She has never received a present; she has never received a letter in her life; she has never eaten in a restaurant; she has never eaten spaghetti; she is gentle and submissive; she never complains; the only thing she wishes for is to be alive; she fights off death by living very little; she doesn’t know what to live for; she lives to exhale and inhale and exhale and inhale; she lives to live; her life doesn’t matter; she doesn’t exist for anyone else; she’s just a accident; she has what she calls an inner life but she doesn’t know she has one; she never asks questions; she never thinks “I am me”; she is used to forgetting herself; she doesn’t pay attention to herself; she suffers every moment; for her, life is like a punch in the stomach. She is Macabea, the main character of this book.

Macabea was born with rickets, thinning hair, and a face just slightly stronger than dirt gray. Regardless of appearance, size, or health, Macabea does not seem to have the feminine gender appeal. But compared to the external factors of life, disease, and poverty, her internal handicaps are even more lamentable. She’s not an idiot, but she’s had a terrible life, and a big part of that is that she’s made a terrible life for herself. She slept in a cotton robe, stained with what was probably faded blood. She wasn’t very clean, rarely bathed, and smelled foul, and her roommate didn’t know what to tell her, so she didn’t end up saying anything. She didn’t have good hygiene habits, and she seemed to lack the inherent dignity of being an adult. But when we look at her upbringing in the context of her life, all the people she meets are just passing through her life and no one stays. Macabea’s life is like eating at a restaurant, where everyone else gets up and leaves when they’re done, leaving a table full of leftovers.

It seems to us that love, marriage and even sex are not all there is to a woman’s life, and that a woman has the right to choose them and the right to give them up. Women should have complete autonomy in their choices, and no one else has the right to say anything about it. But in this book, Macabea doesn’t. She desires it, but doesn’t have the right. She was born into misfortune, a person seen as unworthy of knowing, and has been in a situation all her life where she doesn’t deserve to be known. But when we think about it, if in reality there really is someone like Macabea, someone whose upbringing, whose heart, whose experiences we don’t know, what reason or obligation do we have to care for her? How is she to be treated and how will she build herself up without her ego, when her life has been so miserable and she has never felt true happiness?

My question is why did the author choose a male writer figure to be the narrator of Macabea’s story?