Alborada, telenovela recap, second installment

The telenovela "Alborada" is my constant companion weekday nights - it's on Univision at 9 pm. Here is a second recap; the first is here. Turn on the Spanish subtitles, as I do, and improve your language skills. But if for some reason you are NOT watching "Alborada," you better just skip right along to some other post.

We left Hipolita in a house of ill-repute, her hand being stroked suggestively by Count Diego, who has had her locked in and intends her to be the latest of his victims.

She escapes and goes to see the villainess Doña Juana. (That wouldn't have been my choice.)

Juana gives Hipolita a choice: go back to Panama (to jail, to your homosexual husband, and to your demonic mother-in-law) or go live at the convent - without your child. Hipolita chooses the convent. Her maid and son go back to Las Tunas to the home of Hipolita's wussy mother and brutal stepfather.

Due to her illegitimacy, Hipolita is made a servant at the convent. She asks to serve her own half-sister Catalina - who, we discover, is an angry and unwilling novice, recently bundled off to the nunnery to save the expense of a dowry.

I couldn't find a picture of Catalina (right) in her nun's outfit. You'll have to imagine the wimple.


Catalina is in love with the badly-coiffed and badly-moustached Father Cristobal, Luis's bosom buddy. Cristobal makes googly eyes at Catalina, too.

Shame on him! He's a priest!

Catalina hates her half-sister Hipolita for having stained the family honor by being born illegitimate.


Meanwhile, Luis's fussy hysterical wife Esperanza, who has been taking a potion to make her ready for pregnancy, still needs her husband to bed her, which he refuses to do, having been warned that another pregnancy will kill her. She's desperate because her readiness-potion (purchased from a cigar-smoking black voodoo lady in a tent) expires in a couple of days.

She therefore goes back to the cigar-smoking black voodoo lady in the tent. She buys a love potion and puts an extra-heavy dose in a glass of wine, asking Luis to come to her boudoir.

He comes, and they (Luis and Esperanza) have their usual unsatisfactory argument ("I want to have a baby" "But it will kill you to be pregnant again") and he leaves without having touched the wine. Or his wife.

Now, the evil Count Diego has already decided that HE will do the deed, if his cousin Luis won't. If Diego gets Esperanza pregnant, he has the double pleasure of cuckolding Luis and also making it impossible for the marriage to be annulled as Luis wants.

So, coming to Esperanza's boudoir with evil intent, Diego drinks the love potion and then ravishes her.

Later that night the potion almost kills Diego; he retches endlessly and the palace is in an uproar. Esperanza, though a quivering mess, cannily has her maid wash up the tainted glass.

Doña Juana falls apart sobbing over her drunken philandering retching wretch of a son. Her actual genuine sobbing shows our hero Don Luis (right) yet again that his supposed mother Juana loves his cousin Diego more than she loves him, her supposed son (but don't forget, Juana switched the babies at birth and Diego is her actual son...)

Diego recovers. Luis and Cristobal continue investigating the provenance of a locket Hipolita sold to raise a bit of cash.

Any questions?

You can find ALL my Alborada recaps listed in the right sidebar, just above the elephant!

to be continued...

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