Allende’s “Two Words”
A magic realist short story, Isabel Allende’s Two Words is a tale of a poor woman who grew up with nothing, her only skill being enduring inhumane treatment and surviving inhabitable conditions, transformed herself into a writer. With her passion from words, she started selling stories and used that revenue to pay a priest to teach her to read and write. This transformation alone is revolutionary, symbolizing the existential theme of one’s ability to define oneself for oneself. However, that is not the quintessential moral of the story. Two Story is a tale of the power of words. They can reach people from all over the world, touch people in special ways, and even cast spells on people — powerful people who have survived multiple wars and are formidable enough to cause miscarriages on sight. Even people as powerful as El Colonel are not immune to the power words possess, and should be careful the way they use them, and what they listen to.
To be human, according to Isabel Allende, is to have a complicated and intimate relationship with language, one that is unique to the individual. On one hand, one is very capable of living a full life (full as in dying of old age) while being illiterate. Language isn’t a necessity like food, water, shelter, heat, and human interaction. However, language is something humans have adopted to make said human interactions more efficient and thorough. And in a world where people are reading and writing to communicate with each other, it is nearly impossible to participate in society without having the basic foundations of literacy mastered. The main protagonist, Belisa, isn’t so much concerned with participating in society as she is with the magic of words. She is drawn in by passion and curiosity alone, not by any pressure to be an “intellectual” but just so that she can read and write, since she had already developed a bond with spoken word and oral storytelling. Although capitalism teaches that nothing should be done for enjoyment and every second should be spent making money instead, Belisa’s story is able to combine two elements: she desperately needed money, but she also had a love for words. The story mentions she could have been a prostitute or a kitchen assistant, hinting that those were her second and third options, but she wanted with all her heart to become a writer and that is what she set herself out to do. It was an investment — being a prostitute or a kitchen assistant would have been easier for someone who couldn’t even recognize what words were when she laid her eyes on them; however, Belisa was not interested in taking the easiest route or making the most money. She wanted to patiently develop a relationship with language.
But the story isn’t only about Belisa’s relationship to language; it also speaks of how mesmerized people were by her talents, how successful she was as a businesswoman because of people’s fascination with language, and the most infamous and notorious war criminal in the country, who was nearly a myth, had his men kidnap her because he wanted her to write a speech for his campaign. Of course, she wrote the speech and it was great and won over the hearts of many, yet something (that we later discovered to be the curse Belisa put on him) was weighing him down, killing him, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Others, particularly El Mulato who was especially loyal to El Colonel, were enraged with Belisa for her betrayal of trust against such a high authority figure. However, the man himself was enamored with her, his eyes twinkling as if looking at some type of deity when they fell upon her, and so Belisa is protected.
The words are what put El Colonel under hypnosis, and what caused him to wither like a flower in autumn. He stood no chance against those words. Even as he was using language, the speech she wrote for him, and gaining notoriety based on skills that were not his, the reader hopes for some type of vengeance. It is uneasy watching El Colonel falsely portray himself as who Belissa truly is, although instances like this happen all the time and have happened for a long time. Of course, our strong, feminist hero Belisa Crepulsculario will not allow her work to be acquired in such a violent abuse of power and used for the gain of a selfish and nearly sociopathic man. Readers knew Belisa was a powerful wordsmith, but we didn’t know she was a witch and was already ten steps ahead until she was captured again for casting the spell, and we realize that El Colonel, though dying, will never order his men to hurt her.
