The other day, in these pages, a defender of the telenovela “Pasión” explained us which element made Ricardo de Salamanca, apart from his physical attractiveness, a very special character. Although we don’t remember the exact words, she said that in “Pasión” the characters don’t let themselves be affected or influenced by gossip or those ‘I-tell-you-and-you-tell-me’ prattles, because Ricardo and Camila always trust each other and before any setback they wait to listen what the other has to say. She also added that another of his virtues is that Ricardo, when he gets angry with Camila or doubts about her, doesn’t fall into any woman’s clutches (or bed) to comfort himself.

Such a sound comment made us think that in most telenovelas, in many occasions, the protagonists react in such a way before any setback that it would be impossible that in real life, after overcoming those setbacks, the loving husband would accept to get back together so happily. I mean, there may be things that can be forgiven and forgotten but, would a woman still love a man (it’s almost always the male character the most foolish one, of course) that treats her like dirt or has behaved in such a way? Would any person accept with resignation, before any offence, (mainly if, like in telenovelas, the protagonist misleadingly reacts to a setback and believes the first thing he or she hears), that his/her beloved would sleep with others and would do it right under his or her nose?

It’s logic that in telenovelas many things will happen which may join or separate the protagonists alternatively. It’s also inherent to the genre that those things be serious enough to provoke a sad and apparently lasting separation (though we may particularly hate those made-up categorical phrases like ‘we broke up for good’, ‘goodbye for good and all’ or ‘he left me for good’, when the whole audience knows that in ten episodes more they’ll be in the same vicious circle again). But even so, there are certain conducts and behaviors and certain things that in real life would make us send the person who did all that to us to hell, and this time it would be ‘for good and all’. Summing up, if telenovelas were better made, many of them would finish badly.

1.- Sex on sale – 2 for the price of 1

In the telenovela “Por Qué Diablos”, the hero, Juan Diablo, has a quite difficult girlfriend. Once, she flies into a terrible rage with him and sleeps with another guy and then she deeply regrets it. Although everybody intercedes for her (even the protagonist) and they all blame her behavior on her spite, Juan Diablo says something which turns out to be an honest to God truth, which is that he won’t forgive her because, regardless of her having slept with another man, he says he can’t live with a person who, after a simple rage, sleeps with the first man who passes by, that he can’t live that way; not being able to trust in what her girlfriend could do to take revenge or hurt him after a rage. The only regrettable thing is that the only time we saw this type of reasoning in a telenovela, had to be the case that a woman slept with another man (a less frequent behavior in telenovelas than the other way round – a man sleeping with another woman to ‘comfort’ himself) and a case in which the guy has to get rid of his pain in the back, i.e. his girlfriend - arguementally speaking, to get free and keep the other girl he’s destined to be with.

Even so, this argument is forceful, though is hardly used. For example, in one of the telenovelas which is currently being broadcasted, “Mi Querida Enemiga”, the character interpreted by Gabriel Soto splits up from Anna Layevska’s character and in a blink he starts dating another girl, the bad one, with whom he sleeps, naturally, as he doesn’t take any more interest on the heroine, who has a terrible time. If the comings and goings of new partners would be done by using a subway turnstile, the arms of the turnstile would even produce cool air. In spite of all, if Providence doesn’t remedy it, Anita will end up forgiving it all and the two protagonists will live happily ever after. At least, in this character’s case, he waited until he broke up with the first to sleep with the second.

But things don’t usually stay just there in telenovelas – the protagonists don’t content themselves with just going out with the bad girls, they get married in a blink and then they spend their lives with a hangdog look on their faces, lamenting and pitying themselves, (Is there any law we don’t know which bans men from staying single or which obliges them to get married even if they don’t love the woman? Maybe in the parallel world of telenovelas there is). There are zillions of telenovelas in which the protagonists go to extremes and get married or engaged to whom they shouldn’t, from “Cristal” (Jannette Rodriguez and Carlos Mata) and its Mexican version “El Privilegio De Amar” (Adela Noriega and René Strickler) to “Sin Ti” (Gaby Rivero and René Strickler) to “Vivo Por Elena” (Victoria Ruffo and Saúl Lisazo, though we don’t remember whether Saúl actually marries to Ana Patricia Rojo), “Acapulco Cuerpo Y Alma” (Patricia Manterola and Saúl Lisazo), “Maria Isabel” (Adela Noriega and Fernando Carrillo; here he cheats on her even while they’re married). Even our Sebastian Vallejo marries another one to forget Gaviota! In “Las Tontas No Van Al Cielo” the character of Patricio (Valentino Lanús) is shattered when he thinks that Candy died but even so he marries the sly devil of her sister, who, besides, directly and cynically contributed to his misfortune; what’s more, he also manages to have a child with another girl, more or less the same age than Candy’s son (Patricio can’t hold it in his pants).

