Caribbean Horrors

Dark Wedding by Ramon J. Sender. Translated from Spanish by Eleanor Clark. Doubleday, Doran. $2.50.

The materials of Dark Wedding might seem undeserving of serious treatment. While we approve when a writer infuses new life into the historical novel, as Sender did with Mr. Witt Among the Rebels, most of us have had enough of romance in the Caribbean, even where it is advertised as embodying “the whole plight of man in a world at war.” Put into a sentence, indeed, the plot of the novel sounds absurd: when the warden Black Trinidad is murdered in a remote island penal colony soon after returning to it with his bride Niña Lucha, armed convicts fight for power and possession of the virgin bride, who, after narrow escapes and strange experiences, including a night among Indians and the rôle of white maiden in rites of sympathetic magic with which they invoke fertility and rainfall, is finally rescued by the only romantically suitable person present, the young revolutionist and schoolteacher Darío. This is the possible but preposterous situation that earlier tales of the Caribbean used to give us, tales, I mean, of the helpless damsel aboard a pirate ship on the Spanish Main. Why, then, should the novelist bother to study it? The reason is, apparently, that, apart from considerations of symbol and local color, it enables him to consider important questions which sniggering romance always raised but never tried to answer; namely, what goes on in the innocent — but fascinated and excited — mind of a young woman about to be attacked by a rutting monster, and what, for that matter, goes on in the monster’s mind? Concern with these questions shapes the novel into interlacing of quietly ferocious narrative with puzzled moments of introspection at every level of consciousness from the schoolteacher’s to the feeble-minded pimp’s. The danger inherent in the method, that of writing a Miss Pamela Among the Pirates, or, rather, a Miss Clarissa Among the Convicts, Sender avoids by being brutally decent.