Book Review (Luz Larrain)

Blanca Elena, Memoria Indiscreta de la Quinta Vergara, by Luz Larrain 1994

This book is not available in English, so I have made an unofficial translation. The author’s prologue describes the narrative as a blend of fiction and reality, based on a little bit of research and personal interviews with anonymous collaborators. Her mission statement is to recreate the mood of characters and painful events that rattled her grandparents’ generation. In that, she accomplished her goal.

From what I can tell, even in translation, the poetic language is just lovely. She introduces Blanca as a young debutante enjoying the glamour of Paris with all its sensual delights, floral scents, brilliant colors, gourmet food, literature, fashion, etc. John de Saulles is a dazzling gentleman who sweeps her off her feet and awakens emotions she never knew she had. Their marriage quickly goes sour, with his drinking and carousing with other women. The murder itself is told delicately in sentence fragments that hint of his angry eyes, her shaking hands, a pistol… During the trial, Blanca stares sadly out the dirty window of her jail cell. The narrative jumps ahead to Blanca playing the piano and reflecting on her acquittal, then delves into her melancholy mind in the hours before she overdoses on barbiturates. Blanca’s last thoughts are of her ex-husband’s ghost and her estranged adult son. It ends with her housemaid discovering her body, the empty bottle, and the blank eyes staring off into nothingness as the church bells ring in the distance.

I enjoyed the book on an emotional level, that is, I found it entertaining. The plot moved along quickly and every character had a vivid presence. However, it is not a work of great literature by any means and shamelessly delves into the realm of melodrama. The author walked an easy road by taking the heroine’s point of view and making the victim of her violent act into a stereotypical villain. Not only did this John de Saulles deserve what he got, but Blanca is elevated to saintly status and absolved of all blame. There are no subtleties or ambiguities. Her lawyer Henry Uterhart and a fictional newspaper reporter named Nick are wholly on her side. Blanca is treated cruelly by her jailers, by the wicked prosecutor, and by John’s nasty selfish family. Even at the end, when her adult son argues with her and leaves home, it is portrayed as the act of a petulant youth. Blanca shouts back at him to be proud of his maternal ancestors, and later the house maid ponders her disapproval of the boy not standing loyal to his mother.

The errors distracted me a great deal. Numerous historical facts and dates are just plain wrong:  President Woodrow Wilson announcing his declaration of war on his radio talk show; titles of popular songs, silent films, and Broadway shows that had not appeared yet; John’s father researching how to make homemade beer because of Prohibition; and the famous Russian monk Rasputin’s is assassinated while she is still unhappily married to John. These are sloppy mistakes that could have been easily discovered in an encyclopedia.

Main characters are wrong, as well. She invents the names of John’s mother and a brother Bernie, portrays his sister Caroline as a spoiled single girl attending the opera and trawling for a fiancée. She wrongly pegs someone called J. Heckscher as John’s family attorney. The biggest blunder was to include Blanca’s father as the concerned parent disapproving of John and reluctantly walking her down the aisle at her wedding – Guillermo Errazuriz died when Blanca was a small child. In real life, part of her attraction to an older man was to fill the void of the father figure she never knew.

Mixed in with these errors are just enough true facts to confuse me about what is true and what the author simply dreamed up.  I cannot know what tidbits came from local knowledge and family folklore. She does a charming job of describing Dona Blanca bossing around the Italian architect who is rebuilding the Quinta Vergara palace after the 1906 earthquake. She dramatizes Hugo’s accidental death by falling off a horse. But when she has Manuela being sent to a convent to keep her from chasing boys, I am not sure if I should believe it. Frankly, I expected a little more accuracy from someone who is from Santiago.

I would put this book in the same category as the Daisy Waugh romance novel, as a work of total fiction sprinkled with a little bit of fact. It’s entertaining as an afternoon read but is not a reliable reference. When I must refer to it, I do so sparingly and cautiously, and out of desperation. It is absolutely the only Spanish language source that attempts to tell Blanca’s story.