Gale Virtual Reference Library
"Of Love and Shadows." Isabel Allende. Linda Gould Levine. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2002. 38-54. Twayne's World Authors Series 893. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
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Title:Of Love and ShadowsSource:Isabel Allende.Linda Gould Levine. Twayne's World Authors Series893. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2002. p38-54.Document Type:Work overviewFull Text:COPYRIGHT 2002 Twayne Publishers, COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full Text: Page 38Chapter Three: Of Love and Shadows
When Isabel Allende completed The House of the Spiritsin 1982, she had a concern that many first novelists face: Would she be able to write another novel? This preoccupation did not last long; slowly another story started taking shape in her mind, one that in fact concerned her since her days of political activism in Chile following the 1973 military coup. It was a story that expanded the range of horrors of the Pinochet regime from the vivid suggestions of rape and torture in her first novel to a dramatic portrayal of the plight of the disappeared and their families. De amor y de sombra(1984) (Of Love and Shadows, 1987) is Allende's tribute to those who were "disappeared" by a sinister web of repression that found fertile terrain in the 1970s in many countries in Latin America, such as Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and Uruguay.
Of Love and Shadowsis a novel that not only draws from Allende's interviews with victims and families of the persecuted, but also from an event that threatened to disturb the complacency of Chile's military dictatorship in November of 1978: the discovery of the bodies of 15 murdered peasants in abandoned mine kilns in the region of Lonquén, 50 miles from the capital city, Santiago. According to Allende's own account, she was living in Venezuela when the news of the bodies of the 15 desaparecidos(disappeared) was published throughout the world. The Catholic Church in Chile, one of the few institutions that was active in helping victims of persecution and poverty following the coup, had received notice of the discovery of dead bodies in the mine kilns and sent a delegation of church officials, lawyers, and journalists to verify the report. Upon finding body parts and tattered vestiges of clothing in the mine, the commission requested that the president of the Chilean Supreme Court undertake an investigation to identify both the victims and the perpetrators of the crime. Obliged to comply with the externals of the judicial process, the regime brought to trial eight members of Chile's militarized police (carabineros) held responsible. Although convicted of murder, they never went to jail. Instead, they benefitted from the Amnesty Law decreed by the Pinochet regime in April 1978, which absolved all those guilty of crimes committed up to and including that year. Having sought further to erase Page 39
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Top of Articlefrom public memory the Lonquén chapter and its political symbolism, the military government authorized, in 1980, the dynamiting of the kilns and the construction of a fence to block the area off from the frequent pilgrimages of inhabitants of the region.1
Two years after the discovery of the bodies in the mine, Máximo Pacheco, vice-president of the Chilean Commission on Human Rights and one of the lawyers who initially went to Lonquén to investigate the report, published an exhaustive study of the trial that ensued, complete with the testimony of the families of the disappeared, the accused, and medical examiners, as well as declarations by the Supreme Court and the Archbishop of Santiago. His 1980 book, Lonquén, reached Isabel Allende's hands and provided additional information to the countless press clippings on the event she carefully guarded in her Caracas home. As Allende herself describes in her memoir, Paula:
What happened in Lonquén was like a knife in my belly, I felt the pain for years. Five men from the same family, the Maureiras, had died, murdered by carabineros. Sometimes I would be driving down the highway and suddenly be assaulted by the disturbing vision of the Maureira women searching for their men, years of asking their futile questions in prisons and concentration camps and hospitals and barracks, like the thousands and thousands of other persons in other places trying to find their loved ones…. Every time I thought of them, I was transported with implacable clarity to the times 1 lived in Chile under the heavy mantle of terror: censorship and self-censorship, denunciations, curfew, soldiers with faces camouflaged so they couldn't be recognized…. (P, 281–82)
Compelled to record their story and to bear witness to their tragedy, Allende began Of Love and Shadowson 8 January 1983, exactly two years after she had started to write her first novel. She blends fiction with fact to create a powerful work that straddles several literary genres and situates itself in the middle of testimonial literature, a police novel fraught with suspense, and a tender story of love. Much more limited in chronological range than The House of the Spirits, Allende's second novel takes place during several months of "Another Spring," the title of the first part of the book. Though careful not to refer to either precise chronology or the country's name, the allusions to the military coup five years before, the bombing of the presidential palace, the dissolution of Congress, and the portrayal of the General with his black lens glasses clearly suggest 1978 and Chile as the focal point of the unfolding action.
