El desencuentro.

Gerling David Ross

Not since Galdos's creation of the love-struck cousins in Dora Perfecta has a Spanish author, as Fernando Schwartz has done here, transmitted the intense attraction between a woman and a man in spite of, or perhaps because of, their consanguinity. In Dona Perfecta the love was between first cousins Pepe Rey and Rosario Polentinos. In El desencuentro it is between first cousins Africa Angles and Carlos Mata. There are other striking parallels between Dora Perfecta and El desencuentro: Pepe Rey and Africa Angles are madrilenos who fall victim to the mores of provincial Spain and Mexico respectively, and both incur the wrath of the fanatical mothers of their respective cousins. Dona Perfecta demonizes Pepe through her misguided Catholicism; Dona Maria demonizes Africa through the use of voodoo.

We follow retrospectively the relationship between Africa and Carlos from beginning to end through a long letter (half the novel) written by Africa and delivered by an attorney to her nephew Javier upon her death. In this letter, Africa also confesses that for the past twenty-five years she has been in love, secretly and passionately, with Javier, in spite of the fact that she was his aunt and some twenty years older than he. This declaration takes on tragic overtones when we recall that at the beginning of the story, Javier confesses that he has had an undeclared love for his aunt ever since she returned from Mexico some twenty-five years ago after her thwarted affair with cousin Carlos. Clearly, had the initial encounter between Africa and Javier not been a "misencounter" or desencuentro because of the combined impediments of age and kinship imposed by society, aunt and nephew could have enjoyed a fulfilling rather than frustrating psychosexual union.

As might be expected from a very late twentieth-century writer, Schwartz has included in his novel some erotic description, in sharp contrast to Galdos, who kept any titillation out of Dona Perfecta. Nevertheless, in a curiously ironic twist, Galdos was less puritanical than Schwartz vis-a-vis the subject of interfamilial marriage. While the theme of incest never once entered into the plot of Dona Perfecta, Schwartz has aunt Africa and nephew Javier joking self-consciously about their potentially taboo friendship. And we all know what Dr. Freud would say about that kind of joking.

What sets Schwartz's newest novel apart from a script for a made-for-television soap opera is his astute use of reverse crescendo. Even though the constant flashbacks in the story give us a good idea as to the outcome of Africa's relationship with her Mexican cousin and Spanish nephew, Schwartz unleashes our morbid desire to know all the intervening details. Fernando Schwartz has won, deservedly, the 1996 Premio Planeta, for he has written a highly sensitive, entertaining, and completely unpostmodern story whose five regular and three special editions within its first year have sent the unequivocal message that the majority of readers in Spain prefer their literature lite.

David Ross Gerling Sam Houston State University