A Reminiscent Man
In a chapter titled “A Disillusioned and Sadistic Man” the titular character makes things even more complex by insisting he is not a sadistic man, but a reminiscent man in addition to being disillusioned. He has a way with words. Quite a way with words, at least with one particular woman:
“I don’t know what kind of woman you are,” he said with anger, his hand still on her back. “You’ve become a symbol of something to me. You’re like a religion… You’re like some rare, nocturnal bird…You’re so callipygous…I like the way you’re constructed. I like a woman built just so…I tell you you’re not a wench, you’re a lady…I like the aroma of your hair, like cinnamon.”
The Dictionary Compiler
A very strange interlude in the narrative commences with the arrival of a man on a horse who is compiling a dictionary supplement that will contain all the “impure” words and phrases that Father Tollinare would not allow in the official dictionary. He is an odd duck, to be sure, whose presence is almost completely embedded into the story through use of conversational imagery:
“And I heard the young man reply, ‘But, Padre, you hyperbolize, you hypercriticize, you hyperbola, he he, you hyperborean, you hypercatalectic hyperborean, you hyperesthetic hypercatalectic hyperborean, you must confront the realities of life, the realities of language. The beatings?’”
The Bashful Lady of Solitude
The imagery begins with the title chapter, “The Bashful Woman, or Our Lady of Solitude.” The entire chapter is just one long unbroken paragraph comprising a single page. And most of that paragraph is comprised of imagery. The first half is the best half:
“There was a woman who lived in one of the huts. She was a solitary, bashful woman who spoke seldom and only about necessary things. When she first came to the quilombo, the Palmaristas mistook her silence for arrogance, until it was discovered it was not arrogance but bashfulness, and then her silence was respected by some, tolerated by others, ridiculed by a few, but still not understood. She had come as a free woman, not as a slave. She had walked one morning into the quilombo. A house had been provided for her. In all the time she had been there no man had taken her for his wife or she had taken no man.”
From Miss Pepperell’s Travels in Recife
The narrative structure of this novel is complex. There is first-person narration and third-person narration and first-person narration within first-person narration. An expression of the latter occurs when the first-person narration introduces writings from an example of the “travel literature” which was extremely popular at the time and quite unusual in that it came to be dominated by women authors. In this case, the woman is a white British woman named Miss Pepperell:
“Sometimes I can’t tell the mulatto serving women from the daughters of the house. They are all a tawny people. I suppose it is because of the intensity of the sun. But it is the same as in New Spain. Often to be ‘white’ here is merely to consider oneself white, or to be considered so by others. I have embarrassed myself at least several times treating a mulatto woman as if she were a mistress of the house. I must add that the women, all of them, go around in pantaloons and bare feet when they are inside the house. How can one distinguish one class from the other when they are all in pantaloons?”
