The Guava Bite (El mordisco de la guayaba)

Four generations of women loved the same man, and all of them eventually lost their minds. When the first signs of that inherited curse begin to appear, the youngest descendant of the family sets out to reconstruct the story of obsession, love, and madness that has haunted the women of her bloodline for seventy years, before she becomes the next victim. 

In 2009, Mulatona Montiel has just witnessed the death of the man who shaped the destiny of every woman in her family: the Poet. She also knows that the hereditary madness that consumed her great-grandmother, her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt has finally begun to reach her. Before she loses her grip on reality completely, she decides to write the story of her lineage and the obsession that, for seventy years, bound four generations of women to the same man.

It all began in 1939, when Yolanda, Mulatona’s great-grandmother, met the newborn son of Julia, an Italian immigrant employed in the family home. Upon seeing him, she believed she recognized Alfonso, the great love who had abandoned her in her youth. From that moment on, she developed an increasingly consuming obsession that gradually blurred the boundaries between memory, desire, and reality. She cared for the child as though he belonged to her, made him the center of her existence, and ultimately died because of him when a man driven by jealousy burst into the house intending to kill Julia and, in the darkness, mistakenly murdered Yolanda instead.

After the tragedy, the boy was raised by Cornelia, Yolanda’s teenage daughter. Intelligent, bookish, and far ahead of the women of her generation, Cornelia devoted herself to caring for him almost as if he were her own son. But during the birth of her first child, a catastrophe altered their lives forever. When complications arose during labor, the Poet, then only six years old, refused to fetch help until she finished reading him a story. The delay caused irreversible brain damage to the baby girl, who would die years later. From that moment on, Cornelia’s love for the Poet became inseparable from resentment.

Shortly afterward, Julia left the country and took her son with her. More than a decade later, after his mother’s death, the Poet returned to the home where he had grown up in search of the only family he had left. But he was no longer the child Cornelia remembered. He had become a fascinating, charismatic man capable of inspiring devastating passions. His return reopened wounds that had never healed. The bond between them evolved into a romantic relationship, while he also awakened the desire of Cornelia’s two teenage daughters. When the truth emerged, humiliation and grief shattered Cornelia’s mind, and she was eventually institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital.

With Cornelia removed from the scene, the Poet became the unquestioned center of the family universe. Santa, one of Cornelia’s daughters, had loved him for years and spent her youth trying to win him over, eventually succeeding in marrying him. Yet marriage proved to be a long defeat. The Poet continued to accumulate lovers, and when they discovered they could never have children together, Santa’s obsession only deepened.

Then Santa’s older sister returned from Paris, pregnant and determined to keep the identity of the father a secret. Unable to give up on the Poet and desperate to raise a child, Santa proposed an extraordinary arrangement: the three of them would live together as a family and raise the unborn baby collectively. From that agreement was born Primitiva Serapio, known from childhood as Mulatona Montiel.

Mulatona grew up in a household governed by love, dependency, and frustration. Raised by two mothers and rejected by the man she always called father, though he never acknowledged her as his daughter, she developed a divided identity, torn between the insecure Primitiva and the defiant Mulatona. Convinced that only distance could save her from the fate of the women before her, she studied literature and earned a scholarship to move to Barcelona. For the first time, she believed she had escaped both the Poet’s shadow and the madness that pursued the women of her family.

But her escape ended in failure. A scam left her penniless and destroyed her plans, forcing her to return home. There she found a family in ruins. Santa had died, her mother had abandoned the country to follow a spiritual guru in India, and the Poet was facing the final years of a terminal illness alone.

What began as an obligation gradually evolved into an unexpected relationship. While caring for the Poet during his final days, Mulatona discovered the man who existed behind the family legend. For the first time, she stopped seeing him as the source of all their misfortunes and began to understand why so many women had been unable to free themselves from his orbit. Through conversations, memories, and confessions, the Poet passed down the story of the entire family, convinced that understanding the past might save her from the fate that had destroyed the women of her lineage.

But it was already too late.

One afternoon, while buying the Poet his favorite guava pastry, Mulatona mistook a former boyfriend for the schoolmate who had made her childhood miserable. The confusion lasted for more than an hour. When she finally realized what had happened, she understood that she had begun the same journey as her ancestors. The madness had arrived.

When she returned home, she found the Poet dead.

Now, as her mind gradually fractures, Mulatona writes the story of a family consumed by desire, obsession, and insanity. The story of four generations of women trapped within the gravity of a single man. And the story of the final heir to that curse, determined to finish her account before becoming its next victim.

RELEVANT INFORMATION: María Eugenia Mayobre is a Venezuelan writer and screenwriter. The Guava Bite, winner of the First Ediciones B Venezuela Novel Biennial, was her debut novel.

The novel explores the construction of a family curse, the inheritance of madness, and the portrait of a patriarchal society. Its multi-generational structure, dramatic twists, memorable set pieces, and above all its complex female characters create a sweeping story of love, obsession, and tragedy that resonates with the tradition of the great Latin American novels.

With its rich emotional scope, layered chronology, and powerful dramatic arcs, The Guava Bite possesses remarkable audiovisual potential as either a feature film or a limited series.

AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Limited Series, Feature Film, TV Film. 

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish, French.