Belisa greeted them with a wave as she passed, but she did not stop, because she had no strength to waste in acts of compassion. Many people fell by the wayside, but she was so stubborn that she survived to cross through that hell and at long last reach the first trickles of water, fine, almost invisible threads that fed spindly vegetation and farther down widened into small streams and marshes. Belisa Crepusculario saved her life and in the process accidentally discovered writing.
In a village near the coast, the wind blew a page of newspaper at her feet. She picked up the brittle yellow paper and stood a long while looking at it, unable to determine its purpose, until curiosity overcame her shyness.
She walked over to a man who was washing his horse in the muddy pool where she had quenched her thirst. The answer astounded the girl, but she did not want to seem rude, so she merely inquired about the significance of the fly tracks scattered across the page.
That was the day Belisa Crepusculario found out that words make their way in the world without a master, and that anyone with a little cleverness can appropriate them and do business with them. She made a quick assessment of her situation and concluded that aside from becoming a prostitute or working as a servant in the kitchens of the rich there were few occupations she was qualified for.
It seemed to her that selling words would be an honorable alternative. From that moment on, she worked at that profession, and was never tempted by any other. At the beginning, she offered her merchandise unaware that words could be written outside of newspapers. When she learned otherwise, she calculated the infinite possibilities of her trade and with her savings paid a priest twenty pesos to teach her to read and write, with her three remaining coins she bought a dictionary.
She poured over it from A to Z and then threw it into the sea, because it was not her intention to defraud her customers with packaged words. One August morning several years later, Belisa Crepusculario was sitting in her tent in the middle of a plaza, surrounded by the uproar of market day, selling legal arguments to an old man who had been trying for sixteen years to get his pension.
Suddenly she heard yelling and thudding hoofbeats. She looked up from her writing and saw, first, a cloud of dust, and then a band of horsemen come galloping into the plaza.
Both the Colonel and El Mulato had spent their lives fighting in the civil war, and their names were ineradicably linked to devastation and calamity. The rebels swept into town like a stampeding herd, wrapped in noise, bathed in sweat, and leaving a hurricane of fear in their trail. Chickens took wing, dogs ran for their lives, women and children scurried out of sight, until the only living soul left in the market was Belisa Crepusculario.
She had never seen El Mulato and was surprised to see him walking toward her. Then they thundered off toward the hills. Hours later, just as Belisa Crepusculario was near death, her heart ground to sand by the pounding of the horse, they stopped, and four strong hands set her down.
In their artist statements, students discussed why they chose the two words they did, what meaning those two words hold for them at this point in their lives, and if those two words might change in the future. Lastly they discussed their artistic choices: Why did they choose to illustrate the words in the way that they did, and what was the artistic process like for them?
NICO: Click here for the artist statement. Students recorded their answers in a brief video. En muchas de las obras de Allende - tanto en sus cuentos como en sus novelas - se presenta a protagonistas femeninas fuertes que manifiestan atributos sumamente positivos como: confianza, integridad, independencia, etc. Can you sell me the words for a speech?
One day she is nabbed by the followers of a ferocious war chief named El Mulato. Belisa writes the speech and also whispers two words to him, telling him these words are part of the bargain. What were the two words in two words? The two words she gave him, I have come to believe, are 'Te Amo', which means 'I love you'. While she was working on the speech, El Mulato thought he loved her. Subsequently, question is, who is Belisa Crepusculario?
In Two Words, a wonderfully evocative short story, the Chilean writer Isabel Allende relates the tale of Belisa Crepusculario , a beautiful young woman from a desperately poor background who made a living selling words. Can you sell me the words for a speech? The two words do exist, but we cannot tell you what they are. The point of the story is that these words are different for each person, so you have to find in your own heart those two magical words , only Belisa and the Colonel know what his words are.
Well, Belisa is an anagram for the name Isabel the author's name , and Crepusculario comes from the term crepuscular which is a form of nocturnal where an animal is most active between twilight and dawn.
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