The Shadow of the Wind: The Secret

A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a virtual basilica of shadows spiraling up under a high glass dome, its dimness pierced by shafts of light that stabbed from above. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked.

“Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.”

I could make out about a dozen human figures scattered among the library’s corridors and platforms. Some of them turned to greet me from afar, and I recognized the faces of various colleagues of my father’s, fellows of the secondhand-bookseller’s guild. To my ten-year-old eyes, they looked like a brotherhood of alchemists in furtive study. My father knelt next to me and, with his eyes fixed on mine, addressed me in the hushed voice he reserved for promises and secrets.

“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they have only us, Daniel. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?”

—Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the Wind: Cemetery of Forgotten Books

As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

—Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

2666: Ali Baba’s Cave

…when Archimboldi arrived at the house his first thought was that Mr. Bubis, busy as he seemed, would have no time or him. But Mr. Bubis, after making him wait ten minutes, ushered him into his office, an office Archimboldi would never forget, because with every shelf crammed full, books and manuscripts collected on the floor in stacks and towers, some so precarious that they in turn spilled over, a chaos that was a reflection of the world, rich and magnificent despite war and injustice, a library of glorious books that Archimboldi would have given anything to read, first editions of the works of great writers with handwritten dedications to Mr. Bubis, books of degenerate art that other publishing houses were once again issuing in Germany, books published in France and England, paperbacks from New York and Boston and San Francisco, as well as American magazines with mythical names that for an impecunious young writer were a treasure trove, the ultimate display of wealth, and turned Bubis’s office into something like Ali Baba’s cave.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

2666: The Forest of Minor Works

“…I was a writer, I was a writer, but my indolent, voracious brain gnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my vulture self, on day I understood that I might go so far as to publish excellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that weren’t unworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that I would never manage to create anything like a masterpiece. You may say that literature doesn’t consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and the little wildflowers. I was wrong. There’s actually no such thing as a minor work. I mean: the author of the minor work isn’t Mr. X or Mr. Y. Mr. X and Mr. Y do exist, there’s no question about that, and they struggle and toil and publish in newspapers and magazines and sometimes they even come out with a book that isn’t unworthy of the paper it’s printed on, but those books or articles, of you pay close attention, are not written by them.

“Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces. Who writes the minor work? A minor writer, or so it appears. The poor man’s wife can testify to that, she’s seen him sitting at the table, bent over the blank pages, restless in his chair, his pen racing over the paper. The evidence would seem to be incontrovertible. But what she’s seen is only the outside. The shell of literature. A semblance,” said the old man to Archimboldi and Archimboldi thought of Ansky. “The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece.

“Our good craftsman writes. He’s absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though he doesn't know it, is watching him. It really is he who’s writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary creation, she’s witnessing a session of hypnosis. There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that is wife, at a given moment, might recognize. He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

“Excuse the metaphors. Sometimes, in my excitement, I wax romantic. But listen. Every work that isn't a masterpiece is, in a sense, a part of a vast camouflage. You’ve been a soldier, I imagine, and you know what I mean. Every book that isn’t a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece. When I came to this realization, I gave up writing. Still, my mind didn’t stop working. In fact, it worked better when I wasn’t writing. I asked myself: why does a masterpiece need to be hidden? what strange forces wreath it in secrecy and mystery?

“By now I knew that it was pointless to write. Or that it was worth it only if one was prepared to write a masterpiece. Most writers are deluded or playing….

“Play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers. Also: the promise of future happiness. A forest that grows at a vertiginous rate, a forest no one can fence in, not even the academies, in fact, the academies make sure it flourishes unhindered, as do boosters and universities (breeding grounds for the shameless) and government institutions and patrons and cultural associations and declaimers of poetry—all aid the forest to grow and hide what must be hidden, all aid the forest to reproduce what must be reproduced, since the process is inevitable, though no one ever sees what exactly is being reproduced, what is being tamely mirrored back.

