The Stories of Eva Luna

“I am spectator and protagonist. I am in shadow, veiled by the fog of a translucent curtain. I know I am myself, but I am also this person observing from the outside.”

Here, Rolf considers what it means that he views the world as a photographer, imagining that he is looking at a photo of himself. Because this passage is written in first person, Rolf’s voice also works as a stand-in for the voice of the author, Allende, and for artists in general. Allende uses Rolf’s perspective to explore what it feels like to create art about your life, to be both witness to it and the center of the piece. While he elevates Eva Luna’s use of language above his own, his language is poetic here, using metaphor to create a paradoxical image—a barrier that is simultaneously foggy and clear.

“That was the day that Belisa Crepusculario found out that words make their way in the world without a master, and that anyone with a little cleverness can appropriate them and do business with them.”

Belisa Crepusculario is the character who most fully demonstrates the theme of Language and Storytelling as Tools for Survival. Her story is also a prime example of Allende’s subtle form of magical realism. The tale, set in the gritty reality of a country torn by civil war, is infused with Belisa’s magical use of language to achieve feats that should be impossible, almost as if her words function as curses or spells. Her last name links her with both Eva Luna (“crepuscúlo” means “dawn” in Spanish, while “luna” means moon) and with the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whose first book of poems was entitled Crepusculario. Both of these connections deepen the character’s association with word magic.

“Later, when I found a different job, I lost sight of Clarisa until we met again some twenty years later and reestablished a friendship that has lasted to this day, overcoming the many obstacles that lay in our way, including death, which has put a slight crimp in the ease of our communications.”

This passage exemplifies Eva’s narrative voice. She interjects with the first-person “I” to describe her relationship with the protagonist of the story. Eva’s characteristic witty humor and firm admiration of strong women are evident. She uses a litote—an understatement—when she compares death to a “slight crimp.”

“She reigned among them like a queen bee. She loved their smell of work and desire, their harsh voices, their unshaven cheeks, their bodies, so vigorous and at the same time so pliable in her hands, their pugnacious natures and naive hearts.”

Hermelinda is the embodiment of The Power of Sexuality and Desire. Depicting a sex worker as a joyful, empowered woman who rejoices in her sexuality and her partners’ desire, Allende demonstrates how female sexual expression can subvert patriarchal power structures. She uses a simile to compare Hermelinda to a queen bee, evoking the matriarchal structures of beehives.

“The two women lived on together, happy to help each other in bringing up their children and in the many vicissitudes of life.”

Allende explores the strength and The Resilience of Women throughout the collection. The conclusion to “The Gold of Tomás Vargas” features two women who could despise each other (a wife and a lover of the same cruel man) joining forces to support each other and build a life together instead. This ending subverts typical fairy tale endings in which a man and wife live happily ever after, presenting a new way for these women to live fulfilling lives.

“The cellar became a sealed flask in which they wallowed like playful twins swimming in amniotic fluid, two swollen, stupefied fetuses. For days they were lost in an absolute intimacy they confused with love.”

Allende’s sensuous diction is evident in this passage from “If You Touched My Heart.” She uses contrasts here to create a strange image, juxtaposing a flask and an amniotic sac—a flask usually contains liquor and is intoxicating, while amniotic fluid is nourishing and protecting. This foreshadows the fact that this love is doomed.

“And there, on the dais of a stage-set emperor, sat Horacio Fortunato, his mane slicked down with brilliantine, grinning his irrepressible gallant’s grin, pompous beneath his triumphal dome, surrounded by his outrageous circus, acclaimed by the trumpets and cymbals of his own orchestra, the most conceited, most lovesick, and most entertaining man in the world. Patricia laughed, and walked forward to meet him.”

The story “Gift of a Sweetheart” ends with the closing line, “[she] walked forward to meet him.” This ending, or a similarly sweet yet open-ended ending, is one that Allende uses frequently throughout the collection. The stories often end with a sense of justice or balance being restored but do not resolve all questions, leaving some ambiguity about the characters’ futures. This passage also demonstrates another hallmark of Allende’s style, run-on sentences replete with descriptive imagery.

“In the following months the student received his medical degree and Maurizia relived, one by one, all the tragedies from the operatic repertoire, and no few from romantic literature. She was killed successively by Don Jose, tuberculosis, an Egyptian tomb, a dagger, and poison; she was in love in Italian, French, and German.”

