Lima: Literatura Random House. 2023. 443 pages.
In La fábrica de la memoria (1997), Peter Elmore recalls the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, and his observation that we cannot wake up from the nightmare that is history. Elmore affirms that returning to the past through fiction is not gratuitous or arbitrary, but rather it responds to our need to explore significant and even traumatic historical moments through literature. The Latin American historical novel has consistently represented a past that reverberates in and gives meaning to the present. This explains why the two historical time frames appearing most frequently in our narrative tradition are the colonial period and the process of Independence. During these two periods, profound social and cultural fractures emerged which have since permeated life in our region.
Most historical fiction takes a critical stance on and actively questions official discourses and false reconciliations with the past. A recent incursion into this territory is Francisca, princesa del Perú (2023) by Peruvian writer Alonso Cueto. This novel narrates the life of conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s daughter, Francisca, and Pizarro’s violent treatment of her mother. Francisca Pizarro is not a new subject within our national historical archive; an entire historiographical cannon is dedicated to her. Guillermo Lohmann, José Antonio Del Busto, and Waldemar Espinoza have all written about her. They clarify doubts and unclear parts of her life, which itself was full of pain and mishaps. Perhaps the scholar who most thoroughly studied Francisca’s life is María Rostworowski in her work Doña Francisca Pizarro: Una ilustre mestiza (1989).
In fact, Rostworowski compares Francisca to the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega: “Both represent an entire period of profound transformations. While Garcilaso was shaped by the Andes, Francisca grew up surrounded by the Hispanic world. In her case, it was as if her Indigenous identity had been carefully set aside in order to strengthen within her Spanish customs and traditions.” The historian notes that Francisca’s vindication partially remedies the historical oblivion that befell other mestiza women in the “fateful” sixteenth century.
But we are still at the edge of history. With Cueto’s latest novel, we now have a literary perspective on the matter that we can add to the historical scholarship. Due to old prejudices, literature has been viewed as dubious when compared with historical discourse, which in theory offers more guarantees and sets the stage for an almost indisputable separation of the two disciplines. While history certifies documents and exhausts archives to prove every assertion, fiction takes liberties that, nonetheless, can produce a markedly distinct effect. It invites us to (re)think and (re)interpret characters in a space where history cannot so easily venture; that is, subjectivity and its weaving of relationships with time and meaning.
Nonetheless, in recent times we have seen more contact and less divergence between these two types of discourse. Certainly, complex border zones exist between history and literature and, at least in Latin America, the so-called historical novel or historiographic fiction becomes a conduit for dialoguing with and confronting history. In Cueto’s case, the exercise of language permits an incursion into Francisca Pizarro’s imagined intimate world—not as invention, but rather as interpretation of her life’s trajectory. This demonstrates, however, that such borderlands have clear limits, one of which is verisimilitude.
“Cueto’s novel is an important contribution to the narrative tradition of Peru. The author ably portrays Francisca’s heart and soul, as well as Inés’s pain, and then returns to contemporary Peruvian life with the story of an open wound”
Francisca is basically a realistic character; she is a person who, in fiction, maintains a certain rigor and coherence with what is written about her in history books. The same holds for Francisca’s mother, Inés Huaylas, the daughter of Huayna Cápac. Inés gives her daughter this noteworthy speech:
I am an Incan princess and as a princess I became the wife, and whore, of Francisco the conquistador. Now your father has given me to another man. They say I am his wife. But I am nobody’s wife. I am your mother. I am the daughter and sister of an Inca. I am heir to the empire, the daughter of the sun and earth. In my body, I have the strength of a mother. And you are the source of all my power. You are my daughter.
This is an interesting and revealing passage, perhaps because it symbolizes the beginning of a fracture that remains in our perennially uncertain Peruvian life; that is, the impossibility of a mestizo project that can bring the nation together. There is a creative tension here between history and fiction. The narration stands out for its agility and the eloquent way it employs and displaces the narrative point of view. Francisca Pizarro Huaylas Yupanqui guides us through an intricate labyrinth of anecdotes and observations that, although they are based in history, take on a life of their own in fictional language.
The fragments of Francisca’s life in the story suffer a similar fate. Francisca is watched closely by her father. He hopes she can live the life of a full-fledged Spanish woman and, as we know given her origins, he tries to promote her presence and mobility in Spanish courtly life. Mother and daughter are placed on opposite planes. Doña Inés is the victim of the conquistador’s contempt, whereas Francisca irresolutely inhabits her mixed-lineage identity:
Who was I? I left the city afraid. At night, I imagined somebody would come into our house and kill us. In the morning, I thought I should pray long before going to the plaza. Only Inés and Catalina can protect me. I needed my mothers’ love, and I was marked with the pride of being heir to two bloodlines. I felt marked, yes. Shame, uncertainty, dignity, I don’t know how to explain it. But faith, too. I was made to carry on.
One of this character’s most valuable aspects is that she is aware of her mestiza identity. Once in Spain, Francisca receives news of another mestizo person like herself: “It was around that time I learned about another mestizo who was just a bit younger than I, who had arrived in Montilla. He was Captain Garcilaso’s son, and he had come with my uncle Gonzalo and then parted ways with him. The son of Chimpu Ocllo, my cousin. An exceedingly delicate and discrete man, according to what I had heard.” An impossible encounter that figures within the impossibility of a cohesive Peruvian nation. The past returns us to the present and its dramatic disarticulation.
Cueto’s novel is an important contribution to the narrative tradition of Peru. The author ably portrays Francisca’s heart and soul, as well as Inés’s pain, and then returns to contemporary Peruvian life with the story of an open wound that is far from being healed. It is only worth looking to the past when it teaches us lessons about the present. We have an excellent example of this in Cueto’s latest novel.
Translated by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
