Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel, She-Devil in the Mirror, is a matrix of murder, greed and decadence, into which intrigue, romance and drugs are thrown.
The hyper kinetic, voluble narration of the murder of Olga Maria is conducted by her best friend, Laura Rivera.
To get a sense of how garrulous Rivera is, her description of a character in the book is particularly apt: “It was like the world was about to come to an end and he had to utter the most number of words in the least amount of time possible.”
The Salvadoran civil war has ended. Soldiers have been demobilised and the rich of that society do what the rich of most societies do: accumulate yet more wealth. All manner of intrigue is going on as aristocrats and soldiers try to get into politics.
In societies like these the easiest way to accumulate wealth is, of course, by taking control of the state. When the womenfolk are deployed (to use that most South African of words) to commerce, it is to engage in soft businesses — you know, beauty salons. Beauty boutiques are where other rich women spend their time.
Rivera spends her time in boutiques, coffee shops, beachside love hideouts or restaurants. One of her favourite places is an eatery run by one Mirna. “The best thing about this place is the waiters, all university students, handsome devils, every one, to drool over. They say Mirna picks the gorgeous ones on purpose, so women get addicted to coming here.”
Rivera and Olga Maria belong to the Salvadoran upper classes. Like most children of the upper class, they went to the local American school.
Here, for just about everything, the United States is the standard. Regarding the death penalty, Rivera argues: “If they’ve got the death penalty in the most civilised country, the United States, why not here?”
Fenced off from the riff raff
In fact it’s not just that it is obsessed with the US. El Salvador is a country distrustful of its own institutions and textures. When the elite wants to gauge how trendy a restaurant is, it counts the number of foreigners who go there or whether it stocks foreign newspapers.
As you would expect, the rich (most of them descendants of the Spanish conquistadors) are disdainful of the poor (mostly native Americans and descendants of Africans). If the aristocrats had their way, they would just fence off the beach from the lower classes, “riff raff” in the words of the narrator.
The church is divided between the priests who “only talk about spiritual things” and those (mostly Jesuits) who also concern themselves with the welfare of the poor. (In the modern age it was the Latin Americans who first broached the idea of a God who throws in his lot with the poor.)
The upper classes describe these priests simply as “communists”. One character in the book describes himself as an agnostic (“something about believing in a God up there, but not in the priests down here”). When, on occasion, she goes to church she finds the constant “kneeling down” and “standing up” inconvenient as her clothes get “all messed up”.
The narrative also doubles as a love-log of Laura and Olga. As so often in these matters, those featuring in Laura’s entries somehow find their way into her friend’s.
She-Devil in a Mirror is a rollicking cascade of vacuity, a sad and damning story of a society that distrusts local standards in favour of
imported ones.
Chimurenga Chronicles carries a question-and-answer interview with Horacio Castellanos Moya, who now lives in exile in the United States