Loreina Santos-Silva: This Eye That Looks at Me.

Hernandez, Ana Maria

Carys Evans-Corrales, tr. Pittsburgh Latin American Literary Review Press. 2000 106 pages. $14.95. ISBN 1-891270-06-0

LOREINA SANTOS-SILVA, the author of three novels, several short stories, and a few collections of poetry, breaks into English with this fictionalized autobiography relating her coming of age in rural midfifties Puerto Rico. Lyrical and irreverent by turns, she proceeds in chronological order from a vision of her six-month-old self being tossed over a fence into the arms of a good-hearted neighbor in order to escape her grandfather's persecution, to her graduation from an experimental high school and her crucial move to New York City, where she fulfills her creative longings.

"I'm a baby with my aunt Chabela's memory," we read early on. The author aptly handles the duality inherent in childhood memories, which must combine the perceptions of a child with the narrative abilities of an adult, through a series of cross-references that present the protagonist's increasing awareness of certain key events in her life as her sense of self slowly develops. These key events -- her grandfather's rejection, her mother's attempted suicide and attempted "mercy killing" of her, her godfather's beatings, her disenchantment with religion, the emergence of her vocation as teacher -- are often accompanied by a series of graphic leitmotivs which she orchestrates with symphonic precision. Among the most striking are the vision of a child trampled by a horse, and the unicorn-bump a mean-spirited teacher inflicts on her for failing to conform with accepted norms of behavior.

The most apparent leitmotiv, the repetition of the phrase "this eye that looks at me sees ...," stresses the duality between the candid observations of the growing child and the awareness of the mature writer who assembles them and obviates their inner meaning through artistic form. In her dedication, the author indicates that the concept for her book had been influenced by her visit to the Sam Francis exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., following the suggestion of her daughter Chloe: "There I examined at great length the drawings of Sam's face reflecting different moods -- `psychological snapshots' he took of himself throughout his life. They show a very definite Jungian influence." Indeed, the Jungian concepts of transformation and individuation permeate Santos-Silva's memories as the protagonist gradually peels away the masks imposed by family and society (such as her induction into the Daughters of Mary sisterhood). She encounters "shadow" projections in the form of several malicious cousins and assorted sexual perverts, explores her animus through the young men who pursue her (and invariably abandon her under the threat of beatings by her godfather), and engages both positive and negative wisdom figures of both sexes (her aunts and uncles, teachers, her first employer in New York). At the end of these trials and tribulations, the author's creative self emerges as the culmination of the memories. Hence, the mesmerizing quality of this narrative partly derives from a deftly articulated structure that corresponds to the quests of myth and folklore.

One notable characteristic of Santos-Silva's novella is the absence of positive masculine characters, with the possible exception of her first employer in New York, who is nevertheless schematically portrayed. Men are uniformly flawed or else unworthy of detailed characterization, from the father who abandons the protagonist, through the grandfather who refuses to raise her on a question of pundonor, to the godfather who lashes at her with a belt until her skin and her budding breasts are reduced to a mass of bleeding welts. Other passing characters are equally repulsive: the classmates who try to molest her, the man who enters the basement and exposes himself to her, the one who presses himself against her from behind at a town fair, the various avatars of Latin American machismo that transcend the protagonist's personal experience and become emblematic of the morbid values of the fifties.

The translation by Carys Evans-Corrales closely follows the lyrical flights of the original and aptly renders the wealth of idiomatic expressions into their English equivalents, thus enabling Santos-Silva's outstanding novella to reach the wider audience it deserves.

Ana Maria Hernandez
LaGuardia College, CUNY