The Pond (review)

This is the second time that this Puerto Rican classic has appeared in English. In 1982 it was published under its original title, La Charca, by Waterfront Press. The new title, The Pond, doesn’t correspond exactly to the Spanish charca, which refers to a low-lying, unsanitary, foul-smelling pool of rainwater. Still, Kal Wagenheim’s translation is functional, even though he takes liberties in modernizing the original language.

Manuel Zeno Gandía (1855–1930), a doctor by profession, tries to present a clinical diagnosis of the miserable conditions of campesino life on the coffee plantations; he does so by portraying in great detail the social inequality separating the landed classes from the campesinos in the 1870s. Influenced by Zola’s naturalistic series about the Rougon-Macquart family, Zeno Gandía considered writing a series of twelve novels collectively titled Chronicles of a Sick World. Of the four that reached publication, La Charca (1894) was the best.

The plot is tortuous. After being raped by a rich landowner, Silvina, the main character, is forced to marry Gaspar, a poor, degenerate laborer, and the focus turns to his plan to rob Andújar, a store owner. Gaspar counts on an accomplice, Deblás, and obliges Silvina to help. But Andújar is warned of the planned theft and flees from the store with the money. In the dark Gaspar and Silvina mistake Deblás for Andújar and murder him. While running from the scene of the crime, Gaspar concludes that Silvina has remained free of ties so that she can be united with Ciro, the man she has always loved; unbeknownst to her, however, Ciro has been killed by his own brother. Finally, Silvina suffers an epileptic seizure and falls from a cliff. Most of the minor characters fare no better than she does. The exception is a plantation owner named Juan del Salto, who, while educated and possessed of liberal ideas, is detached from the miserable world of Silvina and the others who work for him. Salto discourses with his friends about the lower classes, but he does so as if they were so many cockroaches or worms; he is merely a scientific observer, noting social phenomena and then taking off to travel in Europe.

While La Charca doesn’t follow the Marxist model of class struggle, Zeno Gandía’s diagnosis is alarming: the rural Puerto Rican worker is socially and morally defective, living at the margins of the worlds of science, religion, education, health, work, and family. Although there are educated people who consider themselves above this degrading view, their good intentions alone aren’t enough to bring about change. Under the surface of the novel, one might be tempted to read an allegory of colonialism into Silvina and a diatribe about Yankee imperialism into Salto. But Zeno Gandía was no prophet. After 1898 he traveled with Eugenio María de Hostos to Washington, D.C., to seek reforms for the governing of the island, but he failed to see its independence as a worthy ideal. Seen in context, La Charca illustrates the failure of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas, particularly in the spheres of politics, economics, and education. Although the colonial power showed some interest in modernizing the sugar industry in Cuba in the 1770s, it did little in Puerto Rico. It is true that coffee and sugar exports were developed to some extent, but the isolation and economic stagnation that the island had suffered for centuries were so great that these exports never overcame them. Strong capital investments in agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce never materialized, and as a result modernization was never seriously undertaken. Slavery having been abolished in 1873, more because of its negligible economic significance than because of anything else, Puerto Rico’s most urgent problems in the 1890s seem to have been to gain autonomy and to move into the next century with the means to achieve economic strength. But it was necessary...