterization, a fondness for New Age theological speechifying -- grew into serious distractions, overpowering their ingenuity.

Still, the publication of Esquivel’s latest novel is hopeful news: Maybe she’ll manage to summon the right combination of romance, spiritualism and celebration of traditional Mexican culture that made “Like Water for Chocolate” so irresistible.

In “Malinche,” Esquivel could not have found a more promising historical subject. “La Malinche,” or “the captain’s girl,” was the nickname given to a 16th century indigenous slave who became the translator for Hernan Cortes during his conquest of Montezuma’s Aztec empire. She later gave birth to one of the conquistador’s children, a son considered by many to be the first recorded mestizo, or person of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, making her a kind of Eve figure in Mexico’s creation story.

There are dozens of contradictory legends about La Malinche’s roles as Cortes’ translator and lover. Many historians have condemned her as a betrayer of her people for smoothing the way for Cortes’ triumph, while others have argued that she managed to save thousands of lives by encouraging negotiations between Cortes and Montezuma.

She’s been thoroughly denounced as well for bearing Cortes’ illegitimate son. Her nickname continues as an insult in Spanish: to call a woman a “malinche” is essentially to call her a whore, while “malinchismo” means the rejection of one’s own culture in favor of a foreign one.

La Malinche has also been portrayed variously as a victim, as a woman of authority who earned great respect from the Spaniards as “la dama de la conquista” and as an intensely feminine earth mother. She’s captured the imagination of many writers and artists including Carlos Fuentes and Diego Rivera. Her house in Mexico City, nearly 500 years old, is still inhabited today, and for many Mexicans it bears as many complicated stigmas as the woman who once lived there.

A touchstone for cultural issues -- race, sex, class, slavery, conquest, language, religion -- and a flat-out fabulous story, La Malinche’s life is extraordinary material for a novelist. But a great subject alone will not carry a novel to greatness, and may even make a bad book worse. “Malinche” is precisely that worse case, a stiff and didactic narrative that shows a standoffish disregard for the technical conventions that keep a reader involved in a work of fiction.

Esquivel begins gamely enough with the quasi-mythological tale of La Malinche’s birth and elaborate naming ceremony, where she is called Malinalli. These scenes set an appropriately spiritual tone for a story in which religion plays a major role: When Cortes arrives in the teeming heart of the empire with only a few hundred men, he owes his easy triumph to a widespread belief that the Spaniard is a welcome incarnation of the ancient god Quetzalcoatl, who has returned to end the dreaded ritual of human sacrifice.

But things fall apart quickly after the book’s opening pages. From a colorless, history-lesson introduction of Cortes to his recognition of 15-year-old Malinalli’s translation skills, from the description of Cortes’ rape of Malinalli in a riverbed to the fall of the enormous city of Tenochtitlan and Montezuma’s death, the narration lurches awkwardly forward. Often it slows to a standstill to allow Esquivel to give long, stultifying disquisitions on the intricacies of Maya religious beliefs, and then elsewhere it sketches too many events too quickly -- delivering a smallpox epidemic, the final siege and massacre of the Tenochans, the birth of Malinalli’s son and the strangulation of Cortes’ Spanish wife in only nine pages.

If the novel’s pacing ranges from paralytic to bewilderingly rushed, its characters are just plain dead on the page. Esquivel doesn’t bother much with physical description: Cortes’ “appearance was that of a strong, brutish and savage animal,” with “eyes not to be trusted,” and all she mentions of Malinalli are “her adolescent breasts, firm, enormous” and, after she is raped, “her black eyes, more beautiful than ever.” Nothing in the course of the narrative convincingly explains why Malinalli is attracted to her vanquisher, why she feels “that on Cortes’s lips, in his saliva, there was a taste of the divine, a piece of eternity, and she wanted to savor it.”

Esquivel presents their relationship exclusively, and exhaustingly, as a cosmic merging of souls, but doesn’t make enough effort to provide the earthly details that might animate these figures. And since her storytelling prohibits a reader’s sympathy for Malinalli, Esquivel’s worthy ambition to rescue La Malinche’s reputation becomes an impossible dream.

It’s clear that Esquivel has been overwhelmed by her material, but another explanation for the novel’s failure can be found in her earlier success. “Like Water for Chocolate” was based on a brilliant gimmick. It overturned the conventions of the traditional folkloric tale by reversing its focus from a male-dominated world to a feminine one, shifting the drama -- augmented with liberal sprinklings of magic realism and classic Mexican recipes -- from the battlefield to the kitchen.

This worked like a charm, but it also seems to have persuaded Esquivel that a high-concept idea will excuse all kinds of deficiencies. Readers were thereafter tantalized with the multimedia production of “The Law of Love” (the novel was accompanied by a compact disc and graphic illustrations), and then with innovative notions about communication in “Swift as Desire” (in which a telegraph operator who is dying of Parkinson’s disease conveys his life story through Morse code). Because they lacked the necessary foundations of solid storytelling, each book collapsed.

The new book is different, of course. Still, Esquivel has used the grandness of its subject to cloak its defects in much the same way.

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Donna Rifkind’s reviews have appeared in a number of publications, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.