looking down
by Douglas Messerli
Nivaria Tejera The Ravine, translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2008)
For the seven-year-old girl in the Canary Island city of La Laguna, “the
war started today,” an indeterminate now which radically changes her life and
allows her no return to the normality of the past where the daily joys of
childhood were determined by the comings and goings of her beloved father. In
fact, the Spanish Civil War did begin
at the very center of her existence, in the Canary and Balearic Islands to
which General Francesco Franco and General Manuel Goded Llopis had been exiled.
On July 18, 1936 both quickly took control of these islands before moving on to
Spanish Morocco and back into Spain itself.
The young narrator, a figure based, in part, upon the author, is
suddenly forced to come face to face with Franco’s squads as they search her
family’s home; her father, a Republican supporter, has gone into hiding and is
soon after arrested and imprisoned in Faife, the local prison created from
warehouses formerly owned by a British trading company. Later exonerated of
criminal behavior, her father briefly returns home only to be arrested again
and ultimately placed in an unnamed prison where the family has no possibility
of discovering him. And so this middle class family of workers—an extended
family that includes uncles, aunts and grandparents—is suddenly reduced to
complete poverty, while they face the fact that they may never see their son,
lover, papa, breadwinner again.
Tejera’s tale, however, is not about the civil war nor the struggles of
the surrounding adults, but is centered firmly on the young girl trying to
suddenly understand not only events conspiring against her family but the
larger events of world war and human morality. Embarrassed by her sudden
poverty and daily assignment to beg for groceries from a nearby shopkeeper,
confused by the new passivity and depression of the adults around her, and
lonely, the girl is transformed from a normal child into a stumbling, bumbling
beast of contrary feelings whom her former friends now taunt and openly
despise. With a younger child to care for, her mother thrusts upon the girl
responsibilities that only exacerbate her difficulties. As she retreats to her
internal thoughts, so too does Tejera’s writing, ultimately turning what might
have been a somewhat painful but perhaps maudlin story of hardship into a
surreal portrayal of the effects of war not unlike Mohammed Dib’s great wartime
story of Algeria, Who Remembers the Sea.
For the most part Tejera succeeds in convincing us of the narrator’s
point of view, in part because of what she describes as “a dialogue between
past and present,” the voice of the little girl ambivalently fusing with the
later adult voice of the author herself.
Translator Carol Maier spends a great deal of her afterword accounting
for and justifying what may seem as inconsistencies between the voice; she
admits to attempting, at first, to correct in English for those moments of
adult knowledge that creep into the childhood narrative. For me, this seems
beside the point. There can never be a truly childhood voice in a fiction
written by an adult, simply because if one were miraculously to accomplish the
transformation into childhood it would cease being of interest to the adult.
Children can express wondrously beautiful and fanciful images of reality which
we can enjoy, but they cannot embrace the realities of that beauty and the meaning
of the images they have portrayed. Frankly, I prefer the kind of childhood
characters created by Ivy Compton-Burnett, children who speak more intelligent
and impeccably stylized sentences than their adult counterparts. Yet Tejera
succeeds in convincing us that the world she portrays is skewed toward a
child-like vision. And particularly in the final last visionary dreamscape of
the fiction, the reader can only be touched by that world evoked. Insistent
that she will go to search for her father in the ravine, the young narrator
imagines the following dialogue:
“Niñaniña, don’t you
suspect? It’s still the zinc rain and the sound from the
canyon still whistles
through the planted fields. Aren’t you going to make
little stripes, aren’t
you coming to the planet?” I’ll go, I will definitely go,
Mama. It’s at the bend
beside where I think, in the puppet pit, I’ll go on
the wounded train, in the
mirror. It’s winter now, the roads are riddled with
puddles and it’s nice to
travel through the dirty trees toward the sky. …I see
him already, first he’ll
lift up the dry hard bones that will be hitting me. I
already feel them hitting
me. The rain’s softened them and they don’t hurt.
In the fog, they seem
like insects, they’re wet and they stick to your body.
They do. Don’t you hear?
Someone’s calling me from further away. It’s
the custodian, his
garbage, the great wind beside the ravine covering,
covering the putrid place
of the peloton, where I liked to think Papa would
never lie dead.
I’ll go and the
great wind will come whirling from the bottom.
And I’ll be there
looking down.
For both her young narrator and the author herself, looking down with
humility—like Alice, looking into the Rabbit Hole—is the only possibility, for
there is no way to “look back.” The father will never again be found for that
little girl. By the time Tereja’s father was released in 1944 and the family
was able to return to Cuba, she was a fifteen-year-old adolescent, a young
woman inevitably aged by her childhood experiences. In 1954 Tejera moved to
Paris, serving the Cuban government for a period as a cultural attaché in Rome
before breaking political ties with Cuba in 1965. Today she lives in Paris,
writing poetry and fiction.
Orange, California, April 17, 2008
Rain
Taxi (Spring 2008).
No comments:
Post a Comment