Milagros Palma: L'eveque.

Accad, Evelyne

Claude Couffon, tr. Paris. Indigo/Cotefemmes. 2000. 142 pages. 100 F ISBN 2-911571-78-9

MILAGROS PALMA -- born in Nicaragua, living in Paris, author of numerous essays on the symbolic and real relationships between men and women in Indian and Latin American societies and on the myths of the Amazon forest, as well as of several novels, some of them translated into French (Noces de cendres, 1996; Le gouffre, 1997; Le pacte, 1998) -- deserves to be better known by the North American public. Her work is rich in its diversity and intensity. Recently she was honored with the Jose Marti International UNESCO Prize (1999) for the body of her work. It must also be mentioned that she and her companion, the artist Claude Feuillet, founded a publishing house which revives the works of women throughout the ages, as well as discovering new, unpublished ones, thus giving them a chance to have their voices heard.

The novel L'eveque (The Bishop) tells the story of Leonardo, a young Latino-American who has immigrated to the United States, where he works in his eldest brother's hair salon in Chicago. He learns English and the styling trade and starts making money, but he becomes greedy for more and begins to deal drugs, using prostitutes to help him in his trafficking. One of them betrays him, and he ends up in jail.

When he is released, he decides to get married and have a family. He finds a young Mexican woman, thirty years younger than himself, through her best friend, who lives in Chicago. He sets the wedding date for the anniversary of the day he was released from prison, hoping thereby to exorcize his past. Her name is Virginia, and she had dreamed of someone younger and more romantic, but resigns herself to what she hopes will be a better life. She soon becomes pregnant with their first child.

Leonardo's past haunts him, however, and he cannot stop drinking and abusing his wife and child, as he was abused by his own father in childhood and by a priest, the eponymous bishop, who messed up his life without ever being punished for it. He is the typical macho man, extremely possessive and very jealous. Virginia, who has a talent for reading cards, does so behind his back to earn money. She also tries to "unwind" his past through black magic in order to have peace at home; her efforts have little success, though, and Leonardo is convinced she will leave him. He goes to visit his mother, who is sick back home in Mexico, and takes with him a casket she has asked for. The account of his transporting this casket on the plane and going through customs is hilarious.

The story is narrated with humor, and the incredible descriptions blend the real and the imaginary in an outstanding way. All kinds of scenes, like the one of the casket, are used in a style rich in out-of-the-ordinary images, often crude and expressed in a straightforward manner filled with irony. "The Bishop" is a must for anyone interested in Milagros Palma's writing, in women's writing, in questions of identity and writing, in the roles of and relationships between men and women, and in Latin American writers in general. Evelyne Accad University of Illinois, Urbana