Mujeres de ojos grandes.

• Author: Hernandez Martin, Jorge

To look, to see, and be seen, to desire and be desired: These activities and their consequences mark the lives described in Mujeres de ojos grandes. These pellucid women's eyes actively search out the magic of life, which some find in socially approved love and others in dreams. Through them, the author offers us parallel female lives and experiences that run their course in the first forty years of this century in Mexico. Mastretta recounts forty lives, and the strands of these stories weave themselves into a kind of family saga.

The streets, neighborhoods, and surroundings of the city of Puebla de los Angeles provide the setting for a narration that, rather than forming a novel, emulates the structure of the traditional "lives of the saints and martyrs." This comparison is appropriate only in formal terms, however, as the women's lives are not at all saintly in the religious sense; they represent attempts to flee the martyrdom of tedium and convention, and to achieve the most humanly possible happiness in the pleasure of the senses, the imagination, friendship, and love. The destiny that hangs over these lives is the destiny imposed by a traditional society in which the women "were not fit to talk about other than domestic subjects . . . Women were supposed to sew and to sing, to cook and to pray, to sleep and to wake at the appointed time." The conservative social world of Puebla stands between female desire and the desired object like an implacable presence, always ready to lynch, burn alive, or ostracize any woman who transgresses the established order.

Although the extremes of physical violence that some of the women feared as reprisal do not find expression in Mastretta's narrative, the women's happiness, especially if it seems to result from an agreement with someone else, is viewed as an intolerable threat to society. The stories explore the causes of the unhappiness of these lonely, anxious married women. Marriage in those days required women to accept that they were of little account and "to worry only about the desires of others, to quietly enjoy the plants and the fishbowl, unfolded socks and tidy drawers." For their part, some of the men are more interested in going to war or pursuing success than in engaging in the ephemeral and possibly arduous task of love. Others are domestic bureaucrats who dutifully direct their vapid smiles at their wives while following their careful customs and timetables. Yet others scheme their...