"The Stories of Eva Luna" by Isabel Allende
In her novel Eva Luna, Isabel Allende’s character Rolf Carlé asks Eva Luna to tell him a story.
“What about,” she wishes to know.
“Tell me a story you haven’t told anyone else. Make it up for me.”
Rolf has little idea of what’s in store. The stories she does tell him do not all appear in the novel. But they are collected in a separate volume titled The Stories of Eva Luna, which was first published in Spanish in 1989, and in the fine translation to English by Margaret Sayers Peden in 1991.
This is a marvelous book.
I read Eva Luna many years ago, and somehow this volume of stories got left behind by me. I remedied that recently, and now can report that each story is a small treasure with remarkable attention to detail and the human heart, told very often with Allende’s signature sense of humor.
There is especially one very short one titled “Our Secret,” which has a political element that seldom appears in the other tales. But the evidence of that secret provides the moment of deep understanding and caring between the two characters who share it.
The story begins with this remarkable sentence: “She let herself be caressed, drops of sweat in the small of her back, her body exuding the scent of burnt sugar, silent, as if she divined that a single sound could nudge its way into memory and destroy everything, reducing to dust this instant in which he was a person like any other, a casual lover she had met that morning, another man without a past attracted to her wheat-colored hair, her freckled skin, the jangle of her gypsy bracelets, just a man who had spoken to her and the street and begun to walk with her, aimlessly, commenting on the weather and the traffic, watching the crowd, with the slightly forced confidence of her countrymen in this foreign land, a man without sorrow or anger, without guilt, pure as ice, who merely wanted to spend the day with her, wandering through bookstores and parks, drinking coffee, celebrating the chance of having met, talking of old nostalgias, of how life had been when both were growing up in the same city, in the same barrio, when they were fourteen, you remember, winters of shoes soggy from frost, and paraffin stoves, summers of peach trees, there in the now forbidden country.”
The now forbidden country is, of course, Isabel Allende’s Chile, the Chile run by a dictator named Augusto Pinochet for seventeen years to 1990. (That fellow’s name is never mentioned in the story itself.) The “slightly forced confidence of her countrymen in this foreign land” is a necessary result of the Pinochet regime and its murderous policies. The couple does eventually attempt making love later that day. Here is an example of their moment together: “When they had met that morning they had no extraordinary expectations, they had no particular plan, only companionship, and a little pleasure, that was all, but at the hour of their coming together they had been engulfed by melancholy.”
The young man falls into despondency. “He thought he could hear the silence growing within him, he knew that he was coming apart, as he had so often before….” We learn that this trouble has a very real cause, that he has been so terribly damaged, physically and emotionally, by what happened to him in his own country that he may not be able to recover his senses. The couple are unable to make love because of his distress and sadness.
The sensibilities of the young woman immediately go out to him, to attempt to help salve his injured emotions. “She touched his most deeply hidden wound.”
We learn subsequently that this young woman had been similarly damaged by the events in Chile and by her own involvement in them, so like those of the young man. They each have a secret that they are able to share with each other…only with each other. “And then they could embrace,” Allende writes.
This is a very short tale of extraordinary pain brought on by the political cruelty of a murderous regime. It is told nonetheless with such fine tenderness and truthfulness that it gives us the assurance that love is possible under almost any circumstances.
©2024 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this piece.
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