On adultery and other demons

Marilyn Bobes has compiled texts by 15 Cuban writers in Cuentos infieles (Unfaithful stories), published in 2006 by Ediciones Unión, where the topic is approached from a women’s perspective.

In an adulterous relationship, are men always on the cheating end? What leads them to be unfaithful? Does willful deception necessarily make us feel remorse and guilt?

It is by no means my intention to analyze adultery as a social phenomenon, only to suggest an approach to the topic of infidelity as addressed by female story-telling, this time through the hands of fifteen Cuban writers whose texts were compiled by Marilyn Bobes in Cuentos infieles (Unfaithful stories), published by Ediciones Unión in 2006.

Most of the stories in this volume unfold in present-day Cuba, using different stylistic and formal literary devices which make its reading enriching and entertaining.

Gina Picart’s Las musas inquietantes (The disturbing muses) takes place at an elevated cultural level where infidelity is rampant in a world of poets, painters and other characters, both real and fictitious, typical of the western artistic and literary traditions, such as Dante, Francesca, Byron, Joan of Arc, Raphael, Circe and Desdemona.

Extremely ingenious and singular, and centered on a seemingly trivial piece of news –the death in Florence of the Bardi family’s last illegitimate descendant– Versión original (Original version), by Mirta Yáñez, shows since its first lines an inter-textual connection with The Divine Comedy, and succeeds in shaking the centuries-long foothold which Dante’s renowned book has enjoyed to the present. According to the storyteller, the discovery of the original verses has revealed that the love between Paolo and Francesco was condemned in the first version, and that it was the author himself who turned the latter into a female character afterward.

As if the commotion of this new fact were insufficient, the narration raises a number of questions which force readers to wonder about and to reconsider the history of literature and even the origins of Western culture itself in what becomes a fierce game of ideas and imagination: Yánez creates fiction and, through it, the readers versed in literature ascribe many different causes to Dante’s correction and ponder the likely courses which the works written in our hemisphere would have taken had the famous lovers of The Divine Comedy been two men.

As a rule, the women in these stories are either adulterous (Mimusa, by Anna Lidia Vega) or victims thereof (Adelaida Fernández’s Tiempo de rosas [Time of roses]); unfaithful within the boundaries of an imaginary circle to get rid of and to escape from their stifling daily lives (Esther Díaz’s Como si ya supiera [As if I already knew]) or to find in deception a reliable way out of so many responsibilities as well as magic tricks to make ends meet every month (Infiel [Unfaithful], by Mylene Fernández). Adultery becomes at times an excuse to reflect on literature and philosophy (Susana Haug’s La maestra y Margarito [The teacher and Margarito]) and other times a prism through which to take a critical look at today’s Cuban society (La paja en el ojo ajeno [The mote in the neighbor’s eye] and Ronda en el malecón [Serenade by the seawall], by Nancy Alonso and María Elena Llana, respectively).

This great diversity of views on and interpretations of this issue brings with it plenty of resources and structures. Hence, we find in these pages both omniscient writers and the ambiguous voices of those who, hurt by unfaithful spouses and still bearing such traumatic marks, have forgotten or muddled up the facts and, consequently, harbor doubts regarding the stories. Introspective monologues, inter-textualism, irony, humor, symbolism and temporal leaps are also used.

Cuentos infieles stands as an example of the unbiased treatment of love and sex favored by Cuban female storytellers in the last 20 years.