A cut above: Allende's 'Zorro'

Her love for the masked hombre creates a tough act to follow

Jenny Shank, Special to the News

Published May 6, 2005 at midnight

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The legend of Zorro began with the 1919 publication of Johnston McCulley's first story featuring the masked swordsman, "The Curse of Capistrano" in the pulp fiction magazine All-Story Weekly. McCulley went on to write many more Zorro tales, and the character, thanks to his cinematic grandeur and smashing fashion sense, leapt almost immediately onto the big screen in the 1920 silent film, The Mask of Zorro.

The mystique of Zorro has remained potent enough over the years to fuel a licensing bonanza run by Zorro Productions, Inc. A few years ago, the president of this company, John Gertz, was in the market for a writer to retell the Zorro tale, and he happened to meet a popular novelist through a mutual friend.

Enter, with a flourish of a black cape, Isabel Allende.

The pairing of Zorro and Allende smacks of destiny, romance, and blockbuster potential. But the result is not as commercially crass as the back-story might suggest. Although many of Allende's novels have become bestsellers in countries throughout the world, she still boasts a literary reputation, distinguished by her vivid characterizations, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink plots, and passionate, occasionally magical-realist prose.

Allende is a staunchly old-fashioned writer - although Zorro eventually turns out to have a narrator, revealed in the final chapter of the book, it is written in the comforting, old-timey omniscience of yesteryear.

Allende, who worked as a Chilean journalist for many years before she became a California novelist and literary diva, never studied in an American creative writing program, and so she is unburdened by the dictate that rules such places: Show, don't tell. Allende tells of the birth of Diego de la Vega, the future Zorro, in Alta, Calif. in 1795, she tells of his boyhood in the rough San Gabriel mission community, she tells of his education in Spain, and then she tells some more.

Allende infrequently pauses to dramatize scenes, adding dialogue and detail, because she has so much to tell in her sweeping novel that she largely sticks to vivid exposition and summary, a technique that some critics, including The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, have derided. But her style is part of the story in Zorro, a tale that would have been at home in the long-gone pulps, where Allende would have been the perfect serialized writer-for-hire. She'll pack a chapter with duels, fair maidens, pirates, and cliffhangers and then she'll turn the page and do it again.

Zorro begins during Spanish colonial times in California, with the meeting of Diego de la Vega's parents: his father, Captain Alejandro de la Vega, a Spanish soldier, and his mother, the half-Spanish, half-American Indian Regina, née Toypurnia. Regina is captured during a battle when she leads an army of united tribes in an attack on the San Gabriel mission, costumed in a wolf outfit. Alejandro is immediately taken with her, and in lieu of prison, she is sent to the home of a Spanish colonial leader, where she is instructed in the behavior of a proper European lady.

Transformed, Regina marries Alejandro, and they soon have a son, Diego, who has many adventures in the rough-and-tumble world of turn-of-the-century California, alongside his "milk brother" Bernardo, the son of one of the de la Vega's native servants.

Diego's American Indian heritage allows Allende to indulge in some moments of magical realism, a flavor she did not impart in her more strictly realist recent novels, 1999's Daughter of Fortune, and 2001's Portrait in Sepia. In Zorro, Diego comes equipped with an ability to communicate telepathically with Bernardo, a mystical grandmother who provides powerful potions, and his spirit guide, a zorro, the Spanish term for fox.

In 1810, Alejandro sends Diego to live with a friend in Barcelona to receive a European education. It is in Barcelona that Diego meets Juliana de Romeu, the unrequited love of his teenage years, learns to fence from the master Manuel Escalante, joins the underground La Justicia movement, develops his masked Zorro alter ego, and becomes embroiled in various escapades that usually involve freeing political prisoners during the fraught times of the Napoleonic era.

But that's not all - in this globe-straddling epic tale, Diego befriends a group of gypsies, helps the de Romeu family flee persecution when the political tide turns, sails with them to America, has a run-in with pirates, lands in New Orleans where his story crosses with that of Marie Laveau, the famed "Voodoo queen," loses his first love to another dashing man, and eventually returns to California, where he continues his Z-slashing ways.

While Zorro started out as a business transaction for Allende, it seems to have ended as a love affair. It is clear that Allende became enamored of Zorro, and she has succeeded in making him her own character, so much so that it will be difficult for another novelist to take up the cape, mask, and sword of Zorro in her wake.

Allende relishes the complicated history of the era, weaving historical detail that never feels gratuitous into her hero's story. Allende's evident enthusiasm for her subject matter should win most readers over to become fans of the masked avenger, at least until Hollywood trots out its next Zorro-themed Antonio Banderas vehicle.

Jenny Shank is a Pushcart-Prize-nominated writer who has a story in the Spring 2005 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. She lives in Boulder.

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