One out of Two

The late Mexican writer Sada is beginning to seep into translation, and if One out of Two is any indication, English-language readers have much to look forward to. The Gamal twins, Gloria and Constitución, are identical in almost every way: both seamstresses, both unmarried in their 40s, both mad. Orphaned and alone in the world but for each other and a kindly—though meddling—aunt, they live in relative isolation in the rural Ocampo, until a wedding invitation threatens their perfect equilibrium. There, Constitución meets a suitor, the dashing Oscar Segura. Dedicated to sharing everything, the sisters decide to pose as one person and take turns romancing Oscar. But there are desires neither sister can fully admit, and so they enter into a series of surprising negotiations and deceptions in order to preserve their ideal union, even after Oscar proposes marriage and forces Gloria and Constitución to acknowledge that perhaps “the number two can never be one.” This short novel is a tragedy, but Sada writes with genuine amusement and a conversational ease, relating the sisters’ secret jealousy with a puckish eloquence (“She imagined the shindig, the enveloping music, and her sister sitting on a chair, alone, silent, a woodpecker perched on a branch, a toy bird, poised and waiting for a polite man of reasonable height to ask her to dance”). In the end, we come to see Gloria and Constitución’s dotty project as no different from any family’s shifting layers of compromise, self-delusion, and love. [em](Nov.) [/em]