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The plot is rather complex and warrants a summary: Irene Beltrán, a flamboyant and unconventional young journalist from an upper-class family, is sent by her magazine to Los Riscos to cover the story of a so-called saint. The saint is 15-year-old Evangelina Ranquileo, who is said to perform miracles while in a convulsive trance characterized by erotic body movements and tremors in her house. Irene is accompanied by the photographer, Francisco Leal, the son of exiles of republican Spain and a committed militant engaged in clandestine activities against the regime. Evangelina's noontime fit is interrupted by the arrival of a group of soldiers led by Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez. Ramírez panics at the bulletlike sound of stones rolling down the roof—part of the disorder of the natural world produced by Evangelina's condition—and orders his soldiers to take fire. Disconcerted by his inability to subdue the writhing girl, he approaches Evangelina with the intent of taking her prisoner and is promptly punched in the face and carried out of the house by this 15-year-old girl who acquires the strength of a man during her mysterious trance. Although the soldiers depart in a state of complete humiliation, Ramírez subsequently reappears and takes off with Evangelina, who is never seen again.
Thus begins the suspensefiil political intrigue of the novel, as Irene, gradually awakened to the brutality in her country, attempts, with Francisco's help, to ascertain Evangelina's whereabouts. Her persistent efforts lead her to the discovery of an abandoned mine in Los Riscos where she and Francisco find not only the dead body of Evangelina, but also the corpses of the campesinos from the region who had disappeared in the early days of the military uprising. Five of the victims are from the Flores family and include Evangelina's biological father and brothers. As Allende recounts in the novel, Evangelina was switched at birth and confused with the newborn baby of the Flores family. When the incompetent and intransigent hospital staff refused to acknowledge its error, the two families brought home little girls who weren't their own, but whom they raised as if they were. Evangelina is brought up by her adopted parents, Digna and Hipólito Ranquileo, and their other children. Among them is their oldest son, Pradelio, who falls madly in love with the young woman he has come to know as his sister, and who is so disturbed by her convulsive fits that he confides his worries to his superior, Lieutenant Ramírez.
The girl who belongs by birth to the Ranquileo family is also named Evangelina and is brought up, in turn, by the Flores family, who was active in the Farmer's Union during the period of reform, a clear allusion Page 41
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Top of Articleto the Salvador Allende presidency. It is Evangelina Flores who eventually assumes the difficult role of identifying the remains and torn vestiges of the men she considers her father and brothers. She also provides Irene and Francisco with countless details about the events that occurred the day her family members were arrested and the fruitless journey she and her mother underwent through the legal system. Finally her involvement in solving the crime leads to her exile and her mission of testifying in future years about the plight of the desaparecidosbefore the United Nations and other international organizations "to insure that the men, women, and children swallowed up by that violence would never be forgotten."2
Her story, as well as that of others who were involved in the two crimes, becomes an obsession for Irene. With the active support of the Catholic Church and the prestige of the Cardinal of Santiago, she exposes to the press the web of duplicity and violence behind the crimes and is gunned down as a result. She subsequently heals and is surreptitiously aided in leaving the country together with Francisco, thus beginning the long process of exile that has marked the life of Allende herself and the lives of many other Chileans and Latin Americans in the 1970s.
A plot of this nature heavily weighted with a deep-seated commitment to a pressing political reality and imbued with traditional narrative elements of popular appeal—fast-paced action, unusual events that somehow fit together, violence, unbridled passion, and love—makes Of Love and Shadowsa hybrid text that bears resemblance to the diverse examples of testimonial fiction cultivated in recent decades in Latin America. Written with the intent of using the printed word and a body of fiction to give meaning to the bodies of those who have disappeared or who lack the resources to have their stories told, testimony becomes "a form of combat," a means by which "images of pain and terror are transmuted … into witnesses of survival."3
Although the form of the narrative may vary and range from fragments of real stories included in fictional texts to complete renditions of life stories often "related by a member of the subaltern classes to a transcriber who is a member of the intelligentsia,"4
the role of the author as witness and recipient of another's plight is a central component of the testimonial agenda. Alicia Partnoy summons from memory the voices of her friends in Argentina's detention camps in her testimonial work, The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina(1986). Elena Poniatowska portrays in her 1969 Hasta no verte, Jesús mío(Here's to You, Jesusa!) the account of Jesusa Palancares, a working-class Mexican woman whose long life includes participation in the Mexican Revolution. Isabel Allende, in turn, Page 42
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Top of Articleblends the historical reality of the Lonquén discovery and the tragedy of the Maureira family with the fictional story of Los Riscos, the two Evangelinas, the Flores family, Irene Beltrán, and the other characters who assume a pivotal role in Of Love and Shadows. Much as the Maureira women's courage and, in particular, the daughter who spoke before the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva inspire Isabel Allende, and much as countless women have been moved to action by the deeds of the Guatemalan activist, Rigoberta Menchú, Evangelina Flores's determination inspires Irene Beltrán to publicize her story (Allende, 1986, 53).
