First published: 1985
Type of plot: Psychological
Time of work: The 1980’s
Locale: Brazil
Principal Characters:
Helio Cara , the narrator and protagonist of the novel, whose face is disfigured after a fall from a cliffLula , Helio’s mistress and intended wife, who leaves him after the accidentSenhora Cara , Helio’s motherJulião , Helio’s stepfatherLuis , andMario , coworkers of Helio who turn their backs on himCardoso , Helio’s former bossGodoy , a doctor
The Novel
Face chronicles one man’s effort to rebuild his soul after a devastating calamity has changed his life. After a short prologue, the book is divided into two major sections. It is told in the third person through the consciousness of the major character, although there are frequent flashbacks to earlier periods in his life. In addition, the author intersperses the commentaries of doctors and other observers of the novel’s action. In the struggle of Helio Cara to repair his badly deformed face, the reader envisages the persistence and resilience of the human spirit.
The book begins with Helio Cara, an ordinary barber with an ordinary life, stumbling as he is running down the rugged rocks of the poverty-ridden, shack-filled Whale Back section of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. As he makes his way down the multi-tiered levels of rock, he loses his grip and falls. Although he survives, his face is irretrievably disfigured.
Helio has difficulty remembering the incident after its occurrence. Although his life is forever changed, the exact moment of the injury is clouded by the impact of the trauma. This trauma is so total that he does not even remember any pain or have clear images of people, such as his coworkers, who were prominent in his life before the tragedy. Wearing a white handkerchief to shield his face from the scorn and mockery of others, Helio reflects on his predicament. The only individuals he perceives clearly are his mother, whom he has lost long ago to his stepfather, and his mistress, Lula, whom he suspects he will now lose after this terrible injury.
Helio recalls a time before the accident, when he was living with Lula and enjoying their romantic comradeship. He is talking idly with his mistress when a telegram comes from Rio Piedras, the remote town in the country that he had left years ago for the large, impersonal city of Rio de Janeiro. The telegram reveals that his mother is dying.
Back in the present, readers witness the attempts of doctors to treat and remedy Helio’s condition. The doctors conduct themselves professionally and genuinely try to repair Helio’s face. Yet their scientific discourse does not address the pain Helio feels in his soul.
Helio attempts to return to his former job as a barber. Although his superiors and coworkers are not overtly antagonistic toward him, they clearly do not wish to have him around and feel that what has happened to his face has made him, in effect, a different person. Helio remembers his former boss, Cardoso, who had taught Helio to read and had ameliorated his backwoods status, schooling him in the rudiments of urban civilization.
Helio applies to have his face rehabilitated, suffering an embarrassing moment when he goes to the window selling lottery tickets instead. His fate in life the exact opposite of a lottery winner, Helio finally locates the right place. Yet he becomes increasingly desperate when the doctors, led by an administrator named Godoy, tell him that even though the state-subsidized Brazilian health-insurance plan covers the physical, mechanical aspects of his facial rehabilitation, the aesthetic aspects are extra. In other words, if Helio wishes his face to be beautiful again, or at least as beautiful as it once had been, he will have to pay for it himself. As Helio, without a job and with his mother dead, has no money, this is an impossibility. Closed in and daunted, Helio seems defeated at every turn. Yet soon Helio, beleaguered and hounded as he is, has a first glimmer that it will have to be his own initiative, not the assistance of others, that provides his rehabilitation.
Helio relates his abandonment by Lula. Lula still loves him and does not leave him callously, but nevertheless his condition makes it impossible for their romance to continue, and Lula reluctantly severs the relationship. Continuing his odyssey with the Brazilian medical bureaucracy, Helio is admonished that he should have had his workplace issue a letter of disability immediately after the accident; without this, there is no question of full reconstruction being authorized.
Helio decides to take his life fully into his own hands and repair the face himself. Helio leaves the city and returns to the hinterlands, where he had been born. Helio finds himself disoriented by the vast difference in scale and lifestyle between city and country. He returns to his mother’s shack, and he recalls the pain he had experienced after his father’s death, when his mother had remarried a man named Julião, an action that Helio had regarded as a betrayal.
Helio once again attempts to find work, but even the merchants of his hometown disdain him. Bereft of other options, he uses his last remaining money to amass supplies for the reconstruction of his face. Revealing an ingenuity in excess of what could be expected from his largely menial and deprived existence, he slowly makes his face anew. It is only when this process is near completion that he is psychologically able to recall the scene of his father’s death. Helio receives a letter from Godoy; presumably, the hospital is now ready to subsidize the remainder of whatever further treatment is needed. Helio imagines encountering Lula and her new boyfriend, and he looks forward to encountering society on his own terms, his identity fully renewed.
The Characters
Helio Cara, the hero and narrator of the book, is a young, lower-middle-class Brazilian man. Although the book shows Helio only after the accident has occurred, readers are offered glimpses of his earlier life. Helio appears to be an absolutely ordinary person; there is nothing unusual about his life at all. This changes after his face is damaged. Although the accident is a tragedy, completely destabilizing Helio’s life and robbing him of all that he cherishes, it has the curious side effect of making him for the first time an unusual person.
