Pedro Paramo -- Memories and Ghosts of the Past

Anyone whose parents or grandparents fled Fascism or Communism is familiar with the syndrome: there are three countries in their past. There is the country in the history books, dry and political, the details of its past told and re-told dispassionately in dusty books. Historians take great pride, after all, in not judging, but in understanding, the suffering that those with power can cause. There is the country of our parents' memories, of faded photographs and loving conversations about those long-ago days so often bathed in warmth and golden light. And there is the country we have invented in our minds. Never having been to the place of our parents' and grandparents' memories, we create our own Neverland, a place where our ancestors were born and grew up in perfect love and harmony, where nothing ever went wrong, where things were always better, the scenery more beautiful, the furniture more comfortable, the homes warmer, the food tasted better, the music more harmonious . . .

Juan Preciado goes on a journey to his mother's hometown after her death, hoping to reclaim his birthright. He is, after all, the only legitimate son and heir of town chieftain Pedro Paramo. Instead of finding a place bathed in warmth and golden light, filled with love and harmony, Preciado finds himself in Comala, a place which is quite literally hotter than hell, filled with the soulless ghosts of the dead, a town which is dead, barren, deliberately left to die years before by Pedro Paramo himself.

Author Juan Rulfo uses a unique narrative technique in this novel; narration shifts from the perspective of Juan Preciado to a third person omniscient point of view (telling the story of Pedro Paramo). This allows the author to shift the story in time, from the present of Preciado's ghost-filled Comala to the past of Paramo's Comala, a town filled with violence and injustice against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution (which Paramo's men join with a cynicism which would be awe-inspiring, were it not for the "true" Revolutionaries's own utter lack of understanding of their own cause). What, exactly, is the birthright that Dolores Preciado has asked her son to claim? Murder, rape, injustice, and theft? Barrenness and death? Unrepentant sin? Unrequited love? For just as Pedro Paramo never loved Dolores Preciado, and shunned her, Susana San Juan never loved Pedro Paramo, and, in her own delirium, never took this man, who was never refused by any woman, into her bed.

It is an understatement to say that Pedro Paramo is not a good person. He is selfish and cruel, living only for his own wants and needs, caring not at all for others, unable even to shed a tear when his son, Miguel, dies. He carries a torch for Susana San Juan for years, has her father killed in order to possess her, worries endlessly about her in her madness, yet does little for her, watching her writhe in her suffering. After she dies, he allows Comala to lie fallow in revenge, caring nothing even for the land he has lied, cheated, and stolen to possess. And Paramo himself dries out, becoming a shell of his former self, staring out of empty eyes at barren land, barely noticing, let alone caring about, his own senseless murder.

This is the birthright, the legacy of Comala, a town that has taken the wrong path at every turn, a town whose people have always been lost in their own decisions and delusions, and who, long since dead and buried, seek only to be heard from their graves, as they tell their stories endlessly, senselessly, their voices, moans, and murmurs, sometimes barely distinguishable, sometimes more real than last night's dream.

La ultima niebla -- the mists of sex and spirituality

At first glance, Maria Luisa Bombal's La Ultima Niebla is a sad tale of a loveless, upper-class marriage, doomed not so much by lack of communication as it is by the inherent differences in the way that men and women communicate, view the world, and use language itself. Daniel and the narrator seem to inhabit parallel universes: they see each other, speak to each other, even touch each other on occasion, but they do not, cannot connect. Indeed, from the moment Daniel brings his new bride (a cousin) home (having lost his first wife, the great love of his life, after only three months of marriage), it is obvious that he has said nothing to his household staff about the apparently momentous decision to marry this woman he has known his entire life. And from the moment she enters her new home, this new wife, saved from the "oddness" of spinsterhood by her cousin, falls into silence, into a fog of sleep.

After drinking much wine over dinner one autumnal evening, the wife is awakened one foggy night in town and tells her husband that she is "going out". Through the mists, she meets a mysterious stranger in the town's plaza, and follows him to his home, where the shutters are closed. Upstairs, she is seduced, and finally experiences the ecstasies of the flesh she has longed for. The stranger smells of vegetable and fruit. The entire experience -- the wine, the mists, the sex, the association with vegetable and fruit -- has an eerie, mystical quality to it. It is as if the wife is experiencing, on some level, a Dionysian mystery rite.