The fusion of the historical and the imaginative and the different demands each one imposes on a narrative structure invite speculations on the thoughtful question the critic and historian, Hayden White, has raised: "What kind of insight does narrative give into the nature of real events?"5
Allende's deceptively straightforward text, composed, in fact, of suggestive imagery and countless levels of symbolism, provides stark insights into the complex web of Chilean social and political life during the military regime. I would even suggest that Evangelina Ranquileo's mysterious state, the catalyst for Allende's plot and pointed analysis, transcends its particular circumstance and becomes a representation of disruptive forces in Chile. If, as the writer Raúl Zurita has observed, following the 1973 military coup, truth "sought refuge in … zones of experience" beyond language,6
Evangelina's trance provides a graphic representation of this phenomenon. Her particular truth—manifested in bodily functions beyond the realm of language—is intimately connected to her family dynamics. Evangelina has not only been deprived since birth of her right to live with her biological parents; she has also been deprived of the possibility of actualizing the erotic desire she feels for Pradelio Ranquileo.7
Her adopted father, Hipólito, fearing an incestuous bond between Evangelina and Pradelio—one that in fact has no basis in reality since the two are not related by blood—chastises his son for his physical attachment toward his so-called sister, thereby creating a mechanism of repression that produces severe consequences for both Evangelina and Pradelio.
Within a broader context, the Chilean sociologist, Julieta Kirkwood, has persuasively argued that the authoritarianism emblematic of Chilean society during the Pinochet regime was manifested not only in the military rule that permeated all aspects of public life, but also in the private sphere. The family, in particular, may be viewed as one of the most powerful enforcers of authoritarian culture in all social classes, from the intelligentsia to workers and peasants, even exercising its regulatory Page 43
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Top of Articlerules on "the proletarian family… the basic revolutionary unit."8
Allende appears to substantiate this theory in Of Love and Shadows. Although she cedes to Hip61ito's wife, Digna, a level of autonomy in family affairs when her husband is away working as a clown in a traveling circus, she underlines that Digna takes backseat to him upon his return. Digna is notably silent about his harsh rebukes of Pradelio and her son's subsequent decision to join the armed forces as a means of escaping from the family domain. Given Evangelina's strong desire for Pradelio, a desire that cannot be verbalized; the unusual circumstance of her birth; and the extreme economic deprivation of her daily life, it is not difficult to conclude, as Francisco's father, Professor Leal suggests, that Evangelina is "the abnormal product of a society gone mad: poverty, the concept of sin, repressed sexual desire, and isolation had provoked her sickness" (OLS, 100).
The unleashing of "the vortex of forces too long held in check"9
ultimately leads to Evangelina's death. The defiance of authority underscored in her aggressive behavior toward Lieutenant Ramírez and her implicit transgression of gender norms must be disappeared to maintain a society predicated on the suppression of truth. Yet, even before her disappearance and despite the obvious psychological overtones behind Evangelina's behavior, Allende reveals that no one in the community is able to grasp the nature of her problem. Education and social class are not the only factors that intervene in the community's inability to understand the young woman. Rather, Allende suggests that Evangelina—much like a literary text—is read according to the vested interests of those who have interpretive powers in society. Since no reading is ever neutral but infused with ideology, each social or religious institution interprets the Evangelina phenomenon according to its own strategic role in society. The doctor at the local hospital declares that her problem is hysteria and that she needs tranquilizers and electric shocks; the Protestant reverend attributes the problem to Hipolito's drinking and affirms that Evangelina is the vehicle through which God is calling out to her father to repent; the Catholic priest is convinced that Digna's Protestantism is the root of Evangelina's illness and that God is showing displeasure with her mother's abandonment of the Holy Church; and the earthy midwife of Los Riscos, for whom affairs of the body are a central concern, issues the simple pronouncement, "The girl needs a man" (OLS, 58).