“Plagiarism, you say? Yes, plagiarism, in the sense that all minor works, all works from the pen of a minor writer, can be nothing but plagiarism of some masterpiece. the small difference is that here we’re talking about sanctioned plagiarism. Plagiarism as camouflage as some wood and canvas scenery as a charade that leads us, like as not, into the void.

…

“Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.”

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Pablo Neruda: Atacama

Atacama

Insufferable voice, disseminated
salt, substituted
ash, black bouquet
on whose extreme dewdrop the blind moon
rises, through grieving galleries of copper.
What matter, what hollow swan
plunges its naked agony into the sand
and hardens its slow liquid light?
What hard thunderbolt shatters its emerald
amid the indomitable stones until
the lost salt congeals?
Land, land
above the sea, above the air, above the gallop
of the horsewoman full of coral:
heaping granary where wheat
sleeps in the bells’ tremulous root:
O mother of the ocean!, maker
of blind jasper and golden silica:
upon your pure skin of bread, far from the forest,
nothing but your secret lines,
nothing but mankind’s days and nights,
but beside the thistle’s thirst, where
there’s a submerged and forgotten paper, a stone
marks the deep cradles of sword and cup,
indicates the calcium’s sleeping feet.

—Pablo Neruda (Jack Schmitt trans.)

Mano del Desierto / Hand of the Desert by Mario Irarrázabal.

2666: Fear and Semblances

What was Ivanov afraid of? Ansky wondered in his notebooks. Not of harm to his person, since as a longtime Bolshevik he’d had many brushes with arrest, prison, and deportation, and although he couldn’t be called a brave man, neither could it fairly be said that he was cowardly or spineless. Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts more citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, and integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers. Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

2666: The Diseased

Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion—so vague, so malleable, so warped—of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

2666: Take Any Book You Want

Halder, too, was the first to get Hans to read something other than Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. It wasn’t easy. First he asked whether he knew how to read. Hans Reiter said yes. Then he asked whether he’d ever read a good book. He stressed the word good. Hans Reiter said yes. He had a good book, he said. Halder asked what the book was. Hans Reiter told him it was Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Halder said that must be a reference book and he meant a good literary book. Hans Reiter said he didn’t know the difference between a good refints (reference) book and a good litchy (literary) book. Halder said the difference lay in beauty, in the beauty of the story and the beauty of the language in which the story was told. Immediately he began to cite examples. He talked about Goethe and Schiller, he talked about Hölderlin and Kleist, he raved about Novalis. He said he had read all these authors and each time he reread them he wept.

“Wept,” he said, “wept, do you understand, Hans?”

To which Hans Reiter replied that the only books he had seen Halder with were history books. Halder’s answer took him by surprise. Halder said:

“It’s because I don’t have a proper grasp of history and I need to brush up.”

“What for?” asked Hans Reiter.

“To fill a void.”

“Voids can’t be filled,” said Hans Reiter.

“Yes, they can,” said Halder, “with a little effort everything in this world can be filled. When I was your age,” said Halder, clearly exaggerating, “I read Goethe until I couldn’t read anymore (although Goethe, of course, is infinite), but anyway I read Goethe, Eichendorff, Hoffman, and I neglected my studies of history, which are also needed in order to hone both edges of the blade, so to speak.”

Then, as dusk fell and they listened to the crackling of the fire, they tried to decide which book Hans Reiter should read first and were unable to agree. When night had come, Halder finally told him to take any book he wanted and return it in a week. The young servant agreed that this was the best solution.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

2666: Reading is Believing

He was a professor at the medical school, and as a medical examiner he unfortunately never lacked for work, so he simply didn’t have time for other things, like business, for example. He was an atheist and it had been years since he’d read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two. Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn’t read any more. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

2666: Madonnas or Whores?

