First Confession by Latin American Writer Montserrat

¶ … First Confession by Latin American writer Montserrat Fontes

The idea of the Christian confessional and its ultimate inability to give spiritual or societal healing in the presence of perpetual societal injustice and class inequities gives rise to the major themes of the novel First Confession by the Latin American author Montserrat Fontes. In the novel, two children, the privileged cousins Andrea Durcal and Victor Durcal, are about to make their first confession at the end of the summer of 1947. They are living on the Mexican border, living a carefully controlled life "designed" by their mothers, a life where servants serve, and the wills and the needs of the upper classes of Mexican society hold sway.

But then, sin and disorder intrudes upon their family's neatly structured existences. First, their maid Alicia is murdered. Then, Andrea's father accidentally runs over a night watchman, a man of the lower orders. Seeing such unlamented crimes and careless sins so recklessly committed in the lives of the adults, the children soak up this attitude, and endeavor to make the maximum use of their own, briefly sinless existence before their first confession. The children rationalize that as they are about to be absolved of all of their wrongdoings, and that their souls will be made afresh by confession, then they should do as many things wrong as they can over the course of the summer -- fifty bad things before breakfast, if they can manage it. This sense of excess is paralleled in the lives of their parents, who similarly live only for today, because society allows the wealthy to do so, at the expense of the poor.