The chorus of voices that intervene in offering their judgments further reveals how the hidden forces and desires that are expressed in Evangelina's trance become part of the public domain, disrupting the Page 44
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Top of Articleso-called normal order of events. Her sickness curiously emerges the day an invasion of frogs covers 270 meters of the main road in Los Riscos, creating the illusion of a "glistening carpet of moss" (OLS, 36).10
While Allende is not interested in developing in her second novel the same tone of magical realism that permeates the initial chapters of The House of the Spirits, she does suggest a parallel between this bizarre disruption of everyday occurrences and Evangelina's trance. As witnessed by Irene and Francisco, the following occurs in the first part of the novel:
At twelve o'clock noon Evangelina fell back on the bed. Her body trembled and a deep long moan, like a love call, ran through her. She began to shake convulsively; her body arched backward with superhuman force. The girlish expression of a few minutes earlier was erased from her disfigured face and she was suddenly years older. A grimace of ecstasy, pain, or lust marked her features…. Outside the dogs howled an interminable lamentation of catastrophe in accompaniment to the sounds of song and prayer. Tin utensils danced in the cupboards, and a strange clatter lashed the roof tiles like a hailstorm of pebbles. A continuous tremor shook a platform in the rafters where the family stored their provisions, seeds, and work tools…. On the bed, Evangelina Ranquileo writhed and twisted, the victim of impenetrable hallucinations and mysterious urgencies. (OLS, 70–71)
The contrast between the dutiful girlish Evangelina and the tormented lustful woman—a radical split in personality—clearly suggests a relationship between schizophrenia and repressed desire.11
Yet, on a political level, this division in self may be interpreted as symbolic of the divided body politic in Chile during the military regime. In a 1986 interview, Allende described Chilean reality in terms that apply both to Evangelina and to society in general: "There is an invisible frontier that separates the apparently ordered world where we live and whose laws we believe we understand, from another world which exists simultaneously, that surrounds us and covers a most terrible orbit" (Allende, 1986, 54). This "terrible" space that tries to hide its presence behind the appearance of normalcy is the sphere of unrestrained violence with its concomitant series of prohibitions. Just as Evangelina's desire for Pradelio cannot be articulated within a family and social structure that represses disorderly forces, Chilean political life in the 1970s is premised on the eradication of disruptive concepts. As Allende narrates in her novel, "'Justice' was an almost forgotten term, no longer mentioned because, like the word 'liberty,' it had subversive overtones" (OLS, 214).
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Class divisions and the pointed dichotomy between the rich and the poor are similarly reflected in Allende's description of the city itself, presumably Santiago, where most of the action occurs. Seen through the eyes of Irene's mother, Beatriz, who shares the regime's enthusiasm for an economic prosperity that only benefits the wealthy, the city glitters with "exotic merchandise that once had been unknown in this country… spiral buildings housing luxury boutiques to satisfy the whims of the newly rich; and high walls hiding the slums of the city, where life did not follow the order of time and the laws of God" (OLS, 177). Of Love and Shadowspowerfully demonstrates that the high walls hiding the other side of the city are not sufficient to conceal the truth; in fact, they are gradually eroded throughout the text as Allende suggests that the two worlds of Santiago are emblematic of the entire country in the late 1970s. In the words of the critic Bernardo Subercaseaux, Chile is "a schizophrenic country or rather two countries…. Standing in opposition to this country of gilded store windows suffering from cultural amnesia, another country persists, however, one that is invisible, that doesn't show itself but that, nevertheless exists…."12
This pressing awareness of a divided nation is highlighted most clearly in the novel by the description of "two countries (that] were functioning within the same national boundaries: one for a golden and powerful élite, the other for the excluded and silent masses" (OLS, 177). Irene herself, personalizing this division, intuits that "Evangelina, the saint of the dubious miracles, was the borderline between her orderly world and a dark unknown region" (OLS, 127). The bodies of the disappeared buried within the darkness of the mine thus become a compelling metonym for the burial of the dissenting body politic that is exhumed in the second part of the novel—appropriately entitled "Shadows"—and that threatens to alter the foundation of the orderly public sphere.
Allende's narrative skill in symbolically reflecting the divisions in Chilean society is also apparent in her fictionalization of the complex relationship between repressive social practices and the individual. The disturbing images of mutilated body parts that are found in the mine graphically represent the psychological alteration, and in some cases, the disintegration, experienced by those forced to live under the dictatorial regime. Further, the suggestive image of the hidden self crystallized in Evangelina Ranquileo's trance reappears in less dramatic form in several other characters, providing subversive models of resistance to the seemingly monolithic body politic. Francisco Leal, trained as a psychologist with a doctorate from abroad, is an example. Suspended from his position Page 46
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Top of Articleat the university after the military coup because "the School of Psychology was closed for being a hotbed of pernicious ideas" (OLS, 47) and unable to find work as a practicing psychologist in a society where those who need him the most—the disenfranchised and alienated—do not have recourse to his services, he takes a job as a photographer at a slick magazine to make ends meet.
