AUTHOR: Elena Alonso Frayle
PUBLISHER: Baile del Sol
GENRE: Fiction/Literature (short stories)
READER’S NAME: Jennifer Ottman
DATE: June 11, 2020
La mala entraña is a collection of nine short stories by Elena Alonso Frayle, the author of several other collections of stories, novels, and children’s books. The stories are not linked, but they share two common themes. The first is suggested by the title of the collection, which is also the title of the first story and which translates roughly to “the evil heart.” Many of the stories revolve around a character’s choice to do something fundamentally wrong, on different scales and with different degrees of provocation and premeditation, but knowingly and out of a basic impulse toward inhumanity that seems to be universal in Alonso Frayle’s world. In two stories, partly framing the collection as the second and the second-to-last (“Misericordia” [Mercy] and “Amados hijos muertos” [Beloved dead children]), this impulse is even bound up with a mother’s love for her child, underlining both its naturalness and its all-pervasiveness. In the central story (“La mujer promiscua” [The promiscuous woman]), in contrast, a mother’s self-sacrificial act, apparently performed with only the best of motives (the reader is not given access to her consciousness), is misinterpreted as evil by all those around her, including the daughter she acts to protect, and provides the occasion for the one person who does understand what she has done to exploit her, directly for physical gratification and indirectly as material for his work as a writer.
This suggests the collection’s second theme, the deceptiveness of the drive to find coherence and meaning through narrative. The protagonist of “La mujer promiscua” is the only character who is a writer by profession, but many characters are engaged in plotting out stories by which to understand themselves or others, from a hitchhiker and the man who picks her up and tells her a story about fate that mirrors and shapes the dark bond that is forged between the two (“Gente tan afin” [People so similar]); to a psychiatrist trying to find the common thread among patients suffering from an epidemic fear of holes (“Tripofobia” [Trypophobia]); to an imaginative child struggling to grasp the world’s moral order (“El ojo de Dios” [The eye of God]). Without exception, these efforts do not end well. The child learns that adults lie, God is not watching, and imagination is no escape. The psychiatrist’s theories are an illusion incompletely papering over the randomness of reality, and the cost of creating them may be the experimental abuse of her patients. The hitchhiker finds her soulmate in what will probably end (after the conclusion of the story) in her rape and murder. In other stories in the collection, the results are similar.
At best, the stories we tell are failed attempts to protect ourselves against the blows of an indifferent fate; more likely, they are failed attempts to protect ourselves from acknowledging our own evil; and worst of all, we may not be able to tell the difference. Near the end of the title story, Alonso Frayle states two characters’ dilemma in what could serve as a summary of the stories that follow: “Thinking that evil was like that disease that was possibly eating away at their friend’s body, something painful and damaging but explicable according to the laws of the logic that orders chaos, seemed for a moment less terrible to them than accepting that perversity lacks patterns that explain it and instead is exercised gratuitously and at random, without origin or objective, without beginning or end, like the essence of divinity” (p. 36–37, my translation).
As in this passage, Alonso Frayle rarely misses an opportunity to hammer home her themes by explicit statement, and if her writing has a weakness, it is this didacticism. The stories are well plotted, and the characters, settings, and structures are sufficiently varied to maintain the reader’s interest within the overarching unity of theme. It is plot that is the primary mover, not the language of the stories, which is competently handled but straightforward, so there are no unusual translation difficulties. The world of the stories could generally be anywhere in the contemporary West. Even in “La buena hija” (The good daughter), in which the protagonist’s parents are members of a terrorist group that in the Spanish context will probably be read as the Basque separatist group ETA, Alonso Frayle names no names and includes no details. The story could just as well take place in Northern Ireland or elsewhere.