The relationship/engagement/marriage as a method to forget has many connotations; we don’t know whether they are male chauvinist, selfish or a bit of both, since it gives us the idea that:

a) Men can’t suffer alone – they must always have a woman to comfort them, and if it can’t be the woman they want then any will be fine; after all, up to a certain extent, women are interchangeable – Why would he stay alone when he’s ‘every inch a man’?

b) It’s justifiable to use a person as a substitute, even if we don’t love them. In telenovelas the substitute woman is almost always very very wicked (except in “Dora La Celadora” and in “Montecristo”), a fact they use to justify that he uses her but, what would happen if instead of a wicked person the substitute would be a good person? It’s true that sometimes the female protagonists start a relationship with another man, but they don’t usually lie to them and almost always they tell them that they don’t love them and that they’re still in love with the protagonist.

Another variation of the ‘getting laid’ theme is when the male protagonist gets really drunk as the consequence of a quarrel and he sleeps with another woman, or he believes that he slept with another woman. Of course, if the guy was able to ‘function’ in that state of complete unconsciousness, full to the marrow with alcohol, we shouldn’t take that one into account…

And what about our guy’s aim? The thing is that, whatever they aim at they hit it, though in honor of the truth, sometimes it’s not clear whether they left the crawler pregnant at once or they got laid many times and they show it on the screen only once, so that we still like the protagonist. Most of these guys get married out of spite, and the fact that they are terribly in love to the marrow with the heroine doesn’t stop them from sharing the bed with ‘the other one’ (which is totally credible, by the way, even if we don’t like it – a romantic orgy). Except for two or three heroes that once they realize they don’t love their women any more they also break with the sexual-marital relations, in the rest of the cases it’s as if they were trying to be polite and they happily go on enjoying with their wives while they suffer for their sweetheart, even if sometimes they put a ‘patience face’ - but the bed is the bed. Of those coherent men, we remember about three of them at the moment: Luis Manrique (Fernando Colunga) in “Alborada”, Gustavo Gonsalvez (Christian Meier) in “Luz María” and Diego Luján (Rafael Novoa) in “Cosita Rica”.

The thing is that, of all these behaviors, the only one which could be redirected and forgiven may be the ‘sexual affair’; but the rest of those acts, namely that he despises her, that he gets married to another woman or that he has children with the other woman are indigestible acts of self love and pride, apart from forecasting a quite problematic future.

2 – Contempt and unforgivable offences

Not all the mistakes have to do with sex, which is not the most important thing after all. There are other dirty tricks and behaviors which are really unforgivable, and our ‘favorites’ are José Armando Peñarreal’s behavior in “Esmeralda” and Pedro Luis’ in “Leonela”. We already talked about these guys when we talked about “Male Chauvinism In Telenovelas”, but we name them again here because they are two abominable characters who any normal woman, with a little self-respect, would send to Hell. In Pedro Luis’ case, leaving aside the rape thing (which is a serious thing to leave aside anyway), he feels very offended because the poor Leonela, constantly suffering for him, is not able to satisfy him sexually (he even feels offended!), so he looks for another woman who can give him what he wants – it seems loneliness is very bad, but abstinence even worse.

Another character to whom is impossible to forgive is Alejandro Méndez in “Te Voy A Enseñar A Querer”, who does it all: he treats Diana unfairly and ruins her, he swallows all the gossip that comes to him, he puts Diana’s father in jail, he leaves her pregnant and believing the baby is Pablo’s he sleeps with Deborah. Anything else? Would you forgive this load of clumsiness, to call it some way?