His few writer friends, those who came to visit him at the arts department, had no idea what was happening in Santa Teresa, although news of the dead women reached Mexico City at a steady rate, and Sergio imagined they probably didn’t care much what was happening in some distant corner of the country. His fellow reporters, even those on the police beat, were indifferent too. One night, after making love with a whore, as they lay smoking in bed, he asked here what she thought about all the kidnappings and all the bodies of women found in the desert, and she said she had only a vague idea what he was talking about. Then Sergio told her everything he knew about the dead women and described the trip he’d taken to Santa Teresa, and why he took it, because he needed the money, because he’d just gotten divorced, and then he talked about the killings, which he, as a newspaper reader, had followed, and about the press releases from a women’s organization whose initials, WSDP, he remembered, though he’d forgotten what they stood for, Women of Sonora for Democracy and the People?, and as he was talking the whore yawned, not because she wasn’t interested in what he was saying but because she was tired, which irritated Sergio and made him say, in exasperation, that in Santa Teresa they were killing whores, so why not show a little professional solidarity, to which the whore replied that he was wrong, in the story as he had told it the women dying were factory workers, not whores. Workers, workers, she said. And then Sergio apologized, and, as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head, he glimpsed an aspect of the situation that until now he’d overlooked.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

I’m ashamed to admit that unlike the whore, I did not catch Sergio’s mistake, even after many, many pages describing all the victims to date, who they were, where they worked, and what happened to them. They were indeed all workers, or students, completely “innocent.” And there is the diabolical twist of logic, the categorization of women as either Madonnas or whores, the former being essentially nonexistent, the latter being fair game for abuse, humiliation, and punishment for their supposed misdeeds. Is it possible that this logic is tucked away in the darkest corners of my mind, of all minds? It is something all too familiar to us here in British Columbia after the disappearance of dozens of women in Vancouver. For years the police ignored the missing person reports because the victims were prostitutes and drug addicts, and mostly native. They said the women were shiftless and probably just left town. Their friends and family knew different, but they were also ignored. Some of the street people even suspected who it was, but the police didn’t want to know. It took street protests to finally shame the police into investigating and arresting the guy. And it’s only today, 8 years after the killer was arrested, that the government has initiated for an inquiry into the police investigation (or non-investigation). So it’s not just Mexico. It’s everywhere, this notion that women are guilty and guilty women are disposable. It has to stop.

---

It is a sad confirmation of the lack of concern about murdered women that Wikipedia has only a few sentences on the Ciudad Juarez murders, with no information past 2005. Does anyone care?

Our Lady of the Lost and Found: Big Stories

…When I began to write this book, I thought it would be a simple story one that would result in a slender pretty volume with gold lettering and a Renaissance painting of Mary and Jesus on the cover. But soon after I started reading about her, I realized that I could not write the story of Mary’s visit to me, fictionalized or not, while I ignored her whole history, the history of the last two thousand years.

Each story of Mary that I have discovered could (and sometimes does) constitute a whole book in itself. For each one of the stories I’ve attempted to retell here there are hundreds more that I haven’t got room for. As the story of Mary that I was trying to tell grew ever more complex, I could not decide whether trying to get it all straight was more like untangling a gigantic ball of wool or like being caught in a labyrinth. Some stories are too small to be novels but others, I soon found, might just be too big. I could only hope Italo Calvino was right when he said that, while overly ambitious projects may be objectionable in many other fields, in literature they are not.

—Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found

Our Lady of the Lost and Found: Truth and Fiction

What I now know (or think I know) about Mary, I learned in two ways: from the stories she told me while she was here and from the reading I have done since. For those of us with a bookish bent, reading a reflexive response to everything. This is how we deal with the world and anything new that comes our way. We have always known that there is a book for every occasion and every obsession. When in doubt, we are always looking things up.

Not being especially fond of library books myself (mostly because you have to give them back when you’re done but also because their spines are often broken, their pages sticky and dog-eared, marked up with other people’s jottings and grease spots), I would rather buy than borrow. Even a casual examination of my overcrowded shelves would quickly reveal the various areas of interest that have gripped me over the years. Add to these now a small shelf of books about Mary:

Mary Through the Centuries. Mary, Queen of Heaven. A Litany of Mary. A Dictionary of Mary. Miracles of Mary. Visions of Mary. Meetings with Mary. Portrait of Mary. In Search of Mary. The Secret of Mary. Encountering Mary. Mary’s Message to the World. Mary’s Journal. Healing Words from Mary. Desperately Seeking Mary….

