Gubi Amaya
...men she encounters. But she frequently emphasizes her gender and its disguise. She depicts “feeling my woman‘s heart beating loudly under the outfit with pistols with which I had heroically adorned my belt” (Gorriti, 150), as she is welcomed as a visiting man by the women who live in the house where she grew up. These women showed such kindness and camaraderie to the narrator and these women are, in her eyes, strong and splendid “daughters of the Rio de la Plata, guardian angels of Eden.” The narrator praises the tenacious compassion and moral behavior of women, whose actions are governed not by political affiliation but by idealistic principle. The stories in Gubi Amaya are a series of parables which knit the past and the present together. First the gap between Then and Now is emphasized; seeing her own childhood drawing still on the wall, the narrator is overwhelmed: “Oh! What a difference between those times and the present! What a difference between the girl with blond hair and flushed cheeks who, talking wildly, had drawn that picture--and the pale, tired, and sick traveler who now looked at it in silence.” (Gorriti, 151.) Memory is essential and valued. It is the private sanctuary where ethics, spirituality and optimism can harbor and be preserved. But the story she goes on to tell next is a legend. She recalls the story of Pascual, who kills his beloved María out of jealousy and fear that she may escape his control. It is also about María’s gullibility and naiveté. Pascual tricks her into climbing a tree, then removes the lower branches, leaving her there to die. The story of Pascual and María relates to the idealization of the past, and human desire to remember a past golden age as positive and frozen in time. It relates to the recurrent theme of men’s violent possessiveness about women and desire to transform the woman, the mother country, and even the history into his own image of perfection, often at great expense. And third, it relates to women’s ability to evade and survive repressive circumstances: the narrator has slipped into Argentina illegally and she travels more easily because she is disguised as a man, as she continually reminds us. María escapes Pascual’s death trap by transforming herself into something else, too, in her case into spirit and legend: her body disappears and her voice haunts the forest and becomes immortal. When the narrator is asked how she would respond to the loss of a friend, she says that she would grieve and that she would always remember, but that she would try to adapt to the loss. She views it as a strategy for survival, not as a character flaw, but as pure common sense, rather than as cowardice. The joy of memory and the pain of loss continue to compete. She encounters a much loved childhood friend, Miguel el Domador, where tears of joy overwhelm her and make her unable to speak. Miguel’s story is the centerpiece of the novel. He recounts his alienation from conventional morality due to the betrayal of those he trusts. He believes that, “Good and evil exist within us; we have them both since childhood, like two equally unknown roads. We do not choose: Destiny chooses for us, and brings about circumstances, joyful or ill-fated, that throw us down one or the other path.” (Gorriti, 163) His reactions to adversity are excessive: he is either desperate with adoration or raging in homicidal/suicidal fury. He over-idealizes both friendship and romance. Miguel’s beloved Natalia betrays him by marrying his best friend, and the narrator intrudes her enthusiastic empathy into the story. Through several pages of escalating desperation, Miguel yells, faints, cries and roars his grief as nature responds. He pledges himself to Evil, converting himself into the dreaded bandit, Gubi Amaya, the terror of Tucumán and is confirmed in his dedication to destruction by yet another encounter with a beautiful woman, whom Miguel mistakes for an angel only to find that she, too, is a woman who has sold out to material wealth, abandoning the man she loves for a rich suitor. He rips out her heart and fills the bloody vacant hole with her gold. Shortly afterward an avenger pursues and defies him, hurling gold pieces at his head. The man becomes the voice of conscience, and Gubi Amaya undergoes a conversion from evil to good. He is capable of controlling his own behavior after all. His savior details his own worthy deeds which are an odd and ambiguous lot: he tells of working to support his family. Offered the viceroy’s illicitly accumulated fortune by the Royalists’ fleeing treasurer, he put his own life and honor in jeopardy to allow both the greedy treasurer and the fortune to slip into Peru. It is his money that was stolen from his family, and it is also money that is needed to fund the cause of independence, so this seems a perverse sense of honor. He would seem to have been...