Text and countertext in Rosario Ferre's "Sleeping Beauty."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Kathleen M. Glenn

Catalan writer Merce Rodoreda has emphasized the question of language and voice in her fiction. Characters who have no one with whom to speak, no one who will listen to them, at times turn to writing letters in order to make themselves heard, as does the protagonist of "Una carta" ("A Letter").

Rodoreda's strategy of giving marginalized figures--women, the elderly, the uneducated or mentally unbalanced--a literary voice and allowing them to speak out has a parallel in the introductory section of Ferre's "Sleeping Beauty."(3) The story begins with two intriguing letters addressed to "Dear Don Felisberto" (Don is a courtesy title used with Christian names in Spanish) by "a friend and admirer." The writer identifies herself as a manicurist who works in a beauty parlor located on the lower level of a fleabag hotel, and her letters are purportedly motivated by concern for the reputation of the business tycoon and his ballerina wife. The latter, wearing dark glasses and a scarf over her hair, is surreptitiously visiting a room in the hotel. The writer, echoing a centuries-old theme--woman's honor is easily besmirched, and any slip on her part dishonors the man responsible for her, be he father, brother, or husband--reminds Don Felisberto that "A lady's reputation is like a polished mirror; it will smudge at the lightest touch. A lady mustn't simply be respectable, she must, above all, appear to be so" (89; emphasis added). The second letter adds information about the time of the trysts as well as the room number and name of the hotel, the Elysium.(4) Each letter is followed by brief comments by an omniscient narrator that allow us to identify the writer as the ballerina wife. As Altman affirms, "Addressee-consciousness informs the act of writing" (111), and the style of the 21 and 29 May 1973 letters is designed to produce certain effects upon their intended recipient. He must be led to believe that his wife is not only having an affair but is doing so with a man who is far beneath her socially. The references to reputation are aimed at Felisberto's concern with public opinion and his own honor (any red-blooded man should be able to satisfy and control his wife), and the writer anticipates his reactions, such as his turning the envelope over to see if there is a return address and trying to track down his anonymous "friend and admirer," who in the second note announces that she has quit her job and thus cannot be found. The writer's use of a pencil and her poor handwriting (she uses her left hand to scrawl the address) are extraverbal signs that reinforce the impression that she is a woman of little education. Letters are frequently tools for seduction, but in this instance the two false letters are intended to seduce (lead astray) in a special way. Why, we may well ask, would a wife want her husband to believe she is deceiving him with another man? Is she in fact doing so? How many layers of deception are at play here? The questions raised whet our appetite and propel us into the main body of the narrative.