My original intention was to write a fictionalized version of the story of Mary’s visit to me, keeping my promise, of course, to publish it under a pseudonym and call it a novel. I knew this would work to the book’s advantage because, ironically, calling it fiction would make it easier to believe. There are some truths that cannot be made credible in any other way….

—Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found

2666: You have to read books

Then he dictated recipes for Endive and Shrimp Salad and Broccoli Salad and then he said that man couldn’t live on healthy food alone. You have to read books, he said. Not watch so much TV. The experts say TV doesn’t hurt the eyes. I’m not so sure. It won’t do your eyes any good, and cell phones are still a mystery. Maybe they cause cancer, as some scientists say. I’m not saying they do or they don’t, but there you have it. What I’m saying is you have to read books. The preacher knows I’m telling you the truth. Read books by black writers. But don’t stop there. This is my real contribution tonight. Reading is never a waste of time. I read in jail. That’s where I started to read. I read a lot. I went through books like they were barbecue. In prison they turn the lights out early You get in bed and hear sounds. Footsteps. People yelling. as if instead of being in California, the prison was inside the planet Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. You feel cold and hot at the same time and that’s a clear sign you’re lonely or sick. You try to think about other things, sure, nice things, but sometimes you just can’t do it. Sometimes a guard at the nearest desk turns on a lamp and light from that lamp shines through the bars of your cell. This happened to me any number of times. The light from a lamp set in the wrong place, or from the fluorescent bulbs in the corridor above or the next corridor over. Then I would pick up my book and hold it in the light and get to reading It wasn’t easy because the letters and the paragraphs seemed frenzied or spooked in that unpredictable, underground world. But I read and read anyway, sometimes so fast that even I was surprised, and sometimes very slowly, as if each sentence or word were something good for my whole body not just my brain And I could read like that for hours, not caring whether I was tired and not dwelling on the inarguable fact that I was in prison because I had stood up for my brothers, most of whom couldn’t care less whether I rotted or not. I knew I was doing something useful. That was all that counted. I was doing something useful as the guards marched back and forth or greeted each other at the change of shift with friendly words that sounded like obscenities to my ear and that, thinking about it now, might actually have been obscene. I was doing something useful. Something useful no matter how you look at it. Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach. And you, who are so kind, now you must be asking: what did you read, Barry? I read everything. But I especially remember a certain book I read at one of the most desperate moments of my life and it brought me peace again. What book do I mean? What book do I mean? Well, it was a book called An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire, and I promise you that is one useful book, or at least it was of great use to me.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

2666: Major and Minor Works

One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

2666: Curious Wind

At that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighbourhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano’s shirts and pants and slipping in to his daughter’s underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

 

“Caramelo” by Sandra Cisneros

Caramelo, or Puro Cuento
Sandra Cisneros
Vintage
2003
464 pp.
9780679742586

Caramelo is the story of a Celaya Reyes, a Mexican-American girl trying to make sense of the web of stories around her. National stories, family stories and her own memories are woven together with a few “healthy lies” knotted in to keep the stories going. The title refers to the famed caramelo rebozo, a particularly fine long striped silk shawl with elaborately knotted ends. Celaya’s “awful” grandmother comes from a family of weavers, and her unfinished rebozo becomes a metaphor for both connectedness and the unfinished business of life.

The book starts with childhood memories of Mexico, which was quite a trip down memory lane for me too. There is something about the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of one’s early life that leaves a profound impression, and Cisneros taps into this powerfully. But these memories are, of course, just stories. As she writes at the end of the book, she is homesick for a country that doesn’t exist, that never existed. You can’t go home again.

