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The wars begin here, in our hearts and in our beds" (105) says Ines, witch-woman and "sometime wife" to Emiliano Zapata in "Eyes of Zapata," the most ambitious story of Sandra Cisneros's second collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. In Ines, Cisneros presents a narrator who is capable of seeing both at a distance and up close, who is able to encompass both the physically violent world of Zapata's revolution and the emotionally violent world of love. She is able to see both worlds and, more importantly, understands how the pain of both worlds is merely a manifestation of the same disease-a failure of love. Cisneros says in a voice that is Ines speaking to Zapata but also Cisneros speaking to the reader (the two are easily confused--even Cisneros claims to have woken from a dream believing she was Ines [Sagel 741):
We drag these bodies around with us, these bodies that have nothing at all to do with you, with me, with who we really are, these bodies that give us pleasure and pain. Though I've learned how to abandon mine at will, it seems to me we never free ourselves completely until we love, until we lose ourselves inside each other Then we see a little of what is called heaven. When we can be that close we no longer are Ines and Emiliano, but something bigger than our lives. And we can forgive, finally. (87)
When a writer claims to identify with a character to the extent that she wakes up unsure who is who, one can assume that that character is going to speak deeply and come as close to the truth as fiction can come to the truth of the human heart. This is true of Ines.
Ines is the fully aware feminine self, a woman who has seen her own reality--her people embroiled in a civil war and led by her deceitful, unfaithful husband--and does not flinch or look away. She takes the deepest pain inside herself and through it claims the power of her own identity. Ingesting the pain of her world by facing it head-on gives her strength and the will to persevere: "And I took to eating black things--huitlacoche the corn mushroom, coffee, dark chilies,...