BROOKS, continued

The narrators of Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories are also active in their resistance to physical or verbal abuse at home. The main character in “Entre amigas” (“Between Friends”) appears to match the abused women profile; she seems incapable of breaking a circular pattern of domestic violence when she tells us:

Lo peor siempre pasaba los viernes y los sábados, entre las diez y las tres de la mañana. A punta de insultos me llevó a emergencias de un hospital chiquito que ya estaba cerrado cuando llegamos. No ténian equipo ni para sacarme una placa. Él mismo agarró el teléfono y llamó a la policía. Al llegar me preguntaron si quería enviarlo a la carcél. Les dije que no, pensando que cuando saliera me mataría. (40-1) [Translation]

But this very same character, even though her abusive husband makes her “suffer, cry, and shiver,” manages to get “unos trabajitos limpiando [...] casas [… y] cuid[ando] ancianos enfermos” (45). [Translation] She tells Marta Veneranda that her husband also managed the money she earned. But this abused woman, by the end of the story, accelerates her husband’s death by closing the oxygen valve that kept him alive in the hospital. The narrator of “Los venenitos” (“Little Poisons”) has broken with her emotional dependency before she undertakes a more drastic action. She says that she left her husband, “por hijo de puta, muy consciente de lo que hacía, el jamás me hubiera dejado a mí” (85). [Translation] And later, like the abused women in “Entre amigas” (“Between Friends”), the protagonist of “Los venenitos” (“Little Poisons”) kills her spouse. And finally, she considers the possibility of assassinating Fermina, her husband’s lover, because she considers her unable to break with the abusive patterns of her former relationships:

Sé que ella [Fermina], tal como la he visto conducirse ya en dos ocasiones, si él desaparece buscará otro que abuse de ella. Y dígame usted, ¿vale la pena vivir así, en el mejor de los casos, un montón de años, en el peor, toda la vida? Si se casa y empieza a parir, con lo dócil que es, olvídese, y otra posibilidad es que uno de esos tipos la mate a golpes. O a tiros, o a puñaladas. (93) [Translation]

The sometimes humorous tone in Rivera-Valdés’ narrative does not diminish the stories’ strength. Behind the layer of black humor, a traditionally ignored and censored social situation like the pact of silence established among abusers, victims, the police, and the judges is denounced. In “Between Friends” and “Little Poisons,” the female characters take control over their lives and help others to do so. At this time, and in these two stories, the end justifies the means.

In “El quinto río” (“The Fifth River”), Catalina also has control over her life and explains how she thinks that “todos los cambios [que ella ha llevado a cabo] han [sido con] el propósito de vivir acorde con la ética que predico” (151). [Translation] Although her mother says Catalina “[nació] para nadar rio arriba [ella] no lo [cree] así” (151). [Translation] Catalina, who has moved from her mother’s legacy to create her own set of values, asks one of the most important questions in the book: why be unhappy when you can make efforts to achieve whatever you want? (133-4). It is thorough Catalina’s reflections that Rivera-Valdés articulates one of the most important statements in the book, the leitmotif of the stories, and the most important characteristic in these active protagonists: their capacity to transform their own existences:

Contrario a ese desear inactivo, desde chiquita he creído en la felicidad como posibilidad real. Felicidad entendida a mi manera, queire decir, ser dueña de mi vida, hasta el punto que ella lo permite. No soy dueña de no morirme, pero cada vez que he tenido conciencia de mi desdicha, he dado los pasos para cambiar la situación, aunque haya tenido que torcer el rumbo sin previo aviso y voltear en U donde estaba prohibido hacerlo. (151) [Translation]

According to Rivera-Valdés herself, the themes in her literature and her narrative style are closer to feminist/queer/chicana authors Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrié Moraga than to Cuban literature; but her characters, like her, are not Chicanos but mostly Cubans living in New York. On the one hand, although Rivera-Valdés is not a Chicana writer she writes like one. Her texts are as subversive as a feminist Chicana text because of their directness, and directness is what Cuban literature lacks (or has been lacking until the very late 90s). [Note] Even though Bejel maintains that Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories thematically connects with the esthetic of the Cuban writers from the 90s, I believe that the ideology behind these texts is more about how to overcome those stereotypes that describe Latina women as silenced victims, about how not to portray those stereotypes, but to eliminate them. Their openness and sincerity is obvious because “they deal with all kinds of ‘forbidden stories’; [that are] forbidden [...] from the point of view of the official history of the [Cuban] nation, of traditional moral, and of the ‘stereotypes of citizens’ conduct’” (221).