Demetrio Asúnzolo in “La Mentira” doesn’t fall behind either – he gets married to a woman to get revenge on Verónica and hurt her, he makes her a prisoner, drives her away from her family and home, mistreats her verbally and physically, fucks her and leaves her1 and treats her like a dog. A kick in the ass for Demetrio.

There are other telenovelas, for example “Milagros” (from Peru), “Pura Sangre” or “Mujer Con Pantalones” in which the male or female protagonist, to take revenge for an offence or crime, gets married to someone who has absolutely nothing to do with the offence or crime; almost always the crime was committed by a relative of the person they are marring to. Totally unforgivable.
In “Señora” and in its new version “Toda Una Dama”, the protagonist takes it out on the female protagonist and does the impossible so that she is convicted, sent to jail and has her daughter taken away from her. Even if his acts were justified in some way, any normal woman wouldn’t forgive that lack of mercy and pity on a man; her own resentment would eat her alive, unless she is a saint worthy of beatification.
There’s a paradigmatic case in the telenovela “Duas Caras”, since the theme of the telenovela is precisely forgiveness of objectively unforgivable things. The male protagonist, Ferraço, does something so bad to Maria Paula after they meet that the whole plot consists in making her believe that he truly regrets what he did and now loves her and in making her forgive him and love him back. We wouldn’t forgive him because we’re not crazy; anyway, what we saw from the telenovela was great.

And to finish with this catalog of insults, what can you say about Bruce Remington in “Dame Chocolate”? Would someone forgive his behavior and accept to become someone else to be loved?

3.- Them women

The telenovelas’ female protagonists don’t usually sleep with other men or marry out of spite or revenge (except for Clara Guerrico in “Padre Coraje”, but she gets married to run away from herself. Be ware of Aurelia in “Esas Mujeres”, too). The most they do is getting a quiet and loving boyfriend who supports them and keeps them barely satisfied, and sometimes being about to get married to regret it almost inside the church or inside the church itself sometimes (like in “Luz Maria”). After all, women are the major sufferers in telenovelas, but if they would drive one nail out with another, suffering would be over. I mean, they may drive out the previous man with our heroes because they’re these women’s ‘true love’, but then they don’t forget our heroes or they don’t even try to do it when the moment comes. Sometimes our heroines lie and cheat, but those little details are less important than morality and sexual faithfulness in the plots.
This doesn’t mean that our heroines don’t do things that will need forgiveness. To start with, a lot of them are really stubborn and don’t give their men the slightest chance to speak and explain themselves; an opportunity which, I think, a person you’re going to marry to deserves. Our heroines see something, let their imagination run away with them and the party is over – 25 or 30 episodes without talking to their boyfriend or without letting them utter a word – what kind of trust is that? What kind of relationship do they have? If you had a girlfriend/boyfriend with these characteristics, after the fourth try to explain what happened without success, would you give up and wave goodbye butterfly? I bet you would.
A female stubborn character is found in “Amor Del Bueno”, where Coraima Torres doesn’t let her guy speak nor wants to listen and prefers to suffer for no reason before giving in.

But the worst and unforgivable thing about many of our heroines is how foolish they are – how they fall into the most obvious trap, how they get pregnant out of pure ignorance, how they never ask what they should, nor explain what they should, how they let others mistreat them, ignore them and, as they say in Mexico, ‘ningunear’, i.e. to treat like dirt (I think I mentioned somewhere else that I find it an excellent word). The problem lies in that all those things are evident and are important defects for the audience, though they’re not for the hero who, as he loves her, doesn’t see how stupid she is. What for us is a sign of stupidity, for the hero is a sign of goodness and innocence. Holly blindness!

Fortunately, though there are a lot of foolish female protagonists, there are also some smart ones, like Juana in “Juana La Virgen”, Gaviota in “Café Con Aroma De Mujer”, María Rosa in “María Rosa Búscame Una Esposa”, Angela in “Por Qué Diablos”, Rosario in “La Hija Del Mariachi”, Amada in “La Ex”, Aurelia in “Esas Mujeres” and many others. There are really few things we have to forgive them.