Why Women Love Men by Rosario Ferré from The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories I found particularly interesting and beautifully crafted. It's a story of two women, Isabel Luberza, Ambrosio's wife, and Isabel la Negra, his lover. When he died, he left each of them with half of his inheritance. At first they thought that he did it on purpose, to "push [them] both downhill..., to see which one of [them] had won." But later they realized that he did it to "meld [them], to make [them] fade into each other, so that [their] true face would finally come to surface". One of them, Isabel la Negra, was a prostitute, the other, Isabel Luberza, was a lady. But both of them knew that there's a prostitute in every lady, and vice versa. Both of them wanted to be like the other one, and both of them hid that part under their skin. Ferré devises a way of underscoring this idea of fractured self by calling them different names like "Isabel the Slavedriver", "Isabel the Red Cross Lady", "Isabel the Rumba", "Isabel the Popular Party Lady", "Isabel the Trastamara", "Elizabeth the Black", "Saint Elizabeth", "Isabel the Black Pearl of the South" to show us how many different sides each of these women had and that put together they were a composite of womanhood as dictated by a chauvinistic, patriarchal society. Isabel Luberza polished her fingernails with "Cherries Jubilee", "the shrill and gaudy color that Negroes usually prefer." Isabel la Negra dreamt about being a lady, a wife, sitting on the balcony with Ambrosio as an honorable woman. Throughout the story, Ferré shifts the narrator's voice between the two women, and sometimes she does it so suddenly that at first it's impossible to understand who's the speaker. But as you go deeper into the paragraph, it become
             ...