The Breadfruit Tree: Review

By Kevin Clinton

The Breadfruit Tree published by Antares (Toronto, 2013) offers a startling kaleidoscope of images—humour, generosity, love, adultery, eroticism, obsession, madness, brutality, deprivation—from the perspective of a woman who has succeeded in life against all the odds. Readers of Gabriela Etcheverry’s previous, autobiographical, novel Latitudes will know that, while pregnant, the author and her husband escaped to Canada from the terror of Pinochet’s Chile. Under the strain of the terror, the torture and murder of friends, and exile in Canada, her marriage disintegrated, despite the arrival of a baby daughter. Those readers will also know that through her own efforts, and with the care and inspiration of her overworked mother, Gabriela had earlier climbed her way out of poverty in the port city of Coquimbo, to graduate from university in the capital, Santiago. Latitudes touchingly describes the idealism, humanity and naivety of the young couple. There is a stark imbalance between their simple pleasures and ambitions, and the insensible war machine that destroys their hopes and grinds over lives as if they are nothing.

The stories in The Breadfruit Tree, even those that are not evidently autobiographical, can be read as a continuation of themes in Latitudes. In one scene, a couple is moving apart. The wife wants the husband to leave. She hilariously invites his proposed first lover to be interviewed for suitability, and exerts her feminine power over the situation. In another, she has no control: he berates her as she clinches a bread knife. Exile and poverty play their corrosive role in the marital tension.

Achieving middle-class prosperity does not, however, eliminate stress from the lives of Gabriela’s parade of characters. A psychologist away from home and husband resumes a liaison, arranged around conferences, with her lover. She is not without means; she has choices. But the lover may propose a choice she doesn’t want to hear. A painter uses her vibrant sex appeal to get men into bed and cover up her depression, but eventually she cracks. All she paints in picture after picture is a terrified woman feeling from a man. This is like the world of warped middle-class ordinariness Alice Munro famously digs into.

Most of the stories, however, are set in the Chile of the author’s youth, a dirt-poor barrio of Coquimbo. Poverty, ignorance and social exclusion breed cruelty and perverse macho sexuality. A soldier in the Chilean army beats his wife like a dog, shamelessly, in front of the neighbours. A lesbian girl tolerates being an outcast at school, where she at least finds one good friend, but the rape by her father is the final straw. She kills herself. A husband produces a child a year with his wife and then a few more with other women, including his wife’s sister—his daughters do not know if they are supposed to be sisters or cousins. And one of the daughters has to wonder why she resembles so strikingly a beggar woman who comes to the house. A home falls into anarchy during the day when all the grown women are at work, leaving one of the older boys free to indulge his taste for incest and rape.

Not all is misery. Poor people survive largely through the generosity and friendship of other poor people. A needy photographer snaps a group of kids, and when he realizes that there is no way he is going to get paid, he gives them the picture. There is love within the family. Niza sews an angel dress for her granddaughter. Small Josefina sees her father’s eyes shine in the brightness of the new electric light he switches on, and she is smitten, despite his remoteness and the abusive scolding he inflicts on his children. Most of all, there is maternal love. It is the life-force in Gabriela’s writing, the force that keeps people going, that makes them want to do the right thing, even if they don’t.
The final story joins up the two worlds. A successful singer, after a long absence living abroad, returns to the barrio, which is rebuilt and modern, to see her dying father, a man who could never control his inner demons. While she has always regarded his faults as weaknesses rather than wickedness, some of her many siblings are not so tolerant. Her mother died long ago, and a brother now looks after the family home. Where is Papa? Where indeed. Read the book to find out.