THE SALAMANDER (La salamandra)
by Mercè Rodoreda, 1967

"The Salamander" ("La salamandra") is one of the most powerful stories of Mercè Rodoreda. It appears in an outstanding 1984 translation by David Rosenthal in My Christina and Other Stories (La meva Cristina: altres contes; 1967). The first-person narrative recounts the experiences of the nameless protagonist—a village girl living at an indefinite time in centuries past who is accosted in the forest at nightfall and assaulted by a married man. (It is a rape, but the girl's resistance erodes when the episode is repeated.) Her attacker is known to her, and she asks about his wife; in reply he swears that he has no wife. Surprised in flagrante delicto, the narrator is accused of witchcraft by the jealous wife, who drags the husband home without a word of reproach. The narrator suffers several attacks as a suspected witch before being burned at the stake by superstitious neighbors (who apparently had burned the girl's mother when she was small). She spots her lover in attendance at the burning, with his arm around his wife. In extremes of torment in the flames, she is metamorphosed into a salamander, eludes pursuit, and takes refuge beneath her lover's bed. Discovered and routed by the wife, attacked by the villagers again, and badly beaten, she finally slips into a pond, where her wounded paw is chewed off by eels before she escapes into mud and mire at the bottom.

Rodoreda combines the most prosaic realism with the fantastic. Realistic details abound in initial descriptions of the setting—pond, willow tree and watercress, frogs and lengthening shadows—and the fantastic metamorphosis, unexplained and unelaborated, is connected to earlier reality by the unchanged narrative voice, unchanged setting, and characters. Even though the reader encounters an event (the narrator's transformation into a salamander) that contravenes the laws of science, compounded by the realization that the metamorphosis has not changed her human consciousness, feelings, and reactions, continuity in other elements prevents the sense of a break with reality. Rodoreda wants to maintain contact with quotidian, domestic reality, since, like many other stories in My Christina, "The Salamander" is a commentary on the feminine condition, albeit one that contains a degree of violence and a sense of terror not typically found in her work.

The timeless, mythic chronology and nonspecific, rural locale convey a universality transcending the more specifically twentieth-century Spanish contexts evoked by most of Rodoreda's fiction. While the stubbornly scientific reader may view the metamorphosis as a symptom of psychosis or pain-induced hallucination, it is clear that Rodoreda would prefer another reading. Her allusions to witches and witch burning have a double function: appeal to superstitious credulity and a tradition in which salamanders were alleged to appear in similar circumstances may induce suspension of disbelief, while witches and the persecution of them exemplify the epitome of men's inhumanity to women.

Lyricism combines with the grotesque in this account of the simple village girl—alone in the world, without defenders, with the stigma of her mother's having been burned as a witch—with her sensitivity to nature and her total, unquestioning acceptance of the world around her and the actions of others. It is no mere coincidence, of course, that she (like the wife) abstains completely from criticizing the man's deeds and in no way protests the unfairness with which she is treated (she lacks the feminist consciousness that would perceive the injustice of her situation, but the reader almost inevitably will notice—herein lies much of the irony).

Significantly, metamorphosis is not the end of the salamander's suffering but rather the beginning of prolonged torment that has not terminated when the story concludes. The metamorphosis (occur-ring at what realistically might be the point of death) is not the end, for the exploitation and abuse of women that Rodoreda foregrounds has not ended. The fact that the story is continued by a consciousness still partly human, although situated beyond the loss of her human condition (or life), gives a sense of immediacy and intensity of suffering, perhaps because of its unexpectedness; continuing persecution indicates that no escape is possible for women in patriarchal society. And society is more at fault than the man. Even though he sneaks up behind her in the woods, chases her when she runs away, pins her to a tree until she can struggle no more, and then rapes her, these are the least of the outrages she suffers. Insulted and vilified by the wife (society's traditional reaction to the "other woman"), ostracized, stoned, persecuted in various ways, and even exorcised, she is in a situation that recalls the moral environment of The Scarlet Letter. In "The Salamander," however, the adulterous man is known and goes free, hypocritically leaving her alone to face public disgrace and official punishment. Certainly Rodoreda indicts much of society, for all take part in persecuting the salamander, from elders and priest to the young men who come to break down her door and drag her from the house, the boys who help pile on the wood, and the old woman who brings dry heather when the fire fails to start. Loss of self-esteem from ostracism and disgrace is externalized by physical change to a lower animal, one that must crawl on its belly and live in the mire. Yet the salamander's societal conditioning and values remain with her, as evinced by her crawling out from beneath the bed to pray at a spot where moonlight and windowpane project a luminous cross upon the floor.

Dragging herself to he pond that she desperately envisions as a haven, she is set upon by three eels who eat off her broken hand. The transparently phallic nature of the eels and their taking advantage of her helplessness suggest an allegory of societal relegation of the "fallen woman" to prostitution, especially because the eels play with their victim until they tire of the game, leaving her in the slime. These events with a less skillful writer might degenerate into melodrama or bathos, but the salamander's understated, impersonal tone and near absence of reference to her sentiments or physical pain let the horror of events achieve full impact. Rodoreda has chosen an extreme example, but by no means uncommon historically, and combined it with women's widespread silence about rape and abuse to produce an implicit condemnation of the double standard and its contribution to the victimization of women in patriarchal society.

—Janet Pérez