I lay back and watched the silent beams of
light radiate in the colorful dust motes I had stirred up. I loved to watch the
sun beams of each new morning enter the room. They made me feel fresh and clean
and new. Each morning I seemed to awaken with new experiences and dreams
strangely mixed into me. (p. 28)
I was still
a young man when I first read Rudolfo Anaya’s classic novel, Bless Me, Última. It struck me as a
lyrical novel about a young man’s coming of age, reflecting as it did a world
view that was familiar to me. Not so much because I had grown up in the llanos,
or even in an open space, because I didn’t. It was familiar because it
described the point of view not only of a child who felt besieged by pressures
to conform and to live up to the roles that were being imposed upon him. This
is perhaps a universal constant, but it also featured a cultural setting that
appealed to me with the vistas of time and contrast and struggle. The llano had
its own identity, and it seduced the reader.
This is one
of the reasons why it is possible to state that this landscape constitutes a
character in this novel. It doesn’t have to do only with repeated references to
the river having a “presence” that is felt by the most sensitive characters,
Antonio and Última, but also in the voice of the winds that roar from time to
time, or the dust devils that make a beeline for people and objects if they are
not warded off with a sign of the cross, or even the beautiful evocation of an
ecosystem that is somehow alive, that responds to the sensitive viewer. It is a
romantic landscape in the sense that it is personified, and it plays a role in
the narrative, if not always one that can be readily ascertained. It is angry,
it is peaceful, it is forgiving, it is merciless, but somehow, it responds and
as such plays an almost comforting role when other deities seem all too
distant.
What struck
me as well were the parallels with Harper Lee’s classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. In that work, we
similarly have the evocation of an idyllic upbringing, as told through the
viewpoint of a small child, the girl named Scout. She also lives in a society
that is unfortunately beset by conflict, in which certain groups are
marginalized, and what we have is a novel in which described the wish to encompass
and in some manner incorporate those groups into a greater whole, a family that
is tied together by a shared faith. By this, I don’t mean to suggest that we
have a novel about justice, even though we do have a character who is a lawyer
and who serves as the abiding symbol of comfort and strength for the young
children. No, it is about patriarchy, which isn’t the same as justice.
The unusual
element that we have seem to have in Anaya’s novel is the assertion of an
alternative world view that is also encompassing, that serves as the basis for
the creation of a sense of community, but that resides in the values of
matriarchy. I am referring, of course, to the figure of La Grande, known as
Última, an old curandera who joins
the household and who is deferred to by all, but also acknowledge as a
powerful, almost independent agent. She is the one who is supposedly invested
with magical powers, who has received extensive training by others in a secret
lore, and who is able to assert almost magical restorative powers. She is also
the midwife, and when need be, the exorcist who succeeds where priests fail.
Última is
an old figure who, while she seems not to have borne any children of her own,
is nonetheless treated as a type of material figure by most in this community,
but not by all. She is also an arbiter in the disputes, one who hears pleas and
who intercedes but only when she is able to impress upon all who besiege her
for help that there are consequences. She would almost be tantamount to a
Virgen de Guadalupe figure (virginal because she is not known to have had a
husband or children, and she is present at the birth of others, and because she
heals and intercedes), were it not for the fact that she also appears to judge.
Such has been the case with the family of Tenorio Tremendina, the malevolent
bar owner of a neighboring town who has his own brood of “witches”.
The
upbringing of the young child, at least during this period in which he lives
under the tutiledge of Ultima, is idyllic. We have the sense of a special
relationship, a rapport that is facilitated by the fact that she asserts the
possibility of a third path for Antonio. While his mother beseeches him to
become a priest and to uphold the values of the sedentary farmers who form the
bulk of her clan, the Lunas (who are people of the earth), his father impresses
upon him the paternal heritage of the Márez clan, those llaneros who were born
to wander, who live under the open sky, herding sheep and cattle and living
according to their own code of independence that is predicated on space and
dreams. His vision is forever fixed on the next horizon, in this case,
California.
The
dichotomy between the Lunas and the Márez
form the basis for the struggle, but what is also apparent is the fact
that there is also, in a much less sentimental and formulaic way, a deep desire
to understand the elements that determine how power and authority is wielded.
This is a society that also manifests the presence of disturbing acts of
violence, and we can see this on a personal, emotional level, but also on a
grander sociological scale as well as on a more abstract, ideological
dimension.
The outside
world, for one thing, is a place of danger. Is this perspective common to the
world view of all children? It is the place of wars such as the one which
profoundly disturbed Lupito, a young man who had fought in the army and who was
to be overcome by a feeling of paranoia and fear which leads him to commit a
murder. We also have the arrival of the outsiders, the Tejanos (large scale cattle
ranchers) who fenced the plains and who reduced the scope of the llanero
imagination, leading them to live in a state of perpetual lament over what has
been lost. (Such is the lament of Antonio’s father). There is also the
reference to past community clashes, to that, for example, between the first
settlers and the original Indian inhabitants, the Comanches, several of whom
were murdered in the past and who ghosts have not been fully exorcised. (What
are ghost except for the manifestation of unresolved conflicts?). And, of
course, we have the struggle between those who believe and those who don’t,
between the upholders of institutional power (the Church, for example, with
their representative, Father Byrnes), and the earnest young orphan Florence,
who can’t believe in a god or God because he can’t fathom how such a system can
abrogate to itself a sense of intellectual cohesion (justice) when it leads to
so much injustice.