Celaya’s family memories are amusingly woven into the histories of Mexico and the US, including military service in both countries and unlikely brushes with fame (her father spends a night in jail with Señor Wences, for example).  As Celaya grows up her tone and voice acquire teenage frustration and vocabulary, and in due course she follows her ancestors down the rocky road of love.

This book was especially enjoyable because I listened to the audio version narrated by the author herself. The book is semi-autobiographical so Cisneros reads it with authority, and great deal of character. Hearing these stories somehow seems more appropriate than reading them.

It’s hard for me to be objective about this book—so many parts of it intersect with my own story—but the glowing reviews on Amazon and in print suggest to me that anyone would enjoy this book.

Caramelo: Biographies

I’ve pushed two chairs next to the space heater in the dining room, and this is where I’m trying to read a book on Cleopatra. I’ve got no privacy to hear my own thoughts in this stupid house, but I can hear everyone else’s. Voices echo because the house is still only half furnished, even though Father promised to make us all new furniture as soon as we got here, but that was back in August.

My Cleopatra book is a fat one, which is all I ask from a book these days. A cheap ticket out of here. Biographies are best, the thicker the better. Joan of Arc. Jean Harlow. Marie Antoinette. Their lives like the white crosses on the side of the road. Watch out! Don’t go there! You’ll be sorry!

—Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo

Caramelo: Everybody Needs A Lot

I walk over to the basílica. The streets turned into trashy aisles of glow-in-the-dark Guadalupes, Juan Diego paperweights, Blessed Virgin pins, scapulars, bumper stickers, key chains, plastic pyramids. the old cathedral collapsing under its own weight, the air ruined, filthy, corncobs rotting in the curb, the neighbourhood pocked, overpopulated, and boiling in its own stew of juices, corner men hissing psst, psst at me, flies resting on the custard gelatins rubbing their furry forelegs together like I-can’t-wait.

The old church is closed. They’ve built an ugly new building with a moving escalator in front of Juan Diego’s tilma. Poor Virgen de Guadalupe. The most wretched of the earth, and me among them, wearing my grandmother’s rebozo knotted on my head like a pirate, like someone from the cast of Hair.

I didn’t expect this. I mean the faith. I mixed up the Pope with this, with all this, this light, this energy, this love. The religion part can go out the window. But I didn’t realize about the strength and power of la fe. What a goof I’ve been!

A wisp of a woman sweeping herself feverishly with a candle. A mother still in her apron blessing herself and blessing her daughters. A ragged viejita who walked here on her knees. Grown men crying, machos with their lips mumbling prayers, people with so much need. Help me, help me!

Everybody needs a lot. The whole world needs a lot. Everyone, the woman frying lunch putting warm coins in your hand. The market sellers asking,—What else? The taxi drivers racing to make the light. The baby purring on a mother’s fat shoulder. Welders, firemen, grandmothers, bank tellers, shoeshine boys, and diplomats. Everybody, every single one needs a lot. The planet swings on its axis, a drunk trying to do a pirouette. Me, me, me! Every fist with an empty glass in the air. The earth throbbing like a field ready to burst into dandelions.

I look up, and la Virgen looks down at me, and, honest to God, this sounds like a lie, but it’s true. The universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven. Each and every person connected to me, and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo. Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone. Each person who comes into my life affecting the pattern, and me affecting theirs.

—Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo

Caramelo: Por Un Amor

Pouring out from the windows, "Por Un Amor" from the hi-fi, the version from Lola Beltran, that queen of Mexican Country, with tears in the throat and a group of mariachis cooing, "But don't cry, Lolita!" and Lola replying, "I'm not crying; it's just that I remember..."

—Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo

I love a book with a soundtrack. Here’s the song:

Note the pizzicato when she sings about crying drops of blood from her heart. Love it.

“Focus” by Arthur Miller

Focus
Arthur Miller
Penguin 
2001 (1945)
240 pp.
9780142000427

Lawrence Newman was an anti-Semite. It was his job to be an anti-Semite. As personnel manager for a prominent New York corporation near the end of the Second World War, it was his duty to make sure that no Jews or other undesirables were hired by the company. He prided himself on his ability to pinpoint a person’s ethnicity with a mere glance.