The affair leads the wife to a sort of self-awakening. She takes a naked swim in the local stream, letting her usually pinned up hair loose, and stares at her own breasts for the first time. For a woman in her circumstances, this must have been a bit like those women in the 1970s who had "empowerment" parties to put mirrors between their legs and take a shy, blushing peek. And where her mystery lover smelled of vegetable, her surroundings smell of water. As does Andres, the young caretaker who comes upon her. Interestingly, she does not hide her nudity from him, especially because she thinks Andres, like her, sees her lover's car in the distance, and sees her lover smile at her. This belief that the young Andres has seen the lover smile at her becomes important to her, since Daniel insists she never left the room that long-ago, misty night.

It should be noted that the only time the wife is able to return to her lover's home is years later, again, in an altered state, when she has been given some sort of sedative in the hospital where her sister-in-law Regina is recovering from her own attempted suicide. That the lover was really more a concoction of the wife's own repressed desires for sexual (and spiritual) satisfaction in a life and society that had reduced her to habit and form is fairly clear at this point, but it is not altogether important. Perhaps Daniel had chosen this wife, among all his cousins, because she was the most malleable, the one he could most turn into a copy of his late, great love. This empty vessel seeks desperately to be filled, and in her despair, what takes hold is not entirely of this world.

The wife (well, really, both the wife and Regina) in this story is haunted by love, by a husband who cannot reach her, by a lover who proves ephemeral (and if her husband barely notices her, how must she feel when she realizes that her fantasy lover was blind all along -- even in fantasy or half-madness, this woman could not entirely conceive of a man who really saw her and wanted her for who she was). And we, the readers, are haunted by these women; by the wife who seemingly lives a nebulous fantasy of an affair, and by Regina, who almost destroys herself by living the reality of a love affair gone wrong.

In the end, the narrator implies that her life with her husband Daniel continues as before. While Regina lies ruined on the outside, crying desperately for the lover she has lost, our narrator is an empty shell, who will grow old prettily at the side of a husband she suddenly barely recognizes. She has learned the art of smiling emptily at all the appropriate moments; her life a triumph of form over function, with no one ever knowing her substance.

Tu que me lees, estas seguro de entender mi lenguaje?

Jorge Luis Borges's collection of short stories, Ficciones, is an incredible example of the author's imagination and originality, and shows just how far Latin American literature had come by the mid-twentieth century. Tackling such complex issues as the juxtaposition of chaos and order (Tlon Uqbar) or the order within chaos (La biblioteca de babel), as well as man's desire to reach for the divine in the same story, or the desire of the divine (or perhaps a gnostic demiurge) to create man (Las ruinas circulares). In the world of Tlon, of course, the author becomes a sort of god-like figure, creating, over generations, a fictional world that takes on a life of its own (in the end, our own world, in its desire for some sense of order at almost any cost, may be becoming the fictional Tlon). And, of course, there is the recurring motif of chance (azar) (La loteria de Babilonia, La muerte y la brujula).

Underlying it all is the very real sense that the process of writing is ongoing, never ending, and never the same thing twice (see, e.g., Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote), and that the reader herself is, if not a full on co-author, at least a partial collaborator in the process of authorship. For Borges takes us on a magical mystery tour and confronts us directly with this question: you who are reading me: are you sure you understand my language?

Which begs the obvious question: do two people ever speak the same language? Can author and reader, who are separated by time, space, language, and culture, ever truly experience the same story? Isn't this the whole point of Pierre Menard? The words are exactly the same, but it is an entirely different novel, informed by an entirely different time, culture, era, and experiences.

Another issue Borges takes on here, quite memorably, is the problem of time. Time, to Borges, is not chronological, but a series of many possible events happening simultaneously. Sometimes we are present, sometimes not. This is most clearly explained in El jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan. Time is also elusive, relative, and entirely personal, as we see in El milagro secreto, where two minutes are sufficient for an author and playwright to complete his final play. He is, secretly, granted his last wish -- the god he feared had abandoned him hears his prayer and gives him a year to finish his magnum opus, if only in the playwright's mind.