While pointedly critiquing through Francisco's story the dictatorship's overt repression of the hidden demons of the psyche, Allende does not condemn her character to social irrelevancy. Rather, his other life, as hidden as the bodies in the mine, evokes details of Allende's own clandestine activities in Chile before her exile to Venezuela. Francisco assists opposition members who enter the country and fugitives who leave it; he aids survivors who hide from the police; and he gathers information on the torturers and compiles reports that are smuggled outside the country "in the soles of priests' shoes and in dolls' wigs" (OLS, 208). In his dual role as militant and photographer, he daily traverses the contours of a divided city and inhabits both a world of pure surface where the illusion of prosperity is projected into the public sphere through the glitzy pages of his magazine and a world of harsh realities where the surface must always be disguised. As Allende narrates: "The same day that he photographed exquisite dresses of muslin and lace, in his brother Jose's barrio he treated the little girl who had been raped by her father, then carried the latest list of victims to the airport where, after reciting the password, he delivered it to a messenger he had never seen before. He had one foot in compulsory illusion and the other in secret reality" (OLS, 83).
Francisco's fragmented existence is similarly reflected in the travails of his brother José, whose spiritual work as a priest is accompanied by his political work in the Vicariate of Solidarity, locating the remains of the desaparecidos, and in the activism of the hairstylist, Mario, whose professional devotion to the cult of surface beauty belies his commitment to exposing the regime's ugly practices. Although these examples, similar to the models of female and male activism in The House of the Spirits, implicitly celebrate the indomitable will of human beings to resist oppression, Allende's novel also suggests the spiritual mutilation of those who lack such inner resources. Francisco's brother Javier, a biologist by profession, is unable to withstand the loss of identity he experiences when he is fired from his job because of his union activities. Isolated, depressed, and seemingly useless, he commits suicide, thereby completing the process of disappearance the regime initiated. While Page 47
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Top of ArticleAllende clearly stresses that personal nullification is much more serious when the forces of unbridled violence intervene, she believes it is also severely damaging on the psychological level when practiced by state apparatuses intent on maintaining power. Deeply concerned about the profound effect of such practices on the individual, she reserves for her protagonist, Irene Beltrân, the most complex transformation of character, a direct consequence of her submergence in the world of shadows.
Initially portrayed as politically naive and accepting of many upper-class values—among them, the justification for the military coup adamantly proclaimed by her fiancé, Captain Gustavo Morante—Irene's odyssey throughout the novel is marked by an increasing sense of separation from her social class, her fiancé, and finally, her country itself. The transformation in her physical appearance from wavy manes and peasant skirts to tied-back hair and long pants and the shifting of her emotional attachment from Gustavo to Francisco are the most obvious signs of the shedding of the external trappings of her former self. Uninhibited and daring, but also "educated to deny any unpleasantness, discounting it as a distortion of the facts," her "angelic ignorance" (OLS, 117) is sullied the day she enters the morgue in search of Evangelina Ranquileo's body. Unable to discount the "extensive marks of beatings" on the body of a young woman, "the burned face, the amputated hands" (OLS, 118) as a distortion of the facts, she confronts for the first time the images and smells she had tried to block out and that reappear in her mind as part of a political reality she can no longer deny—"the smoke of bonfires burning blacklisted books … the outlines of a human body floating in the dark waters of the canal" (OLS, 117–118).
