In her ambitious novel, December Breeze, Marvel Moreno (1939-1995) wrote about her native Colombian city, Barranquilla, located near the Caribbean Sea, more than 600 miles from Bogotá. Mansions in residential neighborhoods, second homes on the beach, and the Barranquilla country club serve as backdrops for Moreno’s stories concerning women from the upper class, their fraught relationships with men, and their search for identity and freedom during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Considered as her greatest work, December Breeze was a finalist for the Plaza y Janés International Literary Prize in 1985 and has been translated into Italian and French. In 1989 it received the Grinzane-Cavour prize awarded in Italy for the best foreign book. The novel was also well received in Colombia. According to journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, it is one of the greatest accomplishments of the post-boom era. In fact, it placed Moreno among the emerging Latin American women writers who became part of one of the most significant literary developments in the last two decades of the 20th century.
Those familiar with Gabriel García Márquez’s work will find another aspect of the Colombian landscape captured in Moreno’s lyrical novel. The author paints domestic interior scenes reminiscent of Vermeer and populates them with women, their thoughts, feelings, fears, and challenges, but also their victories. Isabel Adey’s and Charlotte Coombe’s impeccable translation captures the novel’s unique tone and the writing style of the original Spanish edition.
Moreno wrote December Breeze while living in Paris, where she died from Lupus shortly after the book was published. Although it is not known why she left Colombia never to return, the author drew from personal experience. For instance, the beauty pageant she describes closely resembles a famous contest in Barranquilla, held during Carnival. At age 20, encouraged by her mother, Moreno participated in this contest and was crowned queen of the Barranquilla Carnival. Not surprisingly, her social success blunted her reputation as a writer, and she struggled to be taken seriously for the rest of her life.
In an essay included in the most recent Spanish edition of the novel, the French-Colombian social psychologist and feminist academic, Florence Thomas, writes that Moreno’s book “is a historic monument … to all Colombian women,” and that it offers transparent messages of “variations of a patriarchal system that was confronting a modernity which in relation to women’s lives, and their bitter, sometimes violent encounters with men, their insecurity in love, and their observed and controlled sexuality, could hardly change anything.”
In fact, December Breeze is filled with examples of the double standards used to judge men and women in Barranquilla’s society and of the hypocrisy that enables this injustice. In the novel, while men beat their wives, take on lovers, and father children outside their marriages, the women are expected to be loyal, obedient, good mothers. Pious and religious. If, like Catalina, they dare to participate in a beauty contest despite their mother’s checkered past, they are attacked. If, like Dora, they give in to the sensual pleasures of the body, they are prevented from marrying someone from their social class. If, like Beatriz, they become overly religious and thus unattainable and more desirable, they are subjugated by a man. Despite their suffering, these three women do not follow traditional paths leading to marriage or to motherhood.
As members of a society ruled by archaic theories and outdated religious beliefs, Moreno’s heroines have little or no economic independence. If they come from rich families, it is their fathers, their brothers and their husbands who control the wealth. As Moreno repeatedly demonstrates, without economic independence women cannot change their lives and influence their futures. She alludes to Virginia Woolf, but also speaks from personal experience. Although, like some of her characters, Moreno managed to overcome her circumstances and to move beyond the narrow circle in which she had been raised and indoctrinated, her independence and the freedom to devote herself to her art came at a high price.
The rich tapestry the author weaves in December Breeze includes religious references, philosophical musings, and scientific theories. In the first chapter, a few Bible verses introduce one of the main themes in the novel: “For I, the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the sin of their parents, to the third and fourth generation …” This fatalistic point of view becomes a leitmotif in the book, one the reader encounters throughout its copious pages as the narrator lists the sins of parents, grandparents, and other ancestors to show us how they changed the course of their lives and affected future generations. As Lina’s grandmother maintained, “It did not begin with the Word … because before the Word came action, and before action came desire.”
