Moving house in 2019, I chanced upon my notebook of romantic lyrics, an embarrassing artifact from my pubescent years. I was goofy then, in love with the idea of being in love. Wanting to feel happiness and heartbreak when I was barely a teen. It was my inspiration for what I intended to be a comedic segue from religion (“The Lives of Saints") to sex, and a story about bicultural girls succumbing to boy craziness in a machista country.
But my muse argued that my story was no laughing matter. She interrupted my every writing session to remind me of all the girls who didn’t land as softly as I did, the girls we may have gossiped about, or whose there-but-for-the-grace-of-god scenarios we managed to dodge.
Machismo shares a bed with marianismo, and together these ideas of dominant, overbearing males and virtuous, submissive and obedient females create destructive ideals that more often than not victimize women and girls.
In “Las Tres MarÍas,” the second part of Litany of Saints, we follow the American-born daughters of Ticos back to an eventful year in Costa Rica, where they come disastrously face to face with the insidiousness of societal machismo: As gringas, they are automatically assumed to be sluts, and that expectation sets off a chain of events that their American selves are completely unprepared for. (I don’t use the word “slut” lightly; it’s meant to bludgeon with all its weight and ugliness).
While writing the story, I kept remembering my all-girls’ Catholic highschool senior year health class, which focused on women’s fertility cycles with a tiny bit of sex ed thrown in (just a little because giving girls too much knowledge might encourage them). Our text, The Good News About Sex, was filled with lessons on the virtue of abstention. But because it could double as a talisman, we were advised to carry it with us always: if we found ourselves in too hot and heavy a situation, we should pull it out of our bag and hand it to the boy to pump the brakes and save both of us from corruption. We were taught to take pity on the boys we aroused because they had a harder time controlling themselves. Because girls, the traditional fonts of virtue and chastity, were also the near occasions of sin.
This was taught earnestly against the backdrop of Madonna (not the mother of Jesus) preaching sexual agency. Thus we were launched into womanhood with the impossible task of trying to be sexually alluring guardians of virtue.
It was a challenge. There is a passage from The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel about Puritan-era Massachucetts – that embodies that fateful doom of women raised in machista/marianista environments:
“Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom…. I am but a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!"
"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.
"And why not, Mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the beginning of her race. "Will it not come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?”
Difficult tales force us to examine our circumstances, to consider different perspectives. And sometimes when we do that we realize that stale, old ideas persist and not enough changes unless we decide to be the ones to reframe the stories.