The monster was us the whole time: "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado

Easily the most distinctive feature of Yohanca Delgado's "The Little Widow from the Capital" is its first-person plural ("we") point-of-view. Not the novelty of it, because his isn't really novel anymore, but the distinctive end to which it is put. The first story I think of when someone mentions this point-of-view is Joshua Ferris's And Then We Came to the End (which for some reason I blogged about once). In Ferris' novel, the "we" is used because all of the people who share an office are bound together in a lot of ways. They share each other's bathroom space and air. They might not care about each other much, but because they all rely on the office to take care of the people they do care about, they are, in a sense, a kind of family. 

There are a lot of uses for the "we" POV. Team sports, people competing in the same competition together, the inhabitants of a dying town. The possibilities are endless, but generally, there must be a fairly profound link between everyone included in the "we." Much of the story will be exploring that bond. 

In Delgado's "The Little Widow from the Capital," the "we" are the Dominican women of an apartment building in New York. The sense of community that "we" suggests can be positive or negative. It can be about solidarity, but it can also be about how terrifying the community mindset can become, especially for outsiders. That's how the "we" is functioning in "The Little Widow." The "we" who narrate are mostly busybodies or chismosas--gossips. That seems mostly harmless, but for someone outside the circle, it can be frightening and alienating. 

When the little widow shows up, the women of the building have already concocted stories about her, based on scant information. They know she was married for a short time. They suspect she doesn't have much money, and wonder how she can afford a three-bedroom. Other than that, they don't know much.

They exclude her almost immediately from the community, the "we." She dresses funny, like a hick. It isn't just that she not dressed right, though, it's that she's dressed her "short, plump body as though she adored it." That's why the women "instantly...took a dislike." Why should the women dislike her for adoring her own body? Obviously, because they don't. They've been raised on "a diet of telenovelas and American magazines," and they have different ideas of beauty that they themselves don't measure up to. They look with dislike on their own scuffed sneakers and leggings, and they don't understand someone who doesn't also look at herself with dislike. 

The women manage to con their way into the little widow's room so they can see how she lives. They do this by hiring her to sew, which she is very good at. They see that the little widow has decorated her sewing room with burlap wallpaper, on which she has "embroidered massive, swaying palm trees." The women think they can "almost feel a salty breeze warm (their) faces" when they look at the trees. The widow's artificial trees seem to them to have life, then, while their own flowerpots that are supposed to have real plants in them are "full of barren dirt." 

The little widow does not conform to the expectations of the ladies. The most closely detailed description in the story is of the widow's face, whereby we learn how carefully the women have been inspecting every aspect of her face. The widow, though, has hand-sewn a pack of muñecas limé, dolls the Dominican Republic is especially known for and which tourists often favor. These dolls have no faces. The violence of the community toward the little widow was to invade her life and to surveil her, down to her most minute features, so they could judge her. The widow's response is the opposite; it's to erase their features, the ones they are so obsessed with. It's to tell them, "I matter to you, but you don't matter to me." The women interpret it as voodoo and are both afraid of her and dislike her even more. 

Has nobody thought to turn these creepy things into a horror element before this story? 

Magical realism

The story is mostly told in a very realistic vein, albeit an especially vivid one. However, there are moments where the fantastic enters in. This combination of realism with the magical is generally referred to as "magical realism" or "magic-realism." Its origin is generally considered to be 20th century Latin American literature, but it's now ubiquitous worldwide. 

Whenever I encounter magical realism, I like to think of the bits of magic sort of like the songs in a musical. In a musical, characters are going along talking to each other like normal people, and then suddenly, they burst out into song and a choreographed dance number. Which--I don't know what your life is like, but the people I know don't do this.

Unless the song is diegetic, you're not supposed to think that the people in the story are really singing and dancing. It's a dramatic and lyrical expression of the feeling a character or characters would be having at the point in the story, or it's a way to establish a feeling to a plot point, rather than just having it happen. It's the same thing with soliloquies in plays. In real life, people don't talk to themselves out loud in poetry while other people fade into the background. You're meant to think of this as an opening into the psyche of the character by means other than action and normal dialogue.

When something that doesn't happen in the real world happens in a story where most things do happen in the real world, then, I look at it like a song in a musical. It's not about the thing, it's about what the thing signifies. The women aren't afraid of being cursed by a voodoo doll; they're afraid that the little widow's lack of concern for their faces means they aren't really that important. The "we" is facing a threat from the "them." 

Likewise, when the little widow turns a man into a folded-up piece of cloth through her voodoo sewing magic, it's not that she's really doing that. It's that the women of the "we" community see her as powerful because instead of taking back the lowlife guy, she never thinks about him again. Moving on and never thinking about him again is such powerful magic, it's nearly as good as making the man into nothing. There's power in getting over someone and never thinking about them again. 

When the little widow was briefly in love with the man and approaching marriage, the community of womenfolk temporarily like her. They see her as "finally on the right track, heading toward a life we understood." The women, with their trail of men and children behind them, want everyone in their orbit to live the same life, because it means the community is making the right choices.

Ultimately, when the little widow's boyfriend turns out to be a creep, she doesn't take him back. She turns him into a "small scrap of cream fabric." After this, the women are even more terrified of her. But someone also later thinks they've seen the boyfriend "slinking out of" a bodega in Queens. They aren't sure. By turning her back decisively on him, she's made him like he doesn't exist. He's forgotten. It's an even stronger form of what she's done to the women by erasing their faces. He's reduced, for a time, to "slinking" around because he's been unmade by her lack of concern for him. 

It's at this point the women finally get serious about discovering the widow's past. It turns out this isn't the first creep man she's been with. She's a widow because her first husband forced himself on a maid (the widow is rich, it turns out) and was then murdered by the maid's husband. 

For some reason, the women seem to spontaneously decide to check on the widow on the day her wedding was supposed to happen. The widow comes out in the hall in a wedding dress full with names of people from the Dominican Republic written on it. She goes up to the roof and jumps off, although the women try to stop her. 

Is this an earned ending? I didn't think so at first. I mean, it's kind of foreshadowed. When the widow lands, her flowing dress turns into birds that fly all over. This was foreshadowed by her arrival, during which raindrops fell that "sounded like tiny birds slamming into our windows." So the little widow is aligned in their minds with a bird, which is to say, someone essentially free. At the end, the women have come to care about her, perhaps, or maybe they wanted to smother more than comfort. In either case, the widow does not need the community. She's a bird. And this freedom is powerful. The dress turning into birds is the name of each person she's written down flying away, no longer important to her.

It's nicely done. I don't like a lot of horror movies, because I find them more upsetting than terrifying. A good horror, though, is about more than just jump scares and special effects. It's about tying the frightening thing to a real fear people have. That's what this story does. It takes a perennial theme, the push-pull between society and individual, and dramatizes it. It does leave a lingering shivering feeling for the reader, but not because of the uncomfortableness of watching a man be sewn down to nothing from a distance. It accomplishes its creepy effect by showing the downside of community and how easily the power of the community can be brought to nothing.  

Other readings: Karen Carlson viciously attacks me for being a spoilsport toward magical realism here: