Telenovela Alborada, #19

Owing to a mothering disaster, I didn't get to watch till after midnight, hence I've had no time to proof this. Read at your own risk!

This is one in a series of recaps of the Univision telenovela Alborada.
In order to read the whole post, you must now click "read the rest" at the bottom of this summary! If you are new, please visit the recaps in ORDER - see the bottom of this post for information.

GUEST BLOGGERS STILL NEEDED!Covering for me while I'm out of town: Sylvia has volunteered to do March 6th and 8th. Jean has volunteered to do March 1st, 9th, and 10th. That leaves March 2nd, 3rd, and 7th to be covered. If YOU would like to do a guest recap or two, leave your contact info in the comments section or email me at melinama@mappamundi.com

Wednesday: Well, as you know, my machine did not record Tuesday night's program, so I watched the "previously on Alborada" section with interest. Cristóbal, lying in bed with no shirt on, marries Catalina, who looks very lovely. They exchange the rings of his parents and kiss each others' hands! Annoying martial music plays! Who chose this music?

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Luis is away somewhere impatiently waiting for the kidnappers to show up but, of course, they don't. That's because Juana's henchpeople, Gasca and Modesta, were the kidnappers, and they don't exactly want Luis to know that. So Luis missed Cristóbal's wedding for nothing. Eventually Felipe gets him to return home.

Francisco is drinking alone when his wife Asuncion arrives. He says "our luck has changed." Now that Catalina will be wife - or widow - of a very wealthy man, Francisco will be able to sit with his feet up and get hammered every single day without having to worry about money. Asunción says, well can you at least stop blackmailing Juana now? But he doesn't see any reason to cut off that income stream. He grabs her and pulls her into his lap but she slithers away. He doesn't care, he still has his bottle.

At Cristóbal's, more praying and another upwelling of platitudes from Hipólita. Let's see: "Tomorrow is another day," "Don't lose hope," "Look for the silver lining," "There's light at the end of every road," "I've lost half my life, so God will make sure the second half is beautiful" [Only somebody with no memory could think such a thing. -- Ed.] More anachronistic music. [Music of that time was very beautiful. Too bad the producer didn't have enough faith in us to use it. -- Ed.]

Juana is reduced to sending a very stupid servant with her note for Luis ("Come see me immediately!"), because she already has sent her smart ones off to do dreadful things.

Diego is carried home from the inn slung over his horse like a sack of potatoes. He'd been carousing with Rodrigo and Antonio. He's desperate to pee but the servants won't let him use the bushes. He giggles very strangely as they drag him up the stairs.

Luis gets back to Cristóbal's place, sees him burning up with fever, and has him submerged in an ice bath. This turns the tide, so to speak, and Cristóbal is on the mend. By morning he'll be ready for juice and chicken soup, the doctor says.

Juana is going ahead with plan B as suggested by Gasca. "A second note came while you were gone, Luis, the kidnappers didn't dare face you, they went elsewhere and I sent Gasca with the money. He'll bring the kid back." She continues with another feeble cascade of lies. She tells of her plan to have Hipólita be Rafael's nanny - a plan with an eccentric logic since Hipólita is actually Rafael's mother, even if she doesn't remember it. Luis promises: "I'm going to tell her everything as soon as I get our child back."

Juana: "I want Rafael here forever!" Luis: "He'll only stay if Hipólita agrees."

I recognize this old war-horse of an anachronistic cello piece that gets played outside the church but I can't think of the name right now.

Cristóbal's sister jokes with Luis: "I'm not sure Cristobal would ever have married under any regular circumstances," Cristóbal says he's not sorry he married Catalina. Some feeble but cheerful banter shows he's on the mend.

Luis, suspicious, asks Marcos and friend to find out where Gasca was on the previous day, then vows to Hipólita: "I'm leaving Cuencas and coming back tomorrow, hopefully with my son, and then there are many things I want to tell you." "Are these things sad?" "Well, ... uh, life has pains, also happiness. And me, I've had far more pain than happiness." "Even thoughh there are obstacles, you can succeed." Platitudes R Us.

Antonio accosts Luis on his way out of town. Antonio wants to hash out the problems with the regidor, the documents, the hiding of the truth from Hipólita, etc. and he endears himself to me NOT by saying several times in this episode "She's my wife and I have all the rights over her." Luis: "OK, go ahead and tell her everything - be sure not to forget that your mother and you threw me in her bed to make you a son." Onlookers titter appreciatively at this public airing of dirty linen by aristocrats. It's sort of like hearing people's cellphone conversations.

Marina and Isabel get ready for their meeting with Sara and Victoria, who are getting ready at the same time on the other side of town. Sara is very frightened - not having been out of the house for so long - but Victoria is encouraging, telling her mom that her mom's dead parents are looking down from heaven to protect her.

Hipólita is frightened - she's decided people would have told her more about her past life if what there was to tell was ok. The longer they tell her nothing, the more worried she is.

Antonio wants to talk to Hipolita (and tell her everything), but Isabel heads him off.

The regidor has not got the chops to help Antonio procure new traveling papers. And there are those border problems...

For about the tenth time Hipolita harrasses Ada for information. She finds out she and Luis loved each other. "Did we go to bed?" "Yes." "Oh no, I'm a whore! Me engaged and him married!" "No, you didn't know."

Antonio comes but Hipólita has a terrible headache (I don't blame her). She also feels nausea. Uh-oh! We know what that ALWAYS means! Have you noticed men in telenovelas never get nauseated? And that only pregnant women get nauseated? Antonio says he'll come back tomorrow. "Ada, don't tell me I slept with him too!" "No, I swear." "OK, I guess it's a consolation I was the whore of only one man and not many."

The last scene is between Catalina and Cristóbal, who is now wearing a shirt and has had the opportunity to have his silly facial hair groomed meticulously. He talks to her about how it's going to be, to be the lady of the palace. She says she's afraid she won't be a good wife, he says, well I'm afraid I won't be a good husband, so we're in the same boat. It's very sweet.

Thursday: Show was pre-empted by some awards thing.

Friday:

• Asuncion is surprised (she shouldn't be) that her awful husband Francisco was sort of hoping Cristóbal would die. "Nothing wrong with my being concerned about our family's welfare. You know how much our daughter Catalina would have inherited as his widow? This palace would have been ours! And he had a lot of other properties too!" "For this you accepted the wedding, because you tought he'd die?" "No, it's just that if he'd died everything would have been easier!" "I never thought you were so awful, such a ruin. I'm tired of your uselessness, you don't have a spark of nobility, and you treat Andrés so badly." Wow! Francisco coils up a heavy rope in his hand and whips around with it threatening his wife and knocking things over and he pulls the tablecloth off the table. You can bet HE doesn't plan to clean up this mess he's making!
  
  
• In the square, there are fire-eating snake-oil-selling acrobats performing in the square when Victoria and Sara (heavily veiled) arrive for their meeting with Isabel. Sara, who has left her house for the first time in 36 years, is horrified to see the fire and has a post-traumatic stress flashback to when her parents and brothers were burned at the stake in the square by the Inquisition (for being Jews).
  
  Isabel arrives and instantly recognizes Sara. She is saddened by her burns - gotten in the very fire which killed Carlos and Aurora - and shocked to discover it was Juana who denounced Sara's relatives causing the Inquisition to incinerate them. Sara thinks Juana did it out of jealousy of the affection Juana's brother and sister-in-law felt for Sara. They have a sweet, poignant, emotional conversation.
  
  Flashback to a time when Sara, with young Victoria in tow, visited Juana to ask her for help in retrieving the family Olvieda's ashes. (Isabel was living in Peru during this whole period and only heard about it later from Juana.) Not only did Juana not help, she refused to let Sara see the boys (little Diego and little Luis), and said if Sara didn't disappear permanently, Juana would denounce her to the Inquisition and there'd be one more incinerated Jew removed from Mexico.
  
  
  UPDATE:Clarification and correction from Jean:
  
  I didn't understand the chronology here until I watched it several times. We know that Sara was burned in the fire on the chalana. She tells Isabel that it tooks months for her to heal. THEN she found out that her family had been denounced and "were going to be burned alive" (los iban a quemar vivos - using the verb ir + a to mean to be going to to something, i.e., it hadn't happend yet). In spite of her fear, she goes to Cuencas to try and see them before the execution and asks help from Juana who rejects her, etc. etc. What confused me before I focused on those pesky verb tenses was that we know that Sara witnessed the execution so it could not have happened while she was recovering from the burns she got in the fire.
  
  A nice costume touch is that in the flashback of the scene with Juana and Sara, we see Juana in the fashion of most of the eighteenth century, a tight-fitting bodice with a flat front and panniers. The Revolution in Fashion as it is called with the change to the shapeless slip-like dresses occurred about 1790 so when Luis and Diego were babies, the old style was still being worn.
  
