By Heartwood, Everett Public Library staff
One Out of Two by Daniel Sada
When their parents die suddenly in a highway accident, Gloria and Constitución, young identical twin daughters, vow to live their lives as a pair, sharing everything equally. They grow up with an aunt until the girls are ready to strike out on their own, which they eventually do, settling in Ocampo, a small town in northern Mexico, where they set up a tailoring business. They work hard, which seems to suit them and to offer its own rewards. They also find their work can shield them somewhat from participating in the town’s typical gossip and chatter, though they still have occasion to point a knitting needle to the sign they’ve posted: “Restrict your conversation to the business at hand.”
Of course, a vow to live inseparably is going to receive challenges, and the biggest one comes when their aunt invites them to the wedding of her son, Benigno. In her invitation she notes that this will be a great opportunity for them to meet men (she has been after them to find men and get married from the moment they moved out of her house). The twins flip a coin, having decided only one of them will go and the other will stay to keep on top of their many sewing orders.
Constitución wins the coin toss and prepares, among quite a bit of muted strife, to go to the wedding. Constitución does indeed meet a man there and he comes to see her in Ocampo one Sunday, the first of what turns out to be weekly visits. The twins eventually decide that they will take turns dating him, surreptitiously, on alternate Sundays. This weekly dating arrangement goes on for months and it introduces some jealousy and suspicion into the lives of the twins. I began to wonder how Oscar would not have discovered the fact that Constitución had a twin in a town noted for its busybodies and gossip, and he does indeed learn this near the end of this novella.
There are other things in this story that are clearly unrealistic, such as middle-aged twins who still choose to dress and wear their hair identically, and the deal-breaker their vow would place on individual development. So, I don’t know how I was so won over by this quirky and far-fetched story but there is something immensely satisfying about this little book. It’s partly due, I’m sure, to Sada’s warm and unusual style, which grew on me more and more as I read. But more than that, it’s the wonderful characters he has created in the twins, the sacrifice and impossible bond of their vow to be “one in two or two by now in one,” and the timeless quality of their small town life. Finally, the book is something of a paean to work: the duty of it, but also the shared, ongoing pleasure the seamstress twins seem to take in the restorative act of bringing together, of making whole and sound what had been (or could have been) torn or separate.
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