Borges's short stories allowed him to tackle many difficult themes head-on, and to do so with a sense of humor and self-deprecation (injecting himself directly and indirectly -- the "blind man" that makes the more than occasional appearance is reminiscent of Hitchcock's cameo's in his own films) that keep the reader entertained and, above all else, thinking of topics, themes, and subjects that are not easy, but that deserve consideration long after we have finished reading this collection. He was clearly well-read in a wide variety of subjects, from philosophy to theology, and feels secure enough in his knowledge and his audience to speak about these topics without condescending to us. There is a reason Borges has become so beloved throughout Latin America and beyond -- the accessibility of first impression of his short stories give way to a second (ad probably third) reading for many, many readers, who find themselves fascinated by a world filled with possibility, a world in which time is fluid, creation is ongoing, and our world may be just one dream of one half-drunk demiurge, on the verge of awakening.

Los de abajo -- Welcome to the New World (same as the old one)

Los de abajo strikes me as a remakable work, not only for its almost brutal honesty, but because it is written from the point of view and in the voice of its various characters. This short novel about the Mexican Revolution and the men and women caught up more or less unwillingly within it begins without much explanation in the middle of a violent episode that destroys the modest home of Demetrio Macias, an indigenous peasant who flees for the hills. Like the hero of the Chanson de Roland, Demetrio blows a simple horn to rally his men.

Author Mariano Azuela uses phonetic spelling to bring to life the language spoken by the characters: the local dialect of Demetrio, Anastacio, and Pancracio contrasts sharply with the standard Castilian of medical student cum journalist cum revolutionary Luis Cervantes. One begins to hear the characters' voices as they "speak." It is a powerful technique that serves to underscore the critical social differences between the characters, differences that divided Mexican society. Note, for example, Cervantes's (could there be a more perfect name for this young, "idealistic" criollo ?) professed belief that he understood and empathized with the tears of the peasants. When confronted with the actual tears of Camila, who was upset that Demetrio was manhandling her, Cervantes feels nothing at all. In the end, it is Cervantes who kidnaps Camila under false pretenses, and white slavers her to Demetrio.

None of these characters are what they appear to be: Demetrio, while clearly a talented military man, is no revolutionary. As he tells his story, he was simply running away from a crime he had committed in his hometown of Limon (leaving his wife and infant son to fend for themselves). Cervantes, for all his talk of revolution and ideals, is more than happy to act as kingmaker and pimp to Demetrio, to rob from the men when he recognizes the value of the jewels they are looting, and, in the end, to abandon the Revolution to become a doctor in Texas (while suggesting that Venancio send him all his money, so that they might open an "authentic" Mexican restaurant while Venancio joins the Salvation Army!). Guero Margarito is little more than a sadist. La Pintada looks after her own interests at all costs. Camila seems to be the only character who remains true to herself, who, in spite of being kidnapped and raped, uses what influence she has to care for those who are needier than herself. And for her, there is no future. Not that there is much of a future for any of these characters, who are all doomed as the domesticated animals they casually kill from beginning (Demetrio's dog) to end (the cockfight). Once the fight to rid themselves of the federales is done, the fight goes on, for the sake of fighting itself. And this, of course, leads nowhere.

Indeed, if there is a sad theme to Los de abajo, it is the ultimate futility of it all. For all of the idealism Cervantes tries to instill in Demetrio's men, the idea is not to get rid of the system of caciques, but to make Demetrio the next cacique. After hearing all the of the horror stories of kidnap and rape of the village daughters by the federales, Demetrio wants to take an unwillling Camila with him (and many of his men would also like to take a young girl along for company). Demetrio and Cervantes seem to think this would be fine as long as they do it in victory, and not like the federales. How quickly Cervantes has gained a taste for power, has lost his empathy for the downtrodden. Camila is eventually taken, raped, even killed, and no one sheds so much as a tear. Cervantes uses the Revolution to enrich himself and then leaves Mexico altogether, his notions of social class entirely unaltered. And Mexico itself is left to die, starving, despairing, fighting to the death for ideals that were neither fully articulated nor even entirely understood.