Similar to Allende, whose awakening to the abuses of the military regime was also marked by a desire to use her journalistic skills to tape interviews and to help victims of oppression, Irene's activism has a catalytic effect on other characters in the work and ultimately serves to reveal the potholes in the regime's monolithic discourse. In fact, much as individuals in the novel are mutilated by the incestuous union of the State and the armed forces—two bodies that warrant far more separation than that imposed upon Evangelina and Pradelio—Irene's investigative reporting uncovers signs of disintegration in the military body as well. The sense of unity that is apparent in the military at the beginning of the text when the soldiers appear at the Ranquileo household and invade "in a body … with weapons in hand" (OLS, 71) is carefully eroded in subsequent sections of the novel, much as the corpses buried in the mine. The narrative strategies that Allende employs in the novel Page 48
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Top of Articleand in particular the introduction of first-person accounts contribute to this endeavor by creating the effect of taped testimonies that capture the voices of those who witness the disappearance of both Evangelina Ranquileo and the peasants following the military coup. Their diverse and colliding versions, a heterogeneous body of discourse that plays havoc with absolute notions of truth, implicitly disavow the "official, public and authoritarian discourse" of the regime engaged in a perpetual "monologue" with itself "that leaves no room for reply."13
Further, the inclusion in the novel of two different crimes committed by the military, strictly necessary from a narrative point of view because the investigation of Evangelina's disappearance leads to the subsequent discovery of the bodies in the mine, invites countless questions about the nature of power and its exercise in both the private and public terrain. Do the arrest, rape, and murder of one person, Evangelina Ranquileo, purely fictional crimes invented by Allende, seem unimportant when compared to the brutal assassinations of 15 campesinos, a historical event documented by Máximo Pacheco and cited almost textually in Of Love and Shadows? Is the reader meant to interpret Evangelina's disappearance as the result of the violent excesses of one man alone, Lieutenant Ramírez, intent on "recovering the macho pride she snatched from him that day in the patio of her house" (OLS, 242)? Or does the impunity enjoyed by the military "in all its activities" (OLS, 214), the total lack of accountability for abuse of power, provide carte blanche for its officers to redefine, as convenient, the "internal enemies" (OLS, 132) they have been told to eliminate? Allende's second novel, as well as The House of the Spirits, reflects her belief that "there is a direct line from machismo to militarism (and that) the military mentality … is the synthesis, the exaltation, the ultimate exaggeration of machismo."14
Within this context, both crimes may be read as a grotesque example of the way in which the rhetoric of the State merges with the unleashed force of the military to "disappear" all those who are deemed disruptive or dissident.
Despite Allende's obvious critique of the armed forces, her novel resists, in some measure, the presentation of the military in stereotypical terms. Even her most unsympathetic portrayal, that of Lieutenant Ramírez, is complemented by Captain Rivera's testimony to Irene about Ramírez's transformation from an officer haunted by his first execution to a man consumed with his own sense of power. Further, she convincingly tears apart Ramírez's blind belief that "the armed forces must be monolithic" (OLS, 128) through Rivera's denunciation of Ramírez's crime to Irene and more significantly by Gustavo Morante's aborted Page 49
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Top of Articleattempt at a military coup designed to restore "the honor of the institution" (OLS, 255). While these examples add texture to her novel, I wonder if Allende is not presenting, in fact, a more favorable portrait of the military than is corroborated by reality. Allende herself has been characteristically forthcoming in defending her view of the seeds of discord and remorse within the armed forces. Revealing in interviews and in her memoir, Paula, the genesis of several of her characters (Allende, 1986, 52), she describes at length different sources behind the inspiration for Captain Gustavo Morante. Among them she cites the story of a Chilean officer in exile in Venezuela who refused the order to kill and was expelled from the country (Correas Zapata, 91) and the case of a young officer who shared his story with her in Santiago in 1974. His story—one that is reproduced in Of Love and Shadowsbut attributed to Lieutenant Ramírez and not to Gustavo Morante—describes the officer's first execution of a political prisoner whom he had to shoot in the temple because the prisoner, tranquil and "beyond fear," (P, 283), was still alive after his soldiers' round of fire. Unable to exorcize the haunting image from his mind, he reveals it to Allende so that she "may be able to make use of it," and understand that "not all the military are murderers, as is being said; many of us have a conscience" (P, 283).
While Allende's novel clearly depicts the evil that exists in human beings, an evil that the system itself foments, it also bears tribute to her belief that "for one torturer you have a thousand people who have risked their lives for freedom, for justice, to help each other" (Allende, 1991b, 262). This belief is significantly given the most credibility in her novel through her detailed account of the role of the Catholic Church in providing the solidarity, means of diffusion, and courage needed to publicize the Los Riscos crimes. As Raul Zurita observes, after 1973, the sense of "community space" in Chile was severely restricted (Zurita, 313); while organizations such as the Chilean Association of the Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared were formed in 1974, building a solid network of support among its members, the Catholic Church remained, according to the opinion of many, "the only viable institution independent of the police state" (Moody, 40). Of Love and Shadowspays particular homage to the Cardinal of the Catholic Church and his staunch commitment to the cause of justice:
This leader of the Church took upon his own shoulders the burden of defending the victims of the new order, placing his formidable organization at the service of the persecuted. If the situation became dangerous, Page 50
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Top of Articlehe changed his strategy, backed by two thousand years of prudence and acquaintance with power. He avoided open confrontation between the representatives of the Church and those of the General. On occasion he gave the impression of retreat, but soon it was apparent that this was merely an emergency tactical maneuver. He did not deviate one iota from his task of sheltering widows and orphans, ministering to prisoners, keeping count of the dead, and substituting charity for justice if that became necessary. (OLS, 220)
Drawing heavily on Pacheco's Lonquénas a crucial source in her portrayal of Church solidarity yet relying also on her own imagination to fill in certain gaps, Allende reveals that her novel and the exigencies of fiction curiously coincide in a strange way with reality itself and political expediency. As an illustration, she cites the part in Of Love and Shadowswhen Irene and Francisco ride by motorcycle to the sealed-off mine in Los Riscos to photograph the corpses and then deliver the photos to Francisco's brother José, who in turn gives them to the Cardinal. Although Allende's mother—her favorite critic and editor—protested the improbability of such a daring venture during the perilous curfew imposed by the regime, Allende decided to leave it in, citing "literary license" (P, 284). Reality, however, subsequently made the implausible plausible. During Allende's return to Chile in 1988 to vote in the national plebiscite, she was visited by a priest who informed her that he had been told in confession about the bodies in the Lonquén mine and had gone there on motorcycle, during curfew, to photograph the remains and deliver the packet to the Cardinal (P, 283–84). Allende's text had unwittingly duplicated his experience, thus underscoring another way in which narrative not only provides insights into the nature of real events, but also mirrors them in an uncanny fashion.
