A Study Guide for Isabel Allende's "Two Words"

Two Words

Isabel Allende

1989

Introduction

Dos palabras, or Two Words, is a story by Chilean author Isabel Allende, one of the very few, and the foremost woman, in the uppermost echelon of Latin American literature. Her life trajectory has been intricately tied to Chile's political history—in particular, the 1973 military coup that ended her cousin's presidency and his life—with her career as an author beginning with a letter to her grandfather, written in exile, that expanded into her first novel.

One of Allende's best-known characters is the eponymous heroine of Eva Luna (1987), who reappears primarily as narrator in Cuentos de Eva Luna (1989), translated as The Stories of Eva Luna. After the scene-setting prologue, the volume's first story, Two Words, takes up the tale of a strong-willed young woman from a distant time, Belisa Crepusculario. Belisa has made a name for herself—literally and figuratively—by becoming a master of language, fulfilling people's verbal needs in village marketplaces up and down the countryside. A true test of her abilities comes when her most intimidating, and intriguing, customer needs a set of words to accomplish the transformation of a lifetime. Like many of Allende's empowered female characters and like the author herself, Belisa does not shy away from a challenge.

Author Biography

Isabel Allende Llona was born on August 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru, to a Chilean diplomat and his wife. Her father was a first cousin of the future president, making Salvador Allende her second cousin, but by virtue of the closeness of their families, he was like an uncle to her (and was her godfather). This relationship was sustained despite Allende's parents' separation when she was just two years old, when her mother took her to live with her grandparents in Santiago, Chile. Her grandmother especially proved a profound and lasting influence on Allende's life, a woman who practiced spiritism, was committed to justice and truth, and, in the words of scholar and biographer Linda Gould Levine, inhabited a space between dreams and reality—a space that much of Allende's future fiction would occupy.

Solitary as a child, the young girl became a precocious reader and before long was rebelling against her conservative Catholic upbringing. She was intelligent enough to recognize the double standards that allowed men to do whatever they wanted while women were expected to forgo dreams of