GUEST REVIEW: MALINCHE

Malinche: A Novel
By Laura Esquivel
Translated from the Spanish by Ernesto Mestre-Reed
Atria Books
191 pp.; hardcover

REVIEWED BY DANIEL OLIVAS

It is a brave writer who attempts to fictionalize a historical figure. This is particularly true if the subject carries tremendous cultural baggage and was born centuries earlier leaving behind a limited and contradictory record. The writer must find ways to breathe life into her protagonist and not allow the seduction of extensive research to undermine the poetics of the novel form. Laura Esquivel, the author of the wildly-successful Like Water for Chocolate, has bravely attempted to do just that in her new novel, Malinche (Atria Books). Unfortunately, and surprisingly, Esquivel fails in her quest to paint a compelling and believable portrait of the sixteenth century indigenous woman who became not only the interpreter for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, but also the symbolic mother of a new people of mixed race or, to some, Mexico’s version of the traitorous Benedict Arnold.

What we know of La Malinche comes from first person narratives of Spaniards who knew her. Born in the early 1500s to a noble family, Malinche’s odyssey begins when her father dies; no longer an asset, she is sold to Mayan slave traders by her mother. She eventually lands in the hands of the invading Spanish who, pursuant to an order from Cortés, is baptized and given the name Marina. Her true name has been lost to history but we do know that her own people eventually called her Malintzin; Malinche is very likely a corruption of that name. Some historians venture that she may have been named Malinalli which is a Nahua word for a type of grass. In any event, Malinche was more than a slave to Cortés; she was accorded respect by the Spaniards and even referred to as Doña Marina rather than merely Marina. Drawings from the period often show Malinche by Cortés’s side and sometimes by herself acting as an authority figure separate from Cortés. Within Mexican culture, Malinche has been painted as a traitor, a victim, and everything in between.

Esquivel chooses to refer to Malinche by Malinalli throughout the novel perhaps in an attempt to strip away the mythos and get to the essence of this extraordinary woman. And indeed, Esquivel begins her novel promisingly, with this powerful description of a human sacrifice performed by the Aztecs with a foreboding of the bloody Spanish conquest to come:

“First came the wind. Later, like a flash of lightning, like a silver tongue in the heavens over the Valley of Anáhuac, a storm appeared that would wash the blood from the stones. After the sacrifice, the city darkened and thunderous eruptions were heard. Then, a silver serpent appeared in the sky, seen distinctly from many different places…. That day, far from the Valley of Anáhuac, in the region of Painala, a woman struggled to give birth to her first child.”

This child is Malinalli who is brought into the world with the help of her paternal grandmother who “sensed that the girl was destined to lose everything, so that she might gain everything.” But after priming the reader for a lyrical retelling of Malinche’s life in ancient Mexico, Esquivel soon strays and falls into the depths of prosaic, unadorned historical narrative:

“In the year 1504, when a young Hernán Cortés first set foot on the island of Hispaniola (nowadays comprising of the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and realized that he had entered a world that was not his own, his imagination became filled with desires…. He wanted to be rich just like the nobles, who could do whatever they wished.”

No poetry there. And so it is throughout Malinalli’s remarkable life—from slavery to becoming the translator for and sexual companion of Cortés, giving birth to a son, and subsequent forced-marriage to one of her countrymen—Esquivel repeatedly commits one of fiction writing’s cardinal sins: she tells rather than shows. Even with what should have been one of the most dramatic and powerful episodes of Malinalli’s life, her rape by Cortés, Esquivel gives us but one unremarkable paragraph:

“Cortés did not notice the lightning. The only thing that he was aware of was the warmth of the core of Malinalli’s body and the way that his member pushed and opened the tight walls of the girl’s vagina. He did not care if his passion and force hurt Malinalli. He did not care if lightning struck nearby. All he cared about was going in and out of that body.”

The most difficult aspect of this story is explaining in a convincing manner how from this rape Malinalli became not only a trusted translator between the Aztecs and Cortés, but why she allegedly came to love Cortés and crave his body and even his kiss as Esquivel asserts. Esquivel certainly could have relied on dialogue to fill in these emotional gaps but even here she fails. Rather than show us in realistic dialogue how Malinalli interacted with her parents, grandmother, Cortés, and their son, she has her characters fall into stilted speechifying sometimes lasting an exhausting page in length. For example, this is Malinalli’s beloved, blind and apparently wise grandmother announcing that she will soon die of old age:

“Today I will leave these lands. I will not see the destruction of this world of stone, the writings of stone, the flowers of stone, the cloths of stone that we build as mirrors for the gods. Today the songs of birds will carry my soul into the air, and my lifeless body will stay behind to return to the earth, the mud, and one day it will rise again in the sun that is hidden in the corn. Today, my eyes will open in bloom and I will leave these lands. But before I do, I will sow all my affection for you.”

And this is one of the shorter speeches offered by Esquivel’s characters. The reader’s frustration grows when Esquivel plants a gem in the midst of otherwise soulless prose such as this exquisite description of an Aztec marketplace:

“The market, as a heart, as a living entity, had a pulse of its own: it slept, awoke, talked, loved, and hated. If it awoke with feelings of war, you could sense it infuriated, vulgar, and violent. If, on the contrary, it awoke in peace, it sounded happy, cheerful, prancing.”

At the end of her book, Esquivel includes an extensive bibliography that demonstrates that she conducted a great deal of painstaking research into her subject. Indeed, we do learn many facts about Malinche, Cortés, as well as the daily lives of the Aztecs both before and after the Spanish conquest. Unfortunately, Esquivel’s immersion into those source materials results in a narrative that reads more like a history book rather than a novel.

Daniel Olivas is the author of four books including Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press, 2004). He is currently editing an anthology of Los Angeles fiction by Latino/a writers. He co-blogs on La Bloga each Monday.

Comments

[msedano]

Esquivel has had her moments. Swift as Desire had its moments but wasn't the novel her The Law of Love was. OTOH, I enjoyed Love more than Chocolate, although I plenty dug that one. Sad to note her Malinche is a let-down. Oh well, everyone's entititled to an off day. I hope this doesn't portend a downward spiral for this ambitious writer.

mvs