“Tosca,” in a Madame Bovary-esque series of events, explores the power of language and storytelling by considering where that power might lead someone astray. Although her love of opera and romantic stories brings some fullness and satisfaction to Maurizia’s life, it also prevents her from seeing reality with clear eyes and leads her to abandon her son and husband.

“I have noticed that these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man’s thought. We should not speak without reason; this I have taught my sons and daughters, but they do not always listen to my counsel.”

The narrator in “Walimai” is not Eva Luna, making it a rare exception in the collection. “Walimai” is narrated by an Indigenous person who is a skilled storyteller and who has a reverent appreciation for the power of language. The story allows Allende to reflect on the theme of Language and Storytelling as Tools for Survival from a different perspective.

“Simple María believed in love. That was what made her a living legend.”

Eva Luna believes in love; the stories that she chooses to tell Rolf often feature a romance or a tragically romantic character who is still celebrated for their dedication to love. María, the protagonist of “Simple María,” is a sex worker who pursues her work with enthusiasm and romance and is one iteration of Allende’s exploration of The Power of Sexuality and Desire. Allende emphasizes her power through the juxtaposition of “simple” and “living legend.”

“[S]he never saw them as anonymous objects, only the reflection of herself in the arms of her imaginary lover. Confronted with reality, she was blind to the sordid urgency of her temporary partner, because to each one she gave herself with the same uncompromising love, anticipating, like a daring bride, the other’s desires.”

María’s sexuality and desire allow her to honor and respect each of the partners she engages with in her work as a sex worker. Through honest expression of her desire, she shows love to her partners, even if only for a time. Allende asserts that this love is something otherwise missing from their lives—and perhaps from their society at large—thus asserting that female desire is a productive force in the world.

“Her hair was half covering her face when she held out her hands to him. White scars circled her wrists, too. For a timeless instant he stared at them, unmoving, until he understood everything, love, and saw her strapped to the electric grid, and then they could embrace, and weep, hungry for pacts and confidences.”

Physical connection and sensual expression are recurring motifs in The Stories of Eva Luna. Often, as is the case in “Our Secret,” characters find emotional support by first connecting physically. Here, two unnamed characters who have just met realize, without speaking, that they have a shared past of trauma and torture. The enduring nature of trauma is highlighted through the juxtaposition, of “timeless instant.”

“El Capitán took the hand of the gentle lady he had wordlessly loved for so many years and walked with her to the center of the room where they began to dance with the grace of two herons in their courtship dance.”

“The Little Heidelberg” is one of the most romantic stories in the collection and reveals Eva Luna’s appreciation for romance. This passage also exemplifies Allende’s style with the quiet drama of the metaphor of two herons dancing. In some Indigenous cultures, herons represent death and the circle of life, so choosing this bird foreshadows Eloisa’s disappearance.

“El Capitán danced on as niña Eloisa turned to lace, to froth, to mist, until she was but a shadow, then, finally, nothing but air, and he found himself whirling, whirling, with empty arms, his only companion a faint aroma of chocolate.”

This passage highlights the magical realism of “The Little Heidelberg,” which ends with Eloisa disappearing while she dances. This moment of magic leaves the ending of the tale ambiguous; it is unclear where reality ends and the magic begins, whether El Capitán imagined approaching Eloisa, or whether her disappearance is meant to symbolize years spent together, dancing.

“[A]t some point she let herself go, marveling at her own sensuality, and somehow grateful to Vidal. That was why when she heard the distant sound of the troops, she begged him to flee and hide in the hills. Nicolás Vidal preferred to hold her in his arms and kiss her for the last time, thus fulfilling the prophecy that had shaped his destiny.”

Casilda uses her sexuality to buy time for her children, only to discover that she enjoys the sensuous encounter with Nicolás Vidal. Allende explores The Power of Sexuality and Desire, rewarding the characters for giving in to the joy of physical connection. Here, Nicolás Vidal decides that spending time with Casilda is something worth dying for.

“They awakened covered with blue beetles. At the first light of dawn, when the landscape was still wreathed in the last mists of dream and neither man nor beast had yet begun the day’s tasks, they started off, taking advantage of the coolness.”

The setting of “The Road North” and the other stories in the collection plays an important role in the narrative, as the characters’ lives are defined by their geographic locations and the political turmoil of their country. Allende’s style often includes poetic descriptions of the countryside, filled with vivid imagery and sensory descriptions.

