eforeAsesinato! eforeLujuria! eforeTraicion! [Murder! Lust! Betrayal!]

The withdrawal symptoms started several weeks ago: restlessness, grumpiness, a vague sense of disorientation beginning around 9 o’clock every weeknight. I feel as if I’d fallen asleep on a cross-country flight and woken up staring down at some unknown landmark. I’m fighting the urge to ring Jennifer Lopez and beg her to sing “Que Ironia” to me over the phone.

The truth is, I miss my telenovela.

Now, before you start asking how a fortysomething Anglo-German-Irish-Huguenot male can get hooked on a Spanish-language soap opera aimed at 25-year-old Pacoima hairdressers and Guadalajara housewives, let me explain. This wasn’t just any telenovela. This was Univision’s heavily hyped “Entre el Amor y el Odio” (“Between Love and Hate”), a gripping six-month saga of greed, betrayal, murder, mistaken identity, child-napping, family feuds, kinky sex, macho posturing, female martyrdom and enough cheesy dialogue to stock a Gruyere outlet mall.

Not to mention a belly-dancing femme fatale, a Jacuzzi party in which the main villain gets parboiled alive (don’t ask) and -- holy mixed messages! -- a cameo by Juan Diego, the recently canonized Indian peasant whose vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe opened up the New World to Roman Catholicism nearly five centuries ago. The beloved saint showed up in a blaze of light and canned music, just in time to inspire a young paraplegic to rise miraculously from his wheelchair and rescue his mother from being raped. This, by the way, constitutes the basic telenovela cocktail: a triple shot of sex, violence and sensationalism, followed by a stiff chaser of moral uplift.

In other words, pure melodrama. And why not? Back in the days before the Age of Irony descended across our land like a shroud, melodrama was the lifeblood of American popular culture -- novels, stage plays, penny dreadfuls, folk tunes and, later, movies and television. Today, sophisticates roll their eyes at melodrama unless it’s tarted up in the playful campiness of a John Waters flick, the knowing poignancy of a Pedro Almodovar film, or the hyper-real grit of “The Sopranos.” But un-self-conscious melodrama still rules in serialized telenovelas like “Entre el Amor y el Odio,” which climaxed in a gruesomely lurid, ludicrously over-the-top -- and compulsively watchable -- finale that played like a 17th century revenger’s tragedy in leather jackets and skintight jeans.

It wasn’t just the baroque subplots and operatic emotions that turned my wife and me into “Entre el Amor y el Odio” addicts. For roughly the past decade, the two of us have been studying Spanish. During that time we’ve found that one of the best ways to get a foreign tongue to stick in your ear, so to speak, is to listen to lots of radio and television. And few programs can match telenovelas in their ability to impart colorful colloquialisms while opening a window onto another culture.

Like their U.S. and European counterparts, Spanish-language soap operas convey the tensions and contradictions of the societies that produce them. In Latin America, they hold up a cracked mirror to countries that in many cases were in the grip of military dictatorships or one-party oligarchies until recently and are wrestling with issues of tradition versus change, familial duty versus individual freedom, and with evolving models of male and female behavior. Most telenovelas are curious hybrids, mixing the consumerist trappings of the post-NAFTA world with social attitudes that in some cases haven’t changed much since the 16th century. You can learn a lot if you watch closely.

You also can indulge in a first-rate guilty pleasure -- with the emphasis on “guilt.” Telenovelas hide the stern face of moral instruction behind a mask of titillation, simultaneously proselytizing and pandering. In the telenovela worldview, no bad deed goes unpunished, while redemption is only a fervent prayer away. In last year’s “Vale Todo,” for example, all manner of dark deeds from adultery to homicide were committed before the just deserts were finally doled out in the final episode. In Latin-American countries with large Roman Catholic populations, telenovelas let their audiences share vicariously in transgressive behavior before steering them back to the confessional. Typically, telenovela characters spend the first 55 minutes of an hourlong episode gleefully sinning away and the last five in misty-eyed pleas for divine absolution.

As connoisseurs of the genre know, many telenovelas follow a classic Cinderella story line: Woman of humble origins meets man of a higher social class. Woman and man fall in love. Woman temporarily loses man to a scheming bruja, frequently the man’s ex-wife, second wife or former flame. Endless complications ensue, and after many ups and downs our heroine prevails and wins her man back. The End.

And I do mean the end, because unlike those U.S. soaps that seem to have been around since the Truman administration, most telenovelas have life spans of only a few months. This keeps audiences from getting bored and lets a handful of star actors recycle themselves through endless variations on the same stock characters.

“Entre el Amor y el Odio,” which was adapted from the Cuban radio novel “Cadena de Odio” (Chain of Hate) and ran locally on KMEX-TV Channel 34, followed this scenario to a fare-thee-well. In the premier episode, Octavio, described in one Internet TV guide as “un hombre recio y viril” (translation: studly and sorta butch), returns to the pastel-postcard Mexican city of Guanajuato after the death of his enigmatic rich Uncle Fernando. There he encounters Ana Cristina, a beautiful young woman who’d become a kind of surrogate daughter to Uncle Fernando in his dotage. Octavio and Ana Cristina are instantly smitten. But before they can fall in love and live happily ever after, they must overcome the evil machinations of Marcial, the shifty-eyed administrator of the local shoe factory, and Octavio’s gold-digging ex-girlfriend, Frida.

