Lost in the City: Tree of Desire and Serafin

The Texas Pan American Series

LOST in the CITY

Tree of Desire
and
Serafín

Two novels by Ignacio Solares

Translated by Carolyn & John Brushwood

University of Texas Press
Austin

Copyright © 1998 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
First edition, 1998

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Solares, Ignacio, 1945–

   [Arbol del deseo. English]
   Lost in the city : two novels / by Ignacio Solares ; translated by Carolyn and John Brushwood.
            p.      cm. — (The Texas Pan American series)
   Contents: Tree of desire — Serafín.
   ISBN 978-0-292-77732-3

1. Solares, Ignacio, 1945–   —Translations into English.   I. Brushwood, Carolyn.   II. Brushwood, John Stubbs, 1920– .   III. Solares, Ignacio, 1945– Serafín. English.   IV. Title.   V. Series.
PQ7298.29.044A8613   1998
863—dc21

97-35001

ISBN 978-0-292-75356-3 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-78579-3 (individual e-book)

DOI 10.7560/777316

CONTENTS

Preface

Tree of Desire

Serafín

PREFACE

Ignacio Solares is a major figure in contemporary Mexican literature: the author of a dozen novels and several plays (some based on his novels), editor of the cultural supplement to the weekly magazine
Siempre
, and director of the Department of Literature at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). His awards and honors include two fellowships at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (1975, 1977), the Magda Donato Prize (1988), the Diana/Novedades International Prize (1991), the National Prize for Cultural Journalism (1993), membership on the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CNCA, since 1994), and a Guggenheim fellowship (1996).

Life in Mexico City—you might even say the life
of
Mexico City—is basic material in Solares' novels. They are stories of personal relationships sensitively detailed, with natural dialogue and the use of special effects that may be called “supernatural” (not the “magical realism” so often noted in Latin American fiction). In more recent novels, Solares adds a historical dimension by focusing on the experiences of some of Mexico's revolutionary leaders, the great figures that defined the political beginnings of modern Mexico. Intensely human, credible characters inhabit all of these narratives.

Solares was born in Ciudad Juárez in 1945, but he has never been a regional novelist. Rather, both his life and his interpretation of Mexico seem to extend outward from the capital city, always recognizing the centrality of that sprawling mass of humanity. His first novel,
Puerta del cielo
(1976), focuses on a young man of modest background who works as a bellboy in a Mexico City hotel. Outward relationships are interwoven with the protagonist's inward realities and, surprisingly, with visits from the Holy Virgin. This kind of supernatural effect became a hallmark of Solares' novels. He followed the first novel with a documentary narrative about
alcohol-induced visions (
Delirium tremens
, 1979). His next novel,
Anónimo
(1980), opens with the startling statement “It seems laughable, but that night I woke up being somebody else.” This novel proceeds to test the limits of reality in ways that may remind readers of the play and film
Heaven Can Wait
.

During the 1980s, Solares produced three notable novellas:
El árbol del deseo
(
Tree of Desire
),
Serafín
, and
La fórmula de la inmortalidad
. Each of the three stories features a juvenile protagonist who is quite real, and some kind of supernatural effect (such as telepathy). Late in the decade, Solares published a major novel about twentieth-century Mexico City,
Casas de encantamiento
(1987), that folds three time periods into each other, thereby projecting certain essential qualities of the place.

Near the end of the decade, Solares published his first historical/political novel,
Madero, el otro
(1989). This story deals with the conflict between idealism and political expediency in the leadership of President Madero. (Solares discovered that Madero communicated supernaturally with a deceased younger brother.) The success of this novel led to others featuring historical figures: one about Felipe Angeles (1991), another about an archetypal post-revolution president (
El gran elector
, 1993; presented on stage in 1991), and a third about the invasion of the United States by the forces of Pancho Villa (
Columbus
, 1996). Another well-known figure, Plutarco Elias Calles, is the protagonist of one of Solares' plays (
El jefe máximo
, 1991).

Published in 1994, Solares'
Nen, la inútil
returns to the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Nen, an Aztec girl, is raped by a young
conquistador
who could have had her as a willing lover. This incident is a metaphor for the convergence of the two cultures as perceived by Solares. Here, as in all his work, he seeks an understanding of the society in which he is an important actor.

.   .   .

In the two novellas translated here,
Tree of Desire
and
Serafín
, Solares demonstrates his particular adeptness at portraying the complex lives of young people—an unusual subject in contemporary Latin American fiction. Cristina, the ten-year-old protagonist of
Tree
of Desire
, runs away from a home that is outwardly normal but inwardly dysfunctional. She takes her four-year-old brother with her, and confronts some of the humbler and more troubling aspects of life in Mexico City. Or is it all a dream? If it is a dream, Cristina also dreams within that dream. Solares' narrative, deceptively simple on its surface, suggests that the terrifying city may be a metaphor of Cristina's life within the family, a nightmare that may not come to an end with the end of the story.

Serafín, in the novel that bears his name, is a boy (eleven or twelve years old) who lives in rural Mexico. His father has left the family for Mexico City, taking the village beauty with him. Serafín's mother sends the boy, by himself, to look for his father. Woven into this story of cruelty and compassion, of connections maintained and broken, is an account of a failed protest march against the injustices suffered by rural Mexicans. In portraying the homespun intellectual leader of this movement, Solares explores the social and economic background that has led to Serafín's plight.