Moreno adopts a scientific stance to explain men’s lack of sophistication and their aggressive behavior: “If Darwin was not mistaken and a process of natural selection did in fact exist, it seemed only right to conclude that the men currently living had descended from those whose violence or cruelty — now defects, then virtues — had allowed them to conveniently massacre their rivals, passing down a gene pool that was capable of sowing the healthiest distrust in women … that these men should stone birds, pull the wings off flies or dismember the bodies of lizards was in keeping with tendencies once encouraged by natural selection …”
The distrust men inspire in women, along with a mutual lack of understanding that leads to suffering, are key themes in Moreno’s book. Even though the men in December Breeze are educated — surgeons, lawyers, business owner — and even though, unlike their wives, they often exercise political power, the women, from the wealthy heiresses controlled by their husbands to the prostitute turned entrepreneur — come across as superior to the men. Concerning men’s aggressive behavior, the narrator adds, “Men could be tamed … they could be taught to be less aggressive with the help of religion or ideology … they could be turned — at least some of them — into the kinds of harmless dreamers who fall in love, write books, compose music or discover penicillin.” Moreno’s candid portrayal of men exposes them, even though promoting hatred is not her intention. At the end of the Darwinian discourse quoted above, the narrator adds, “But not hated; hating them [men] made no sense.”
December Breeze, narrated in the third person, describes the world as seen through Lina’s eyes. Lina’s grandmother also plays an important role as a source of information about the past, a detached observer, the oracle that predicts. In her opinion, shame is often at the root of violence and lack of understanding. Early on, the narrator states, “the Bible, as [Lina’s] grandmother saw it, contained all the preconceptions that could make man ashamed of his origin, and not just his origin, but also his innate impulses, urges, instincts, call them what you may, turning a fleeting lifetime into a hell of guilt and remorse, frustration and aggression.”
When her friends suffer, Lina tries to help them. But, as her wise grandmother points out, Lina cannot save her friends from their destinies. Only they can save themselves. Although Lina often fails in her attempts to protect others and to alleviate their pain, throughout the process she learns a great deal about human nature.
Paris plays a crucial role in December Breeze and in the lives of Moreno’s characters, just as it played an important role in her own life until she died there, penniless. Perhaps personal experience inspired Moreno to give some women in the novel the opportunity to achieve economic independence, personal freedom, and a full, rich life enjoyed without guilt.
In the epilogue, Moreno switches from the third to the first person, thus giving the reader the opportunity to hear Lina speak in the present tense:
“Sometimes, at night, when the fever grips me again, I think that, like our grandmothers, I dwell among memories. All these years in Paris have not been able to erase them… the fevers and even the cold that cuts like a knife outside the Metro station on my way home from the hospital insist on taking me back to … the breeze that always came in December, to the evenings when, sitting round a table at the country club … my friends and I amused ourselves trying to predict our destinies with a deck of cards. ”
En diciembre llegaban las brisas (the breeze that always came in December) is the title Moreno chose for her novel. Adey and Coombe shortened it to December Breeze. The longer Spanish title, which includes the imperfect tense (llegaban) as well as the plural (brisas), carries a nostalgic tone not easily replicated in English.
As for the card readings that Lina mentions earlier, she concludes: “No card could have foretold the extraordinary twists and turns our destinies would take, not mine, nor the other girls …”
The last three lines of the epilogue are devoted to making peace with the past: “Years have passed. I have not returned, nor do I think I will ever return to Barranquilla. No one here even knows its name. When they ask me what it’s like, I simply say that it’s by a river, very close to the sea.” Is this Moreno speaking? Is it Lina? Or both?
As a Colombian expat and a writer, I feel a strong connection to Moreno’s work and share her obsession with the world in which she grew up. My rare visits to Bogotá are brief. And yet, in one way or another, I’m always writing about the world I left behind, about the Colombia of my childhood and of my imagination, because I’m still trying to understand.
[Published by Europa Editions on November 15, 2022, 484 pages, $18.00 paperback]