As its title suggests, “Entre el Amor y el Odio” unspooled in an emotionally scorched-earth landscape of terminal hostility and distrust between men and women who were constantly teetering “between love and hate.” Over and over, the show pounded home the message that the only woman a man should trust unconditionally is his mother. Only la madre can be counted on to forgive her son’s mistakes and take him back in, even if he’s a no-good wife-beating bum.

This Hobbesian view of male-female relations taps into one of the oldest archetypes in Mexican culture, that of La Malinche, the real-life Nahua Indian woman who became the translator and later the lover of the conquistador Hernan Cortes. To this day, she’s reviled by her people as a traitor, the symbolic castrator of Mexican manhood, and her modern incarnation lives on in scores of Mexican telenovelas.

One of “Entre el Amor y el Odio’s” main attractions was the charismatic cast, which included chiseled Cuban leading man Cesar Evora as Octavio, Susana Gonzalez as the honey-blond goody-two-shoes Ana Cristina, and Sabine Moussier as the vampy bottle-blond Frida.

For my money, though, the program’s most entertaining character by far was Marcial, played by Mexican heartthrob Alberto Estrella with the perfect blend of menace and comic self-awareness. A shifty-eyed Iago to Octavio’s brooding Othello, Marcial was a pathological liar with a Napoleonic complex and a touch of J. Edgar Hoover: At one point he planted a microphone in a giant teddy bear so that he could spy on a comely widow, whose husband he’d previously murdered. He provided some much-needed black-comic relief from the show’s penchant for portentousness and moral heavy-handedness.

Marcial also was endowed with greater psychological depth than most of the other characters, especially the female ones. In many telenovelas, women tend to be divided between long-suffering wives and mothers, willing to sacrifice everything for their families, and back-stabbing harpies and predatory tramps with razor-sharp talons and clingy wardrobes.

In “Entre el Amor,” for example, the saintly Ana Cristina avoided premarital trysting (in spirit, if not in letter), while the name of the Virgin of Guadalupe was seldom far from her imploring lips. In one memorable episode, while very, very pregnant, our plucky heroine saved herself from raging floodwaters by commandeering a burro from a barnyard and riding bareback to the hospital. eforeQue milagro!

At the start of the series, Ana Cristina seemed like a complex modern Mexican woman: smart, sexy, independent and opinionated but also family-minded and deeply devout. But as the series marched on her character grew more passive and one-dimensional, making preachy pronouncements about the sanctity of motherhood, then bursting into hysterical screaming fits whenever the plot took another dire turn. It was as if the show’s creators had scripted their own anti-feminist backlash.

In contrast, Ana Cristina’s conniving rival, Frida, was nothing if not consistent. She smoked, drank and made whoopee with Marcial using whipped cream and melted chocolate as erotic props, if memory serves. Worse, she dishonored her mother and complained about her children, two cardinal sins in the telenovela catechism. Sure enough, the payback was like something out of the Book of Revelation: Frida lost Octavio to Ana Cristina, developed a leprosy-like skin condition that (yuck!) caused her flesh to peel off in raw chunks, and was first stabbed, then shoved off a precipice to her doom in the show’s grimly punitive finale.

A hero to the rescue

As it rushed toward its helter-skelter conclusion, “Entre el Amor” fell back on some bizarre cultural cliches. In one late episode, Ana Cristina was set upon by a machete-wielding mob of ignorant Indian peasants after meeting with an indigenous backwoods dude named Animus, a classic “noble savage.” Valiant but doomed, the swarthy, long-haired Animus developed an unrequited crush on porcelain-skinned Ana Cristina and ended up bleeding to death in her arms after rescuing her from an escaped circus lion (!). You don’t need to be Subcommander Marcos of the Zapatista rebels to find that scenario sociologically troubling. In general, indigenous characters in telenovelas are consigned to the types of roles once occupied by African Americans in U.S. pop culture: maids and stable boys, flunkies and sidekicks.

Yet for all its insistence that character is destiny, its belief that mutual hostility and distrust are the norm between men and women, “Entre el Amor y el Odio” did permit at least one of its main characters, Octavio, a modicum of change and growth. In the course of the series he was transformed from a swaggering, jealous bully to a loving father, a considerate husband, a compassionate boss, a true buen hombre -- a good guy. That transformation suggested how people can alter their behavior for the better even within a social structure that imposes rigid limits on them.

So what did my wife and I take away from “Entre el Amor y el Odio”? Some interesting insights, some good laughs and a bunch of useful slang terms and interjections, like eforeSueltame! (Let go of me!), eforeMe das asco! (You make me sick!) and the invaluable esquincle (little squirt). Also, a terrific toast to be offered when drinking the Mexican liquor mescal, a cousin of tequila: Para todo mal, mescal. eforePara todo bien, tambien! (For everything bad, mescal. And for everything good, the same!)

Now that it’s over, we’ve been casting about for a new telenovela, perhaps with less sturm und drang. We started tuning into “Nina ... Amada Mia” (“Precious One”), a relatively mild-mannered show about two feuding patriarchs and their young daughters. We saw no psychopaths, revenge killings, cat fights or saintly visitations. By the third episode we were struggling to stay awake.

Then we found “Velo de Novia” (The Bride’s Veil), yet another Univision offering, which looks more promising, if only because one of its stars, the ubiquitous Susana Gonzalez, has begun to feel practically like a family member. Maybe we should write to the producers of “Entre el Amor y el Odio” and plead with them to start working on a sequel. Because while there may be only a thin line between love and hate, we’ve discovered, there’s a wide gulf between an ordinary telenovela and one that you just can’t do without.