When his discriminating eyes began to fail him in his 40s, and it was both his downfall and the making of him. He resisted getting glasses for the simple reason that they made him look Jewish, something completely intolerable for him. But after noticing his difficulties at work, his boss forced him to get glasses, and then promptly demoted him to a back office where he would not be seen. The corporation had an image to keep up, after all.

As much as Newman revelled in the status he got from working for “The Corporation,” his natural dignity would not accept the demotion, so he quit. But before he left, the long-time bachelor had a bewildering encounter with an attractive young applicant. He thought she was a Jewess, but he fell in love with her anyway. She thought he was a Jew, and resented his desire. They met again later, cleared up the confusion, and eventually married, but the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman he had seen as a Jew, troubled and ultimately changed him.

He was also changed by his only Jewish neighbour, Finkelstein, who ran the corner candy store and news stand. His neighbours, even more anti-Semitic than Mr. Newman, were organizing a gang to force the Finkelsteins out of the neighbourhood, and after Newman got his glasses and married a Jewish-looking girl, he was put on their list too. In one pivotal conversation, Finkelstein, thinking Newman is part of the group trying to drive him out, wondered:

You look at me and you don’t see me. You see something else. What do you see? That’s what I don’t understand…. What do you see that makes you so mad when you look at me?

Newman had no answer for that because he was beginning to realize that prejudices have no reason. He also began to see that the white supremacists in his midst were ignorant hoodlums, not least because they took him and his wife for Jews. He begins to question both judging by appearances and not judging by appearances. Because Finkelstein was a Jew, Newman had never before seen that he was neat, clean, honest, self-respecting—all the things a Jew was never supposed to be. He had been seeing what wasn’t there and not seeing what was there.

In the end, both he and Finkelstein are attacked across the street from each other, and in his indignant defensive fury he finally resolves his inner conflict between not wanting to be perceived as a Jew but also not wanting to participate in anti-Semitism any more. Determined not to be driven away and refusing his wife’s entreaties to simply go to the organization and prove that he’s not a Jew, he goes to the police station to make a report. When the policeman takes him for a Jew along with Finkelstein, Newman does not correct him, and he feels a great weight lifted from his shoulders.

That is the essence of Focus, a short but powerful book about this man’s journey from one side of prejudice to the other, and the freedom that comes from standing with the oppressed. In the beginning of the book, Newman is a portrait of neurosis, desperate to prove his solid middle-class credentials—job, home, good grooming, good manners, and a perfectly maintained car. It is hard to imagine him ever waking up from his nervous stupor, but by the end of the story he is a new man, standing back to back with a Jew against the mob, and proud to finally be fighting the narrowness that kept him afraid his whole life. Alas his wife does not undergo a similar transformation—she is not concerned with truth, she simply wants to be “at the right end of the broom” when the neighbourhood is “cleaned up.” It seems clear that, as much as he treasures his lately-won wife, when Newman sides with Finkelstein against his neighbours he is breaking with her too.

It’s a moving book, and the device of the glasses is the perfect metaphor for Newman’s “corrected” vision. You can trace Newman’s progress through his glasses: when he wears them and when he takes them off, when they get damaged by ruffians, and when they get jammed into the flesh of his nose, almost becoming a permanent part of him. The message of the book is unmistakable and challenges all of us, for we all harbour prejudices of some kind, but it does not come across as a polemic. There is no sense of the author in the book. It is a tense and gripping story in which it is never certain whether the protagonist will meet injustice with defiance or fear. I greatly enjoyed it and now look forward to seeing the film version.

UPDATE: Lest we think Focus is a historical piece, the same thing is happening right now in Malmö, Sweden, and other European cities, where Muslim immigrants are driving Jews, including Holocaust survivors, out of their communities. We are still in need of Lawrence Newmans to stand back to back with Jews and fight the hatred. So far Europeans are just letting it happen. Have we learned nothing?