After drinking much wine over dinner one autumnal evening, the wife is awakened one foggy night in town and tells her husband that she is "going out". Through the mists, she meets a mysterious stranger in the town's plaza, and follows him to his home, where the shutters are closed. Upstairs, she is seduced, and finally experiences the ecstasies of the flesh she has longed for. The stranger smells of vegetable and fruit. The entire experience -- the wine, the mists, the sex, the association with vegetable and fruit -- has an eerie, mystical quality to it. It is as if the wife is experiencing, on some level, a Dionysian mystery rite.
The affair leads the wife to a sort of self-awakening. She takes a naked swim in the local stream, letting her usually pinned up hair loose, and stares at her own breasts for the first time. For a woman in her circumstances, this must have been a bit like those women in the 1970s who had "empowerment" parties to put mirrors between their legs and take a shy, blushing peek. And where her mystery lover smelled of vegetable, her surroundings smell of water. As does Andres, the young caretaker who comes upon her. Interestingly, she does not hide her nudity from him, especially because she thinks Andres, like her, sees her lover's car in the distance, and sees her lover smile at her. This belief that the young Andres has seen the lover smile at her becomes important to her, since Daniel insists she never left the room that long-ago, misty night.
It should be noted that the only time the wife is able to return to her lover's home is years later, again, in an altered state, when she has been given some sort of sedative in the hospital where her sister-in-law Regina is recovering from her own attempted suicide. That the lover was really more a concoction of the wife's own repressed desires for sexual (and spiritual) satisfaction in a life and society that had reduced her to habit and form is fairly clear at this point, but it is not altogether important. Perhaps Daniel had chosen this wife, among all his cousins, because she was the most malleable, the one he could most turn into a copy of his late, great love. This empty vessel seeks desperately to be filled, and in her despair, what takes hold is not entirely of this world.
The wife (well, really, both the wife and Regina) in this story is haunted by love, by a husband who cannot reach her, by a lover who proves ephemeral (and if her husband barely notices her, how must she feel when she realizes that her fantasy lover was blind all along -- even in fantasy or half-madness, this woman could not entirely conceive of a man who really saw her and wanted her for who she was). And we, the readers, are haunted by these women; by the wife who seemingly lives a nebulous fantasy of an affair, and by Regina, who almost destroys herself by living the reality of a love affair gone wrong.
In the end, the narrator implies that her life with her husband Daniel continues as before. While Regina lies ruined on the outside, crying desperately for the lover she has lost, our narrator is an empty shell, who will grow old prettily at the side of a husband she suddenly barely recognizes. She has learned the art of smiling emptily at all the appropriate moments; her life a triumph of form over function, with no one ever knowing her substance.
Obviously there is a feminist--perhaps proto-feminist would be more exact--underpinning to the story. It denounces the institution of marriage as ultimately destructive of a woman's desires and needs.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I'm not sure that it is actually an egalitarian story. Perhaps the reason the narrator does not cover herself when seen by Andres is not only that he, as a boy, is not an object of desire, but also as a servant.