the masked man unmasked

Zorro - A Novel, by Isabel Allende, published by Fourth Estate, 398pp, ISBN 0007201974

Isabel Allende's Zorro is an envoy from the frontlines of industrialized literary oppression. Maintaining the character's swashbuckling hauteur, Allende kicks her way through myth and into the pith of the genre itself: Zorro – A Novel is a sensualist's take on the most racially integrative of all pulp heroes. “This is the story of Diego de la Vega and of how he became the legendary Zorro,” she writes in her high-stepping introduction. “I intend to set the record straight before the slanderers who are determined to defame Zorro have their say. Our enemies are many, as is often the case with those who defend the weak, rescue damsels in distress, and humiliate the powerful.”

Conjured by Johnston McCulley in 1919 for The Curse of Capistrano , Zorro was the first Latin-American hero and through him, the idea of American history inflamed the world. ( Zorro Plucks a Pigeon, Zorro Aids an Invalid , and Zorro's Hot Tortillas were some of the less inspired titles in the pulp series.) Almost eighty years later, Columbia Pictures' The Mask of Zorro generated USD250,000,000 (Allende openly fantasized about a “salsa-smeared Antonio Banderas rolling naked on a tortilla,”). The sequel is scheduled for a late 2005 release, and  Zorro – A Novel will be filmed as the third in the trilogy.

Rebooted through Allende's imagination, Zorro is less Douglas Fairbanks and more the silky, flip, idealistic narcissist with his mother's “caramel-colored” eyes. (“It is true, I am a genius, he concluded as he ran.”) Yes, he flourishes the epee, gallops bareback, wields the mandatory whip, and hangs like a bat by his feet, but he also enjoys promiscuity, duplicity, gambling and prototypical PR: “I could add that another of his qualities is vanity, but that would be to get ahead of the story; that developed later, when he realized that the number of his enemies was swelling – always a good sign – and that of his admirers as well.”

Such an anachronistic sense of high romance is really a form of anarchy. Egotistical moustache-twirlers, virgins in diaphanous white dimity, and slippery-hipped quadroons are the sandbags Allende piles against a world at war with ordinary magic. And yet she wears her literary absolutism lightly. “There was always some drunk raising a ruckus, side by side with well-dressed caballeros, plantation owners, merchants, and officials. Nuns and priests crossed paths with prostitutes, soldiers, bandits and slaves.” Humanity is to her rapturous in its entirety. The harp is played with “tremulous fairy fingers” by a young girl; a brothel is staffed by “three half-Mexican girls of negotiable virtue, and an opulent mulatto from Panama , whose price was fixed and not cheap”; the governor is moved to change the death penalty to a sentence of twenty years by the “rosy glow” of his wife's décolletage. No room for the half-lived lives of Raymond Carver here.

Allende's women can be sanguine in matters of love, but her men never ignore hormonal clarion calls. Their loins determine destiny. Zorro's father: “[O]ut gushed a proposal of marriage. It was not an impromptu impulse; he had … reached the conclusion that a stain on his impeccable lineage would be far better than living without her.” Zorro's milk brother: “Bernardo could not continue to live like a boy; his roots were calling him, he wanted to return to California and assume his new responsibilities … The absolute love he felt for Light-in-the-Night now had taken on a terrible urgency.” And Zorro? “His room filled with a supernatural light when she entered. He awaited her in an elegant smoking jacket, sitting in a chair with a book of sonnets on his knees pretending to read, although all he had been doing was count the minutes she had been gone.”

Neglected in childhood, de la Vega is put in contact with the “Great Spirit” and his destiny is revealed: the fox ( el zorro ) comes to him by firelight. Transhistorically, the fox has symbolized guile. Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, medieval operator Reynard the Fox, and Ben Jonson's Volpone (Italian for “big fox”) have entertained generations with their trickery. (“Like the fox, you will discover what cannot be seen in the dark, you will disguise yourself, and you will hide by day and act by night.”) Despite this, Allende doesn't seem to enjoy Zorro as ardently as other characters - Daughter of Fortune 's Eliza and Tao Chi'en, say. He is, perhaps, too smoothly collusive with mortality – of the world, not in it – and for all her pulse, she prefers those who contemplate the veil between worlds. 

In all of Allende's novels, the idea of destiny as a force that can be read in cards and by which spirit is swept into being. Objects are no more than atomic code for universal truths. (“There he saw the symbols he must venerate: a loaf of bread, a scale, a sword, a chalice, and a rose.”) Bernardo communicates with his mother's spirit by observing the stars. A girl farewells her love by drawing two birds in flight on a rock with her first menstrual blood. Caves are natural temples, a “basic map for spiritual journeys, which is why in ancient times initiates had gone there to seek their own centers, which ideally should coincide with the center of the world, where life originates.” The 1992 death of her daughter, Paula, demanded this permanent consciousness of otherness.

Allende's prose has been derided as grape-purple but if there are elements of la novela rosa in her books, it is because there are elements of la novela rosa in life. With humorous self-awareness, she writes: “[H]is father scorned novels as a minor genre plagued with inconsistencies, basic errors, and personal dramas that were none of his business.” Once their advances have been forgotten, Allende's books will be recognized as works of literature in the tradition of Zola and Balzac – resplendent, daring in their breadth, comic and plunging without reserve into the heart of relative truth.

*Originally published in The Weekend Australian