New Islands by María Luisa Bombal
"New Islands" by María Luisa Bombal is a surreal narrative that explores the complexities of desire and the enigmatic nature of human relationships. Set against the backdrop of a rural estancia near Buenos Aires, the story follows a lawyer named Juan Manuel during a four-day visit to a hunting hacienda. He becomes entranced by Yolanda, a mysterious woman whose presence evokes both fascination and confusion. The narrative intricately weaves between reality and Yolanda's haunting dreams, which blur the lines of seduction and resistance.
The emerging islands in the nearby lake serve as a metaphor for transient beauty and the ephemeral nature of their connection, as they ultimately sink back into the earth, much like Yolanda's elusive essence. As Juan Manuel grapples with his attraction to Yolanda, he is also confronted with echoes of his past, including memories of his deceased wife. The story culminates in his retreat to the safety of his rational life in Buenos Aires, leaving behind the chaotic beauty of Yolanda and the primal world she inhabits. "New Islands" presents a rich tapestry of themes including longing, the struggle between logic and instinct, and the complex interplay of memory and desire.
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New Islands by María Luisa Bombal
First published: "Las islas nuevas," 1938 (English translation, 1982)
Type of plot: Surrealist
Time of work: The twentieth century
Locale: Buenos Aires and a country estate some distance from the city
Principal Characters:
Yolanda , a beautiful and enigmatic estate ownerFederico , her brotherJuan Manuel , a Buenos Aires lawyer visiting in the countryBilly , Juan Manuel's nine-year-old sonSylvester , the owner of a neighboring estate, and Yolanda's fiancé thirty years ago
The Story
On its most literal level, "New Islands" is an account of a city lawyer's four-day visit to an estate in the country a few hours drive from Buenos Aires. Juan Manuel, the lawyer, has been visiting at the La Figura hacienda and is part of a group of hunters from La Figura that goes to have a look at some new islands that have emerged in a lake. They stay at Yolanda and Federico's hacienda, and the story describes Juan Manuel's four-day relationship with Yolanda, which ends with his return to Buenos Aires. The new islands sink mysteriously back into the mud and algae out of which they were thrust. Yolanda, too, represents a mystery that cannot be fathomed rationally.
The story opens with one of Yolanda's dreams, one of a series of nightmarish dreams that recur throughout the tale. It is not clear whether her dreams mirror reality or whether reality mirrors her dreams. Attracted by Juan Manuel, she dreams a seduction scene with him as they gaze over the pampa at twilight. The exact scene occurs at dusk the next day. In her dream, Yolanda has struggled to resist Juan Manuel's caresses and in the mirror-image reality, she runs away. Juan Manuel is fascinated by her but baffled. She appears to be very young, yet Sylvester claims that thirty years ago, she jilted him only two weeks before their planned marriage, for reasons he has never understood. Yolanda is beautiful yet strange, frequently associated with a primeval earth of foliage, flowers, and animals. When she stands up, she seems to Juan Manuel to uncoil like a beautiful snake. Instead of walking, she glides, "pale, angular, and a bit savage," fragile, "aggressive yet hunted." Her feet seem far too small for her height. Dressed in diaphanous white one evening, she reminds Juan Manuel of a sea gull; she faints when he tells her so, as though he had discovered some mysterious secret.
Yolanda is associated repeatedly with camellias and with birds—gulls and magpies, for example—and with the natural world of the pampa. Made desperate with desire and bewilderment, Juan Manuel searches through the vast ghostly hacienda at three in the morning of the fourth day until he finds Yolanda, deep in a nightmare world; as she struggles to awake, she describes her dreamworld of prehistoric forest, giant ferns, "silence as green as chloroform," and the buzzing of giant insects. Once again, Yolanda appears to encourage Juan Manuel's sexual advances but then she cries out—in her husky, strange, sea gull cry, which has punctuated the whole story—and resists, shaming his passion with her tears, not trying to keep him when he leaves.
As Juan Manuel returns to the house at dusk on the fourth day, he sees Yolanda through a bathroom window, her naked body slender and white, her attention absorbed in the contemplation of her right shoulder, "on which something light and flexible looms, drooping down . . . a wing . . . the stump of a wing." Horrified, Juan Manuel jumps in his car and hurtles back to Buenos Aires to the safety of the rational city, the orderly, familiar company of his mother and young son. He dials Yolanda's number but hangs up when the phone is answered at the hacienda; he cannot bear to know more about her, either to confirm or to deny his horror. He perceives that there is no rational explanation of Yolanda or of man's relationship to the passage of time. His beloved wife, Elsa, remains frozen in time at the moment of her death, "preserved forever at age thirty-three. . . . And the day would come when Billy would be older than his mother."
Billy's geography book provides a description of the prehistoric world of giant ferns and enormous flying insects that Juan Manuel recognizes as the world of Yolanda's dreams, a world in which she perhaps still lives. However, Juan Manuel is unable and unwilling to deal with this; he
feels incapable of soaring into the intricate galleries of Nature in order to arrive at the mystery's origin. He fears losing his way in that wild world with its disorderly and poorly mapped pathways, strewn with an unsystematic confusion of clues; fears falling into some dark abyss that no amount of logic will lead him out of.
He prefers a rational, tidy life, and he rejects the magnetic, instinctual pull of Yolanda's tumultuous mystery.