The imaginative force of the novelist, nonetheless, pales when compared to the fabrications propagated by those in power to justify their actions. A case in point: Lieutenant Ramírez testifies to the court that the Flores men were arrested because they constituted "a threat to national security because of their affiliation with a leftist group," because they had plans to attack the military barracks in Los Riscos, and because they were being trained by "foreign agents who had infiltrated the country by sea" (OLS, 262). He further describes how they were brought to military headquarters for questioning and were subsequently destined for the detention camp at the National Stadium. On route to the stadium, they asked to be taken to the mine in Los Riscos where Page 51
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Top of Articlethey said arms were hidden. Arriving there, the soldiers and their prisoners were met by a fusillade from unknown attackers that resulted in the deaths of all the prisoners and the survival of all the soldiers. Fearing retaliation against himself and his soldiers, Ramírez ordered the bodies to be sealed within the mine and reported that the men had indeed been sent to the stadium as planned. While this version might well be considered an example of magical realism worthy of García Márquez, if not Allende, it corresponds in fact, word for word, to the actual testimony of Captain Lautaro Eugenio Castro Mendoza concerning the arrests on the Island of Maipo on 7 October 1973 and the deaths at Lonquén a few days later.15
The juxtaposition of the convoluted reasoning of the perpetrators of the crime and the government's official organ, El Mercurio, with the straightforward voices of denunciation of the victims' families and their advocates in Pacheco's book, and to a lesser degree in Allende's novel, provides further testimony of the marked division between the official and unofficial story. Most significant in this regard are the excerpts from El Mercurio(Pacheco, 211), which Allende reproduces in Of Love and Shadows. Implicitly distinguishing between the events that occurred right after the military coup and the state of the nation five years later, the newspaper urges Chileans "to continue our march on the road of progress, striving to heal our wounds and overcome animosities; dwelling upon cadavers merely hinders that endeavor" (OLS, 233). Within the context of Allende's novel and the relationship between the two crimes, the cadavers do not, in fact, belong to the past but are a crucial part of a sordid present.
Given the marked presence of political themes in Of Love and Shadows, it is not surprising that the novel was originally "meant to be a book about death and torture, repression, crime, horror" (Allende, 1991b, 262). However, Allende's unbridled romanticism, belief in solidarity, and conversations with victims ultimately transformed it into another story, one of love and hope. Allende emphasizes this aspect from the very epigraph of the novel, which also clarifies her own role as narrator of the novel: "This is the story of a woman and a man who loved one another so deeply that they saved themselves from a banal existence. I have carried it in my memory … and it is only now … that I can finally tell it." Blending together political drama with unabashed sentimentality, Allende traces Irene and Francisco's journey from their discovery of the Los Riscos crimes to their discovery of love. If her political descriptions are notably crisp and reflective of her concise journalistic Page 52
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Top of Articleskills, her descriptions of love—not only that shared by Francisco and Irene, but also by Francisco's parents, Luis and Hilda Leal, and by Digna and Hipólito Ranquileo—are more uneven, achieving at times moments of lyricism and at others shades of clichéd prose as when Francisco finds Irene "without blemish, like the heart of a fruit waiting to ripen" (OLS, 107) and knows that she "would be his because it had been written from the beginning of time" (OLS, 194).
