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Story 5: The Gold of Tomás Vargas
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Stories of Eva Luna, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Men and Women
Memory and Storytelling
Love and Sex
Politics, Corruption, and Justice
Family
Summary
Analysis
Amadeo Peralta, the son of a shady criminal family, reluctantly agrees to marry a wealthy but plain young woman to bolster his family’s reputation. Not long before the wedding, he finds himself in Agua Santa for business. There, he hears a simple but clear melody floating through the air. Peralta follows it to a 15-year-old girl sitting in her parents’ garden and singing with her psaltery. After watching her for a while, he calls out to her and grabs her arm when she gets close, crooning compliments and promises in her ear. Flattered and confused, the girl follows him to his car, where they have sex. Her name is Hortensia.
Peralta uses one woman to boost his perceived respectability, and another woman becomes the catalyst that tanks his reputation decades later. But why exactly is Peralta drawn to Hortensia in the first place? There are a few answers in play here. Her art enchants him against his will; her innocence inflames his criminal, conquering spirit; or maybe her youth resonates with him when he’s so close to leaving his own youth behind for good at the altar. The fact that he grabs Hortensia from her parents’ garden underlines the weight of his crime against not just her, but the fabric of her community, too.
Themes
A week later, Hortensia appears at Peralta’s house in a yellow dress, psaltery in tow, telling Peralta she loves him. Peralta decides to keep her in the cellar of an abandoned sugar mill, a wet and dark basement. He provides her with sacks of food but nothing else, and her dress rots on her pale, twisted body. For a few weeks Peralta enjoys intense sex with Hortensia, but he soon mostly forgets about her and only visits her now and then. He hires an Indigenous woman to feed Hortensia and keep her locked up. The woman never pities Hortensia because she seems somehow content with her circumstances, stunted in her childhood development and accustomed to living underground. Hortensia remains in her cell for 47 years and becomes twisted and monstrous, barely recognizable as a human woman.
Hortensia’s consent is heavily complicated by the fact that she’s only 15 when she agrees to go with Peralta. She seems to entertain delusions about what will happen, going along with Peralta’s undelivered promises of grand riches and material comforts and asking him to give her children. But Peralta doesn’t treat her like a wife or even a concubine or mistress; he treats her like an animal, and that’s what she slowly becomes. She’s elderly and yet her mind is that of a child; she’s twisted beyond recognition and yet her soul is still that of a human being. Nobody can consent to being the victim of a human rights violation on this level.
Themes
Meanwhile, Peralta becomes an immensely powerful politician. Although he refuses to impregnate Hortensia when she begs him to, he sires a large family of sons with his wife and makes connections with other important men. Rumors of human rights violations under his authority—including the imprisonment of a woman in the sugar mill—spread, but no one seems willing to do anything about them. But one day, a group of boys plays by the abandoned sugar mill, and they hear horrible, unnatural music coming from the ground. They run home and tell the town about the music and the trapdoor in the ground they can’t open, and the townspeople can’t ignore the issue any longer.
While Hortensia festers underground, Peralta flourishes on the surface. His wife gives him the legitimacy that he desires through male heirs, and he grows his political influence. His power shocks the country into a kind of collective silence, which is only broken through Hortensia’s doing, intentional or not: the boys of the nearby town hear the music of her psaltery. Her art breaks the spell of obedience that Peralta’s oppressive power has created.
Themes
Before a crowd of townspeople, the police and firemen rescue Hortensia. Pale, rotting, and weak, Hortensia is only recognizable as human because of the psaltery she’s still clutching. Footage of Hortensia’s rescue plays on the news and outrage sweeps the country, mixing with guilt for not acting on suspicion sooner. At first, Hortensia is afraid of the above-ground world, but nuns care for her and keep her tied to her bed until she agrees to live as a human again. Peralta’s political enemies seize the moment of outrage and overthrow him, putting him in prison for life. Hortensia visits him every day with food. Then, she sits and sings along with her psaltery, “moans of agony” that no one can bear to hear. The sound haunts Peralta even as he slowly loses his memory and forgets why he’s in so much pain. The rest of his life is spent underground.
Hortensia’s psaltery is her only link to humanity. It represents her sense of self, as she was when she was first taken by Peralta: young, innocent, and completely human. The public outcry after her discovery makes Hortensia a symbol of Peralta’s tyrannical power, the living embodiment of his human rights violations. The people’s guilt over her imprisonment really just results in her being used as a political pawn so that another party can gain power—but when Peralta is imprisoned, Hortensia gets her own personal revenge. Whether or not she knows the effect she has on Peralta and is intentionally punishing him is an open question; either way, he lives the rest of his life in torment.
Themes
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