The mountains were the fists. He was going to pry them open, one after the other, hoping that sooner or later, like an ant scurrying along the furrowed palm, he would find what he was after.
Writer and satirist Ambrose Bierce traveled to Mexico at age 71 to witness first-hand the rebellion of Pancho Villa. He sent back a couple of dispatches, and then he disappeared forever. To this day no one knows for sure what happened to him. Carlos Fuentes' novel The Old Gringo is an imagined rendition of Bierce's journey that fills in the gaps, from his crossing of the border at El Paso to his death at the hands of a tempestuous general in Villa's army.
The old gringo, as he's called--the novel doesn't name him until a couple pages from the end--comes to Mexico because he wants to die. Having suffered the deaths of his two sons, one by suicide, and estrangement from his daughter, having become disillusioned with his satire and the journalism he performed at the behest of William Randolph Hearst, the old gringo has finished living. He insinuates himself into the company of General Tomas Arroyo, who has taken over the hacienda where he was born and chased away the wealthy landowners that brutalized him and the other peasant workers. Volunteering his services, he finds not the death he is looking for, but an unsought honor: his lack of a fear of death makes him the bravest man on the battlefield, and his experiences in the Civil War (they call him "Indiana General") make him invaluable. He convinces Arroyo to let him stay by shooting a clean hole through a peso.
Fuentes writes: "[E]ach of us has a secret frontier within him, and that is the most difficult frontier to cross because each of us hopes to find himself alone there, but finds only that he is more than ever in the company of others." For the old gringo, crossing into Mexico is crossing that inner frontier, not into exile and death, but toward a new version of himself, one where he can make new associations, new relationships. The novel is structured in a triangle, linking the old gringo with Arroyo and Harriet Winslow, a white American schoolteacher hired by the fleeing Miranda family to teach their children, and who has been stranded in the occupied hacienda. Harriet is convinced that she must not forsake the duty of her position--she's been paid in advance--and tries to educate and civilize the peasant men and women of the hacienda.
The old gringo's attitude toward Harriet vacillates between the lustful and the paternal; sometimes he looks at her and Arroyo and sees them as a son and daughter. Harriet, for her part, sees the old gringo as a substitute for her father, who ran off to live with a woman in Cuba, though she tells everyone he died there, his body lost and his grave at Arlington empty. The relationships between the three are amorphous and shifting, symbolically incestuous; if they are the old gringo's children, how does one read Arroyo's demand that a not-unwilling Harriet sleep with him to save the old gringo's life? There is something in this that connects to the fervor of Villa's revolution, and the way that old relationships in Mexico have begun to crumble and must be remade; the Mexican Fuentes is most convincing, I thought, when describing the suffering of Arroyo's ragtag bunch, and their passionate hope that the brutal hacienda system is close to destruction. In this way they reconstitute themselves--much is made of the symbolism of the hacienda ballroom, the only room which Arroyo leaves standing, which is lined with mirrors where the men, who have only seen their reflections in rivers and cisterns, can see themselves for the first time.
The Old Gringo was written at a level of abstraction I found grating. In its most literal elements--the description of the landscape, of Bierce riding into battle, the ruined hacienda and the stranded railcar in which Arroyo makes his camp--Fuentes' writing is fantastic. But I found the emotional and mental states of the characters overwrought in a Romantic way, untethered from the immediacy of the action: why does the old gringo regard Harriet as his daughter? How and why is she so attached to him? These questions have answers in the symbology and narrative structure of the story--he's the father in the empty tomb, which is literally what he becomes in the book's closing turns--but not narrative ones, or ones that get crowded out by time shifts and rhetorical questions. I suspect this is a book that gets better the second or third time you read it; it's certainly rich, and powerfully unique. I think I might try it again one day--maybe when I'm 71 and looking for another frontier to cross.
No comments:
Post a Comment