Book Fever
By Marcia Loy
October 3, 2008 San Miguel de Allende
Book Fever visits the Caribbean

The freedom and happiness experienced in reading are addictive, and the strength of the tradition lies in that experience, which ultimately turns all innovations to its own ends. —Gabriel Zaid

As a child growing up in Miami, I was always fascinated by the islands in the Caribbean. My sixth-grade class took a trip to Cuba, but my dad was sick and I didn’t go. When I grew up I visited Jamaica, the Bahamas and my favorite, Puerto Rico. This week, Book Fever explores two books about the Cuban experience. One takes place in Havana a few years before Castro came to power. The other is the story of a young woman who moves to New York and becomes a cleaning woman, also pre-Castro. But we begin our Caribbean travels in Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic.

I was moved to tears of joy. The sisters Mirabal have not died after all, have they? They continue to live as long as writers like Julia Alvarez are brave enough to tell their story. All Latinas are indebted to her for resisting the amnesia that has been our history. —Sandra Cisneros

In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez, 1994. It doesn’t give anything away to tell you this is the story of three young women who were outspoken in their criticism of the dictator of their country and that their Jeep “accidentally” rolled off a cliff in 1960. Their birth dates and deaths are listed between the title page and the table of contents.

The oldest was 35 years old, the youngest 25. Their story is beautifully told by Alvarez. It’s even more poignant when you see their pictures on the internet. They were all young and beautiful. One sister survived. The three who died were known as the Butterflies.

Excerpt: From the beginning, I was so good. Mamá said she’d forget I was there. I slept through the night, entertaining myself if I woke up and no one was around. Within the year, Dedé was born, and then a year later Minerva came along, three babies in diapers! The little house was packed tight as a box with things that break. Papá hadn’t finished the new bedroom yet. So Mamá put me and Dedé in a little cot in the hallway. One morning, she found me changing Dedé’s wet diaper, but what was funny was that I hadn’t wanted to disturb Mamá for a clean one, so I had taken off mine to put on my baby sister.

“You’d give anything away, your clothes, your food, your toys. Word got around, and while I was out, the country people would send their kids over to ask you for a cup of rice or a jar of cooking oil. You had no sense of holding on to things.”

Oscar Hijuelos gives his heroine of the “upper lower class” all the dignity of an empress. Formal and intimate at once, his tone evokes emotional revelations simply by the respect he shows his subjects. In capturing a life, Hijuelos manages to convey the ultimate kindness by cloaking everything he writes in dignity. It is hard not to love Lydia España. —Boston Sunday Globe

Empress of the Splendid Season, Oscar Hijuelos, 1999. What a good book! Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hijuelos brings us Cuban-born Lydia and Raul and their American-born children living in New York City. In Cuba Lydia lived the upper-class life of the daughter of the mayor of a town, with a big house, beautiful clothes and servants.

Her father forced her to leave when she was 22. He didn’t approve of her behavior. She went to New York and married. Now, at 32, she works as a cleaning woman in other people’s apartments. We learn much about the Españas and the people she works for.

First paragraph: In 1957 when her beloved husband, Raul, had fallen ill, Lydia España went to work, cleaning the apartments of New Yorkers much better off than herself. She took up that occupation because Raul, with jobs in two restaurants, had waited on so many tables, for so many hours, and had snuck so many drinks from the bar and smoked so many cigarettes, that his taut heart had nearly burst, half killing him one night at the age of forty-one. (Lydia imagined the heart muscles all twisted like a much used table rag.) She went to work because, aside from their own children, her husband had a second little family to look after in Cuba (the devil!) and because, among other reasons involving the vicissitudes of making money, they were suddenly “poor.”

A work of absolute mastery. . . . A beautiful text that places [Montero’s] work among the best of contemporary novels [and] confirms . . . the outstanding importance of this novelist in the contemporary narrative of Latin America. —Luis de la Peña, El Pais

Dancing to “Almendra,” Mayra Montero, 2005. This is the story of Joaquín Porrata, a young newspaper reporter; Yolanda, a one-armed former magician’s assistant in the circus; Roderico, a gay former dancer with leprosy who produces cabaret shows; and lots of other intriguing characters. Joaquín’s big interest is the American gangsters who frequent Havana. He’s sent to New York to look into the big meeting of organized crime bosses in Apalachin.