Ultimately, however, the refreshing view of romance and sexual politics that Allende presents in her novel overshadows minor defects in style. Unlike the more traditional marriages of the Leals and the Ranquileos, where, despite the strength of both Hilda and Digna, their husbands exercise considerable power in the family sphere, the relationship between Irene and Francisco offers a reconfiguration of conventional roles. Irene's self-confidence and determination coupled with Francisco's gentle and open nature produce an egalitarian union with shifting roles depending on the circumstance. Thus, when the two contemplate the wisdom of entering the abandoned mine at Los Riscos, and Francisco, in particular, debates "the prudence of taking Irene along on an adventure whose outcome he could not foresee," Allende narrates Irene's response and Francisco's reaction to it: "'You're not taking me anywhere. I'm the one who's taking you,' she had joked, and perhaps she was right" (OLS, 188). The mutuality in their relationship is also expressed in their first act of lovemaking, which Allende narrates with considerable detail and special attention to the pleasure each one feels:
Irene had not loved like this; she had not known surrender without barriers, fear, or reserve; she did not remember having felt such pleasure, such profound communication, such mutual exchange…. Never had she experienced such joy in the fiesta of the senses: take me, possess me, receive me, because in this way I take you, possess you, receive you…. Francisco smiled in total happiness: he had found the woman he had been pursuing since his adolescent fantasies, had sought in every body through the years: his friend, his sister, his lover, his companion. Slowly, without haste, in the peace of the night, he dwelled in her, pausing at the threshold of each sensation, greeting pleasure, possessing at the same time he surrendered himself. (OLS, 196)
Their love becomes so strong that it keeps at bay the encroaching shadows that often envelop them and that are alternately described in the novel as the shifting shadows of the unknown, death, presentiment, Page 53
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Top of Articledarkness, political clandestineness, and fear. Violeta Parra's moving verse that opens the first section of the novel, "Only love with its science makes us so innocent," captures the total lack of pretense that characterizes the two lovers as they plan their escape from the shadows. The pain of exile and the loss of the homeland, one that Allende knows well, is mitigated in the novel by a verse from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda that serves as the epigraph for the third section of the book, entitled "Sweet Land": "I carry our nation wherever I go, and the oh-so-far-away essences of my elongated homeland live within me." Transforming Neruda's poetic image into concrete reality and imitating the act of Allende herself when she left Chile, Irene takes with her soil from her garden, a gift from her Nana Rosa, "so that she could plant forget-menots on to the other side of the sea" (OLS, 288). Irene's and Francisco's final words, "We will return" (OLS, 290), not only echo Allende's upon leaving Chile (P, 229), but also provide a fitting end for a novel that begins with Irene's separation from her social class and closes with her separation from country. In the middle of these two processes, she forges bonds with others, and more importantly, with the most courageous part of her own being.
Of Love and Shadows, a best-seller in Allende's native Chile, as well as in Germany, has garnered diverse critical reaction since its publication in 1984; like The House of the Spirits, it was made into a movie that enjoyed particular success in Latin America and starred Antonio Banderas and Jennifer Connelly.16
It has alternately been described as too sentimental, too political, or not political enough, and even as "too direct" by the author herself (Allende, 1991c, 195). Some have taken exception to Irene and Francisco's act of lovemaking right after their discovery of Evangelina's body in the mine. Allende, well aware of this criticism, has defended the inclusion of such an erotic scene in her novel, stating that "making love brings them back from hell to life, to the paradise of love, in which they are safe."17
While one critic, anticipating Allende's view, has perceptively characterized their lovemaking as the affirmation of Eros over Thanatos,18
I would add that Irene's expression of sheer sexual pleasure reinstates the female body as a whole in the face of its mutilation in the mine.
Of Love and Shadowsacquires special meaning in the context of the report of the Rettig Commission—also called the National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation—founded by President Patricio Aylwin of Chile and released in 1991. While limited in its focus to disappearances, executions, torture, and assaults that resulted in death during the period Page 54
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Top of Articlefrom September 1973 to March 1990, the Rettig Commission provided the opportunity for groups committed to human rights to stress their view that "genuine reconciliation was possible only on the basis of truth coupled with justice."19
Allende's novel, while unable to provide the means for reconciliation, offers a compelling testimony of historical truth. Committed to disproving the General's claim that the "public has a short memory" (OLS, 229), Allende retrieves from her own memory and the lives of others a chapter in Chile's political life and presents it to her vast reading public.20
Her ultimate intent, as she lyrically states in the novel's epigraph, is to bear tribute to those who have confided their lives to her and have said, "Here, write it, or it will be erased by the wind."
Source Citation (MLA 7thEdition) "Of Love and Shadows." Isabel Allende. Linda Gould Levine. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2002. 38-54. Twayne's World Authors Series 893. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.URL
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