Initially, Helio appears only unusual in his torment, as he is pushed further and further to the margins of society. As he commences his heroic quest, however, Helio is revealed as determined and capable. Although he possesses a substandard education and seems to have only a normal mentality, Helio’s misfortune stimulates him to notable feats of imagination and intellect. Helio finds that he has the foresight and the competence to literally re-envisage himself, to re-create his own face, which, from the very beginning of the novel, symbolizes not just the physical lineaments of his facial features but also his inner soul, which has suffered far more severe damage. Additionally, Helio, working only from the limited amount of verbal knowledge that Cardoso has provided him, is able to read medical manuals and piece together the methods he needs to effect his face’s repair, and he is able to find all the practical materials that he needs. At the beginning of the book, Helio is painfully average; at the end, he has made something inspiring and exemplary out of his own pain.
Helio is the narrative center of the book, and the only character fully revealed; all the other characters elucidate aspects of his identity. Lula, his former mistress, represents the social acceptance and validation that Helio loses after the accident. When a prospective meeting with her is pictured at the end of the novel, what is conveyed is Helio’s revitalized capacity to engage with his fellow human beings. More minor characters, such as Helio’s coworkers Luis and Mario, play much the same function on a diminished scale.
Cardoso is one of the few auxiliary characters pictured positively; in teaching Helio to read and initiating him into the ways of the world, he is one of the few constructive models that Helio can call upon as he begins his quest for self-healing. Godoy, the doctor, starts off as an antagonistic representative of insensitive scientific authority, but by the end of the book, he is ready to assist Helio in his effort. This can be seen as symbolizing the willingness of an indifferent society to suspend its recalcitrance toward those who are suffering after they have proved their merit, as has Helio.
Helio’s mother, dead father, and stepfather Julião represent the deeper level of his childhood, which is gradually revealed in the course of the novel. The cruel death of the father and his swift replacement by the hated Julião underscore the fact that Helio’s facial injury is but an overt metaphor for a kind of primal wound already inflicted upon him by this childhood trauma. Although Helio’s face had been intact before the accident, his psyche was badly injured. Helio’s self-healing operates on both the literal and psychological levels. This is demonstrated when he is finally able to come to grips with his father’s death even as he reaches the turning point in his odyssey of facial reconstruction.
Critical Context
Face was Cecile Pineda’s first novel. It was not, however, her first creative effort; for many years previous to the book’s 1985 publication, she had been an experimental theater director in San Francisco. This theatrical background permeates the novel in many ways. To act in the theater is to play a part, to disguise one’s normal self. Often, as in classical Greek and Japanese drama, this is manifested literally in the use of masks. Pineda’s familiarity with drama enables her to understand how even the everyday human face both expresses and masks emotions, how it is both messenger and barrier between the self and the outer world.
Pineda has seldom written about explicitly Hispanic subjects. In both Face and The Queen of the Amazon (1992), though, she does write about the culture of Brazil. The Brazilian setting of these works enables a dialectic of the strange and the familiar whereby Pineda is able to displace issues that other Latino writers might treat naturalistically onto a more stylized and metaphysical plane. Even in novels that have no thematic relevance to Hispanic experience—such as Frieze (1987), a compelling work concerning a medieval Buddhist temple in the East Indies island of Java—Pineda continues to highlight themes, such as the fortitude of the individual against all external obstacles, that occur in the rest of her work.
This emphasis on identity and self-affirmation could be read as obliquely referring to American minority experience. Both Face and Frieze are taut and parabolic works in which images and themes prevail over conventional narrative. In The Queen of the Amazon, though, Pineda displays a looser, more sprawling style that permits a more panoramic view of human experience.
Bibliography
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Deconstructing the Dominant Patriarchal Text: Cecile Pineda’s Narratives.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, edited by Asuncion Horno-Delgado et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. In the first discussion of Pineda to profit from the insights of contemporary literary theory, Bruce-Novoa discusses how Pineda encourages the reader to respond creatively to the plight of the protagonist of Face.
Clute, John. “Stitched Up.” Review of Face, by Cecile Pineda. The Times Literary Supplement, December 13, 1985, p. 1434. Clute understands the magnitude and the ambition of Pineda’s themes. He emphasizes their relationship to essential issues of identity and being. He is critical, however, of what he perceives to be the bland, innocuous nature of her presentation.
Cole, Diane. “The Pick of the Crop: Five First Novels.” Review of Face, by Cecile Pineda. Ms. 13 (April, 1985): 14-15. Pinpoints Pineda’s avoidance of sentimentality with potentially pathetic and maudlin subject material. Cole also mentions the novel’s complicated flashback and overvoice techniques, often slighted by other reviewers.
Colman, Cathy. Review of Face, by Cecile Pineda. The New York Times Book Review, April 28, 1985, p. 24. Discusses the primal terror of Helio’s experience. Colman, though, faults the novel for not developing more strong central characters.
Geeslin, Campbell. Review of Face, by Cecile Pineda. People Weekly 23 (April 1, 1985): 20. Geeslin offers a brief mention of the background of the novel, as well as a short plot synopsis. She likens the book to the work of Albert Camus’s in which “fate deals the hero catastrophic blows” but praises Pineda’s work as “surprisingly upbeat in its suggestion that man is indomitable.”
Johnson, David. “Face Value.” The Americas Review 19 (Summer, 1991): 73-93. Johnson discusses the imagery of masking in the novel, and the ideas of authenticity and inauthenticity it raises, as a Mexican American critique of modern consumer society.
Lowenkopf, Shelley. Review of Face, by Cecile Pineda. Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 23, 1985, pp. 2, 10. Emphasizes the stark force of the novel’s story. Also intelligently discusses the influence of Pineda’s stage experience on the construction of her fiction.