First paragraphs: On the same day Unberto Anastasia was killed in New York, a hippopotamus escaped from the zoo in Havana. I can explain the connection. No one else, only me, and the individual who looked after the lions. His name was Juan Bulgado, but he preferred to be called Johnny: Johnny Angel or Johnny Lamb, depending on his mood. In addition to feeding the animals, he was in charge of the slaughter pen, that foul-smelling corner where they killed the beasts that were fed to the carnivores. A long chain of blood. That’s what the zoo is. And very often, life.

Juan Bulgado isn’t dead, he lives in an old-age home, he’s forgotten that his nom de guerre is Johnny, and the nuns who take care of him call him Frank, later I’ll tell you why. When I met him, in October of ’57, he was close to forty. I think he turned forty in the middle of the crisis. But I was very young, I’d just gone through the calamity of my birthday party, number twenty-two, celebrated in a way that was very like the twenty-one that preceded it: Mamá on her cloud, a little dizzy because of the Marsala All’uovo, the only liquor she was in the habit of drinking back then; Papá, with his arm around my older brother, an engineer like him, both of them smoking their H. Upmann torpedoes; and my sister, seventeen and uncomfortable in her lace-trimmed dress. The three of us were very different from one another, with a father who was similar to my older brother, and a mother who wasn’t similar to anyone: ungainly, tense, a smoker, with a voice like hysterical glass and hair that was totally white. 

For the rest of October, Book Fever will look at classic American mystery writers, including James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Happy reading!

Green growing things: Cultivated and wild 
By Kimberly Kinser

Author’s Sala Reading
Jeannie Ralston & Walter Meagher
Fri, Oct 10, 5–7pm
St. Paul’s Church
Cardo 6
50 pesos

Join the Authors’ Sala special series for an oxygenated evening of plants, wild and cultivated. Jeannie Ralston reads from her recently published memoir, The Unlikely Lavender Queen: A Memoir of Unexpected Blossoming, and Walter Meagher reads from his tribute to San Miguel’s natural preserve: Wild and Wonderful: Nature up Close in the Botanical Garden “El Charco del Ingenio.”

The Unlikely Lavender Queen is a love story. Fall in love with a Texan and chances are you will someday live in Texas. Move to the middle of nowhere and see what grows. For Ralston, what grew were acres of lavender and two sons. The organic vegetable garden came later.

There is a well-worn belief that people come to San Miguel to reinvent themselves. It might just be true that reinvention is a human trait and it can happen anywhere, anytime, if the humans in question are curious enough to wonder where they are being led instead of always having to run the show.

Ralston ended up in rural Texas and after a couple of years of trying to maintain her connections to glamour and her urban life, she just gave up and gave in and got dirt under her fingernails. Her husband, a professional photographer, started it. He planted the 2,000 lavender seedlings with help from friends and neighbors. He got the crop growing nicely with Ralston’s backseat support. When he was called away on assignment at the height of the first harvest, Ralston put her nudging resentments aside and jumped in. Now she considers the timing a blessing. Left on her own in the magical purple fields, she finally could make peace with her new calling in the world. The Lavender Queen was born.

Wild and Wonderful is a love story also. Meagher has intimate knowledge of El Charco. As a field botanist, he has collected 535 vascular plant samples and created a Listado which is published and on file at the national herbarium in Pátzcuaro. El Charco Director Cesar Arias now has scientific proof of the amazing diversity under his care.

The Listado is available for view by politicians and funders.

Wild and Wonderful is not just about plants. It is a tribute to the plant, animal and mineral diversity of El Charco. And it is not a book about Mexico; it is a book of biological ideas. For those with experience in biology, some of the ideas will be familiar, like natural selection and symbiosis. Other ideas may surprise us, like nighttime respiration in cacti. For those who did not study biology, the language is clear and personal, opening a window into the treasure that we call El Charco.

Wild and Wonderful is not just a book of words. Meagher partnered with photographer Wayne Colony to offer readers a visual smorgasbord. Meagher and his wife, Wendy, have had enough experience publishing, and felt strongly enough about the value of each of the more than 300 color plates, to publish the work themselves. 

And finally Wild and Wonderful has attracted the likes of Harvard biologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author E. O. Wilson, who writes in the foreword of the book, “What is pleasing and important…is that [this book] conveys both a sense of place and environmental wholeness. The beautiful photographs and background biology take us on a tour of Meaghers’s place…. It is a glimpse of rightness in the world.”

So there will be much said about the rightness of the world in our Author’s Sala series. Please join us.