This
struggle obsesses Antonio, who is deeply steeped not only a folk Catholicism practiced
by Mexicans and their descendants (witness the allusion to folk cures, to the
faith put in scapulars as objects of power, or in the sign of a cross to ward
off the collision with a dust devil), but also with institutionalized Catholic
dogma that is predicated on the idea of sacrifice, of the spilling of innocent
blood, as if this were necessary to garner the attention of an impersonal and
distant God. He sees plenty of innocent blood spilled, from that of Lupito, the
veteran who is shot by the river after having murdered the town sheriff (who
can be guilty when they know not what they do, as was the case with this
victim?) to Narciso, the friend of the family who is ambushed by Tenorio and
shot at close range, dying next to the boy, to the demise of Florence, the
ultimate innocent, a boy who couldn’t manage to find a filiation with any of
these patriarchal codes and who dies just before he was to be introduced to the
cult of the Golden Carp. He dies in a state of innocence, rendered all the more
tragic for Antonio because it takes the form of a drowning. Would that he had
had a chance to go to the river and commune with this other god.
This cult
of the Golden Carp is a beautiful invention. It may or may not be based on an
original mythology or system of belief that is native to the llanos, but it is
one that seems somehow familiar. In this case it can’t but recall all the
associations we might have with the idea of a hidden deity, or a leader who
fishes for men, and who shows them the way (the Fisher King). This deity is also a savior, but one who is
not distant, one who has not turned his or her back on his or her people. When
the original inhabitants of this valley are punished for their transgressions,
and are threatened with extinction (which strikes me as a common predicament in
all such religious beliefs that posit order as a form of patriarchy, where the
patriarch reserves the right to repress the reprimand willfully and in severe
draconian fashion), the deity intercedes, and these humans are converted into
fish, with the deity joining them as their protector. What more beautiful
notion of union than that in which the deity joins and lives with and among
you? It certainly strikes Antonio as a more appealing notion of union than that
of Catholic dogma, in which God is ingested in a wafer, but even so, these
reflections awaken deep fears in him, precisely because they go against the
grain of the beliefs that have been instilled in him.
The cult is
also beautiful because it is a select and more harmonious society. The other
society, conformed as it is of boisterous individuals and mercilessly tease and
taunt each other (with names such as Bones and Horse and the Vitamin Kid) is
one that is, of course, familiar to us, because they represent the childhood
companions that we had. But the friends in the cult are much more pensive, and
it strikes me, they are like the philosophers of old, but without the urge to
meddle, impugn, castigate or in any way subvert. They are like hermits, having
withdrawn not to a dusty cave deep in the desert, but instead to the bands of a
shady rivers, awaiting the eternal return of the Carp during certain periods of
the year. Of course, I can’t imagine children sustaining such sophisticated
dialogues as the ones that are in evidence in this novel, but that is why I see
this novel as more of a fable, and definitely not an exercise in realism.
Ultima is
the figure who guides Antonio as well during this journey of self-discovery.
She is the one who offers him comfort during his nightmares, which are
recurring episodes and seem to revolve around the sense of foreboding,
abandonment and destruction. These dreams assume the contours of apocalyptic
unveilings (which is precisely the meaning of the apocalyptic vision), and
perhaps they reflect the view not only of those groups and individuals who
inhabit the margins, the outsiders who have little power and are thus exposed
to abuse, but also the recognition that he needs to impose some kind of order,
to find a system that will allow him to navigate this terrain. The old woman
is, in this sense, still a midwife, but not to Antonio’s mother, but to Antonio
who becomes his own person, who is living, perhaps, through the anxieties of
separation from his parents, from his all-enveloping mother and his wistful and
nostalgic father. She is helping him to navigate this transition.
The
elements that seem most jarring to me are both structural as well as stylistic.
For the structural, we have, one again, the pitting of one family against the
other. I am not referring only to the dynamic between the Lunas and the Márez,
nor the opposition between the cult of the Golden Carp and the God of Catholic
dogma, or between the prodigal sons (his older brothers) and his father, but in
that evident between the extended family of the Márez clan and their analogue,
the Tremendinas. In a certain way this division is much too clear cut, and
doesn’t capture the full scope of subtlety that might be afforded by clans
that, after all, share much in common. After all, if magic and brujería is
associated with Última, it is also associated as well with Tenorio and his
daughters, and we don’t have a more nuanced scope of exploration for what magic
might mean in this context. With regards to stylistics, I would have to signal
out not only the sometimes plodding nature of the narrative, one which is meant
to heighten tension and build a sense of anticipation that is too prolonged to
be adequately sustained (why is it taking so long for that final confrontation
with Tenorio?), but also with the language that seems all too lugubrious and
artificial, with dialogue that can be characterized by the tone of false
solemnity. Dialogue is never spontaneous, never broken, at least when it
involves an adult character. It has all the gravity and sententiousness of a salon
conversation, in which worldly reflections are attributed to a boy who is,
after all, only supposed to be six or seven years old.