Serafín's world intersects Cristina's, but does not parallel it. Her story moves from middle-class to lower-class within Mexico City; Serafín's story instead moves from a rural to an urban environment. The two novels, read together, offer a multidimensional view of contemporary life in Mexico.

TREE OF DESIRE

For Myrna

1

“Papá?”

She woke up frightened, the way she used to when Papá and Mamá had to take her to sleep with them because as soon as they put out the light, she saw faces in the window, heard the door to the street open, and death came to sit at the foot of the bed.

Only now it was Papá's shouting that awakened her.

“Papá?”

Maybe they didn't hear her. It seemed to her the shouts and the dry thud of steps came out of the depths of the dream, and again the nightmare's cobweb extended one of its threads into the reality and dimness of the room.

She rubbed her eyelids.

Sometimes rubbing her eyelids and letting her eyes get used to the faint light from the street filtering through the mesh curtains was enough for her to discover the world was calm, and turn quietly to sleep again, burying herself in the pillow's foam.

But not that night. On the contrary, it seemed every shout—really just one, that echoed into many—suddenly brought back images supposedly forgotten: a shout with the feverish face of a man climbing the stairs holding a bloody knife in his hand; a shout with the livid face of a condemned man looking at her through the window as if begging her to pray for him; a shout with the face of death now sitting in the chair next to her bed, smiling.

“Hi, Cristy, been a long time since we've seen each other.”

And Cristina screamed:

“Papá!”

The silence that followed her scream made her think, yes, it was
a nightmare that had lasted beyond her sleep. But a moment later Mamá entered, stepping as quietly as a cat, and came over to the bed—her eyes swollen, damp. She told her, please go back to sleep, nothing was happening, she and Papá were talking but now they were going to bed. Cristina didn't answer, but after looking at her carefully, pulled the covers over her head, and hardly heard her mother's last words, my precious little girl, sleep well; tomorrow you have to get up early to go to school, my darling. She heard her leave the bedroom, dragging her feet. Cristina lowered the covers. Mamá had left behind a large shadow, leaning over, her hands lifted up like wings. It did not go away, as though separated from her, the real image of Mamá.

She got up fearfully, as if breaking a serious rule, and went to open the door. Turning the handle slowly so they wouldn't hear it, she opened the door slightly and looked through the crack into the dining room at the scene she already knew well, that she had dreamed and imagined and now became real—Papá walking around and around the table, waving his hands. And Mamá seated with her elbows on the table, covering her eyes, sobbing. Papá was gradually raising the tone of his voice, his words bouncing all over the room, his yelling as much a part of her as her first memories, her first images of the world. And Mamá, daring to answer from time to time with a brief sentence, burning and sharp, like an arrow seeking his heart, which inflamed him even more.

It seemed to Cristina her parents were awakening a volcano that would end up destroying them. She put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyelids shut. Closing the door with a hard push, she ran back to bed, holding back a sob. She covered her head with the pillow, and the sob turned into convulsive, uncontrolled weeping that choked her and made the pillow stick to her face. Maybe Mamá had come back to ask her to calm down and maybe Papá, too, but Cristina heard only herself; her crying filled the world. She kept the pillow on her face as she was slowly falling asleep, and her weeping died down, becoming sighs that sounded as if she were breathless, imprisoned by her own dreams.

2

The next morning
she awoke with the feeling of having slept only an instant. The light of day seemed even sadder to her than the darkness. She got up, flannel gown down to her ankles, and looked fearfully for a moment over her shoulder at herself in the mirror on the closet door, as if she were an apparition, a small ghost. She opened the door slightly and looked through the crack, like the night before, but the dining room was empty. The chair where Mamá had sat was a little apart from the table, and the ashtray was full of cigarette butts. The windows to the street were open, and yet, although they weren't there, she had the feeling something was still going on, like the sound of her father's shouting or her mother's sobbing, the atmosphere of conflict, something indestructible. She went through the hall to her parents' bedroom, her bare feet stepping softly on the parquet floor. Any noise might reawaken the volcano. But their door was open, and their beds made up. Hadn't they slept here? Their absence startled her more than if she had found them still fighting. “Papá!” she cried, looking all around as if he might appear suddenly, from where she least expected, perhaps filtering through the wall. She went into the hall and again cried, “Papá!” Her little brother's bedroom was on her right. She opened the door carefully and looked in. The boy was sleeping peacefully in his crib, a comer of the blanket clutched in his hand near his mouth. Feeling more at ease, she went back to the dining room and looked for a note on the table, anything. But there was nothing. Only an empty cigarette pack, an ashtray, and a damp, crumpled Kleenex. She went to the kitchen, the roof garden, the bathroom. Exactly the same. She looked at the clock in the dining room. Seven-thirty. The time when Mamá started getting her ready for school. What had happened? What was she going to do? Stopping for a moment in front of the window in the dining room, she looked at a pale blue, peaceful sky and thought, there's no other way. But she was afraid. Or no, not afraid. A strange sensation, a mixture of fear and pleasure.