“Cinco ventanas” (“Five Windows”) illustrates from two different perspectives a situation experienced in diverse ways by two women. In this story, Mayté Perdomo - who was born in Cuba but lives in the United States and represents the nomadic subject, a woman with a mestiza/nomadic consciousness - has an affair with her cousin Laura, who lives in Cuba, but is visiting the United States. [Note] After the unexpected sexual encounter between the two of them takes place, Mayté wants to discuss it with Laura. Mayté admits that she “was aghast at [her] own behavior, but Laura seemed at ease” (20). While Mayté is wondering about her sexual identity, how this identity has been formed, how it is not fixed but mobile, how to confront her infidelity and how to discuss it with her husband, Laura “admitted that this wasn’t the first time this had happened” to her and that she is not going to say a word to her partner. Laura, who considers herself a mature woman and is wondering why her intelligent and educated cousin is interested in telling her husband anything at all, knows that her partner has other relationships with women and, like him, she is “not going to pass up a good time when it appears” (21). Even though she is not interested in having affairs with men but with women, she is not concerned about her homosexuality because she thinks she is not a lesbian. She is a married woman who has affairs with other women since they are not problematic at all, “there’s no risk of getting pregnant” (21).

According to Laura, sexual encounters between women are nothing but unimportant adventures, very unworthy to tell. The moral codes of these two women (Laura and Mayté) are very different; what is honesty for Mayté is immaturity for Laura. They are “speaking different languages” (21). Unlike Laura, Mayté, who has acquired other values without being assimilated and considers herself more Latina than Cuban, is trying to center what has been marginalized or excluded from phallogocentric discourses: her lesbian desire. She is not judging her cousin, but thinking they are different and, unlike Laura, Mayté wants and needs to articulate her experience. She thinks that to talk about it and to confront it will help her to understand herself better. But she is not trying to fold her cousin’s values or to measure them with her own standards. Rivera-Valdés, by presenting these two different approaches to the same issue, is taking a feminist position because “feminism no longer represents itself as the privileged discourse of and for all women. Instead, feminism openly acknowledges and affirms its particularities, its representation of the values and commitments of some but not all women” (de Lauretis 87). As de Lauretis discusses, feminism is a practice of the production of alternative or different knowledges, whose goal may be either the production of “new” or/and “multiple perspectives” - lesbians, women of color, working class women, neocolonial subjects - through the fragmentation and questioning of its basic goals raised by the emergence and insistence of its “others” (87).

Laura, in “Cinco ventanas,” has been portrayed as a “typical” Cuban character. Because she considers herself a liberated, strong, and independent woman she will have extramarital relations, but will not discuss them, question what is wrong with her relationship, or inquire about her sexual identity. Her capacity for lying, taking lovers to “complete” her existence, and having a double life, is the path to live a feminist life, a life equal to men’s lives. Hence feminism, in Cuban terms and unlike what Rivera-Valdés proposes in her stories, is sometimes the capacity of women to behave as men while reproducing the double standard feminism is supposed to be fighting, and overcoming. In Cuba and Latin America, the vast majority of women have been taught not to repress their emotions, but to conceal them. It is not that women do not do their “things,” take lovers for example; it is that they do it silently, without telling anybody. By presenting the case of Mayté Perdomo, who is capable of questioning her cultural values and traditions, Rivera-Valdés is not only presenting the mestiza subject, a subject whose cultural identity is not fixed and whose consciousness has traveled, but also describing cultural differences.

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