“The next day the inhabitants of Agua Santa returned to their usual chores exalted by a magnificent complicity, by a secret kept by good neighbors, one they would guard with absolute zeal and pass down for many years as a legend of justice, until the death of the schoolteacher Inés freed us, and now I can tell the story.”

Agua Santa is the setting for several of the stories in the collection, and is also an important setting in Allende’s novel Eva Luna; Eva spends formative years living with Riad Halabí’s family there. This passage is an example of the occasional first-person interjections that reinforce Eva’s role as narrator.

“Such lavish displays had afforded the Toros a degree of respectability, because by then the line that divided the social classes was vanishing; people were flocking to the country from every corner of the globe, drawn by the miasma of petroleum. Growth in the capital was uncontrolled, fortunes were made and lost in the blink of an eye.”

This passage helps establish setting by alluding to Venezuela’s oil boom. This collection is set in an unnamed Latin American country that blends features of both Chile and Venezuela. This country is the setting for many of Allende’s other works and provides a backdrop for her explorations of political transitions and social class.

“There are all kinds of stories. Some are born with the telling; their substance is language, and before someone puts them into words they are but a hint of emotion […] Others are manifest whole, like an apple, and can be repeated infinitely without risk of altering their meaning. Some are taken from reality and processed through inspiration […] And then there are secret stories that remain hidden in the shadows of the mind […] To exorcise the demons of memory, it is sometimes necessary to tell them as a story.”

As a narrator, Eva Luna is emotionally invested in “Interminable Life,” which tells the story of her longtime friends, the Blaums. Her emotional investment is clear in this opening passage from the story, which is unique in the collection; most of the stories start in medias res without preamble or philosophical mediation. Here, Eva reflects on Language and Storytelling as Tools for Survival, considering the different kinds of stories and the ones that must be told to relieve the pressure of carrying them.

“She had called him in her mind night and day all those years, and finally he had come. It was her hour. But she looked into his eyes and could not find any trace of the executioner, only welling tears. She searched deep in her own heart for the hatred she had nurtured and could not find it.”

“Revenge” is a complex story about The Power of Sexuality and Desire. After being raped and vowing to her dying father that she would get revenge, Dolce Rosa ends up falling in love with her rapist after years of thinking about him all the time. Torn by the impossibility of carrying those emotions together, she dies by suicide. Allende uses this tragic story to explore the challenges of healing after a society has experienced years of violence and upheaval.

“She opened the box and turned out the love letters she had guarded for years. For a long moment he studied the pile of envelopes. ‘You owe me eleven years of my life,’ Analia said.”

Language and storytelling cause Analia to fall in love with a man before she ever meets him. In a twist that demonstrates the sense of justice that resolves many of the stories in the collection, Analia finally discovers the real author of her love letters. This is an allusion to Cyrano de Bergerac, a French play in which Cyrano, a talented but ugly man, helps a beautiful man named Christian seduce the beautiful Roxane by writing his love letters. Also characteristic of many of the stories in the collection, “The Letters of Betrayed Love” ends on an optimistic but ambiguous note, creating the possibility that the lovers end up together. This is characteristic of Allende’s optimism, as the ending is far more hopeful than Cyrano de Bergerac’s.

“When five centuries earlier the bold renegades from Spain with their bone-weary horses and armor candescent beneath an American sun stepped upon the shores of Quinaroa, Indians had been living and dying in that same place for several thousand years.”

This passage exemplifies Allende’s use of imagery as well as her interest in the conflicts between Indigenous cultures and European colonizing forces. She subverts the stereotypical conquistador narrative by describing the men as “renegades”—a word often used for pirates or criminals—and their horses as “weary” rather than triumphant. The sun is described as “American,” and the Indigenous people’s existence as lasting thousands of years. While the conquistadors believe their 500 years is an eternity, these descriptions assert that the land belongs to the Indigenous people, and they will outlast their oppressors.

“To pass the hours he began to tell Azucena about his travels and adventures as a newshound, and when he exhausted his memory, he called upon imagination, inventing things he thought might entertain her. From time to time she dozed, but he kept talking in the darkness, to assure her that he was still there and to overcome the menace of uncertainty.”

The theme of Language and Storytelling as Tools for Survival is highlighted in the final story of the collection, where Rolf sits with Azucena for three days and nights, telling her stories to keep her company. This is a moment of role reversal for Rolf and Eva, where Rolf (rather than Eva) is depicted as the storyteller, repeating the tales she’s told him to ease Azucena’s dying.