  
  While strolling about the plaza, Victoria tells Marina she should occupy a better social position that she does, that she should marry a gentleman and raise some grandbabies already. Marina says it won't be possible, not because of money but because of "other things" (she doesn't say so but the other things include, for instance, that having been raped by Diego she is no longer a virgin).
  
  When Marina and Isabel get back to the castle, Marina wants to know what took place in that long meeting, but Isabel needs a big stiff drink first. Then: "Your mother was accused of killing your father, but don't worry, it wasn't true, because you were with him the day he was murdered, and afterwards you were gone. Sara and Victoria went plumb loco looking for you with no success." Marina cries, probably in confusion and dismay to finally know her own mother under such odd circumstances.
  
  
• Also idly watching the acrobats out there in the plaza, Antonio says to Rodrigo: "The Guevaras are a family of despots, running everybody's lives, they think they are kings and queens. Juana raised one drunk and one shameless man." "Do you think it's true what Diego told us last night, that Esperanza's child is his doing?" "Who knows?"
  
  Rodrigo has received a letter from his father, saying the insurrection is gaining power and properties are being stolen away by the political rebels. This could leave our Panamanian aristocrats destitute. "My father will try to defend what's ours with teeth and claws. He doesn't want me doing business with Diego unless I get cash." Speaking of cash, Antonio is fairly cash-poor since investing in Diego's vanilla plantation and still talks of visiting his ATM.
  
  
• Esperanza, her servant Mirtha in tow, steals into Hipólita's room. Viewing the sleeping woman (calling her "dormidota"), Esperanza hisses disbelief that they share a father - "She doesn't look like us. She isn't pretty. What does Luis see in her?"
  
  She steals Hipólita's medicine and asks Mirtha to run it over to Carmo, the cigar-smoking negro gypsy healer, to find out what's in it. It turns out to be just pain killer and sleeping potion. "Nothing more?" asks Esperanza in disappointment.
  
  Still sleeping, Hipólita dreams of the day of Rafael's baptism. On that day, Luis took her to a big house he planned to buy for her, showed her around, prayed with her, had a faux wedding with her in front of a dusty mirror, and then had sex with her on the floor. Hence, no doubt, her current nausea. Speaking of which ...
  
  If, as I speculate, she is pregnant, just imagine! She's had sex just twice in more than four years and each time she got pregnant! She and Luis must make a very fecund combination. If they end up together and she doesn't watch out she'll end up with a couple dozen kiddlies.
  
  
• Esperanza wants to overdose Hipólita with her own (laudanum?) and kill her. Mirtha rightly points out that since Esperanza is known to have nearly killed Diego with a potion, she'll be suspect #1 should another peculiar poisoning occur.
  
  
• Luis and Felipe tried to head Gasca off at the pass on his way back from ransoming Rafael, but he never showed up - not surprisingly, Juana had lied about the road and Gasca went a different way precisely so Luis wouldn't see him.
  
  Felipe counsels Luis to have a cool head and not go barging off in four directions at once (this was John Lennon's counsel to us all). His point - that if they don't go back to Cuencas right away Luis may miss his chance to spin the story of Hipólita's life to his own advantage - prevails and they head back.
  
  
• Perla is doing a booming twilight business out on the plaza, no doubt because she has such excellent posture. To my great surprise, she comes on to ANTONIO and he accepts! He must want to find out if his equipment really does work.
  
  She and Antonio go to her house and next thing we see them side by side naked in bed, languidly post-coital. He asks her about Francisco; she disparagingly calls Francisco a homely old fart who nevertheless may get her a job at a card-house. As Antonio leaves her house, Ramon and the mute are barging in. Antonio gives the lowlife scum a courtly bow and a cordial, perhaps ironic, "good evening gentlemen."
  
  
• Ramón reports all to Sara.
  
  
• I thought I saw a full-sized dead person being lowered from a tree as Luis and Felipe galloped by.
  
  
• The week ends with another peaceful lovely discussion between Cristóbal and his new wife Catalina. He asks what she wants from their future and she says, "To be a good, obedient wife and care for our kids if God sends us some." "Well, what I want is for us to trust each other, tell each other everything. Don't be afraid of me. Most married people live as if they were separate, barely tolerant, regarding each other with indifference, I don't want an obedient wife, I want a companion and friend. And by the way, please," he begs for the second time, "use the familiar "tu" with me!" That's a cute little shtick.

I post the new update every Wednesday and Saturday morning. All Alborada recaps are now listed in the sidebar to the right - below the small picture of Modesta and Doña Juana, just above the elephant. Click on the numbers (ONE TWO THREE ... ETC) to find them!

Amor Real
Entre el Amor y el Odio

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