The
“evilness” of the Tremendina clan is exaggerated in a way which seems almost
incongruous. I can visualize the evil old man wearing black, with a sneering
visage and an at times whining, at other times menacing tone, cackling as he
rides his stallion and tries to trample Antonio. I can visualize him, that is,
as a cartoon character, not as a nuanced individual. I can similarly envisage
his band of friends, bullies who are sullied by alcoholism and a deep streak of
meanness mixed with cowardice, the mob that makes the trek to the Márez
household in an attempt to extract Última and lynch her for supposedly cursing
and killing the eldest daughter of Tenorio. And in what was a brief and
chilling aside, an observation by Antonio, we actually have cause to give
credence to his assertion, because Última is no stranger to fights, and we are
told that she had a group of three figurines in her room that seem to, maybe,
represent the three daughters, all subjected to a form of torture. She molds
them out of clay right before his eyes, after all, and in what we may term an
example of sympathetic or homeopathic magic (which James Frazer in his work The
Golden Bough defines as the type of magic that assumes a connection between two
objects based on similarity):
Then she sat by the candlelight and sang as she
worked the wet clay. She broke it in three pieces, and she worked each one carefully. For a long time
she sat and molded the clay. When she was through I saw that she had molded
three dolls. They were lifelike, but I did not recognize the likeness of the
clay dolls as anyone I knew. They she took the warm melted wax from the candle
and covered the clay dolls with it so that they took on the color of flesh.
When they had cooled she dress the three dolls with scraps of cloth which she
took from her black bag. (p. 101)
We have the
folk element again, evident in the way in which folk customs fill the cracks of
institutional belief, perhaps supplanting it because they lend themselves to a
more compelling narrative, that of justice that is otherwise denied, or needs
that are unfulfilled through traditional mechanisms.
What is
magic, after all? Why are Ultima and Tenorio so powerful, even if they inhabit
two opposing sides of the same coin? I have to admit, the idea of magic and its
many manifestations, in dolls that are struck by pins, in prolonged illnesses
that resist diagnosis and are somehow cast through use of a man’s freshly cut
hair (invoking as this does the law of contiguity, in Fraser’s terminology), in
raining stones that fall on roofs but not on other areas of a house, and
boiling water that scalds cooks unexpectedly because it jumps out of the pot,
as well as owls and coyotes that in assume symbolic value in this struggle
between human agents but also world views, is certainly fascinating. As one
approximation, perhaps we can say that it represents an appeal to hidden
narrative urge, one that functions like a salve or sealant, a covering or
lubricant, and it strikes us with the force of a beautiful metaphor. (What is a
metaphor but another approximation between two different things, one made
possible by an underlying similarity or quality?)
That is
precisely where I find so much of the power of the novel, in the way that magic
exerts such a hold on Antonio’s imagination, a magic that works by means of
songs and chants and prayers, even if the precise meaning of the individual
words escapes capture. It is the image of Narciso, the gentle giant who was
widowed early in his marriage and who since then has transferred this need to
fertilize to the ground, to the plants, working a magic by the light of the
moon, as described by Cico: “It is then that he gathers the seeds and plants.
He dances as he plants, and he sings. He scatters the seeds by moonlight, and
they fall and grow—The garden is like Narciso, it is drunk” (p. 109). It is a
way to reap more than you sow, to gather together pleasure and pain and to
transform them in ways that aren’t entirely controlled, for rivers can also
overflow their embankments. It is the force of the psyche, is it not, a way to
express or release those hidden energies, the imputation perhaps of a narrative
essence to our actions to create a convincing and necessary story?
The child
becomes a man in an impossibly short period of time. But this is a parable, and
as such, subject to compressed time. During this formative period of one or two
years a young boy was nurtured by powerful and sympathetic people, by those who
had, as explained by Antonio’s father, the “magic” of understanding, something
which “means having a sympathy for people” (p. 248), by an gentle giant by the
name of a flower (Narciso), by a wise young hermit by the name of Cico, by an
earnest Christlike child who didn’t believe in Christ and whose name was
Florence, by those silent uncles who tilled the soil in Las Pasturas, and by
that old curandera, the midwife who
perhaps personified the power of a landscape and a time and tradition that
helped this young boy understand where he came from. She resonates still with
him, as an adult looking back on these years.
“Ultima and I continued to search for plant and
roots in the hills. I felt more attached to Ultima than to my own mother.
Ultima told me the stories and legends of my ancestors. From her I learned the
glory and the tragedy of the history of my people, and I came to understand how
that history stirred in my blood.” (p. 123)
OGRomero © 2013
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