The Stories That Forged Me
In which Teófilo speaks about the literature that influenced him in school.
(Friends, please note this post is out of sequence. I should’ve written it and posted it a couple of iterations ago. If and when I decide to publish this memoir for a larger audience, I’ll have this post located in its rightful place).
Despite my preference for science and math I didn’t leave la Academia a total illiterate bum. The fact is we were assigned a lot of literature to read and learn to critique. With the exception of the first work, this is a list of works of literature we studied at la Academia in no particular order. I’ll include a brief commentary on each. Most likely there were more, but these are the ones I remember well because of their impact upon me. Good readings will always impact the reader, if and when the reader reads them well. That has been my experience always.
They say that education is what remains after you forget everything else. These I’m moving from memory to screen. They did stick. I got some “educashon”.
The Works
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
The school didn’t assign this classic Jules Verne’s work. I chose to read it by myself in a Spanish edition. I was amazed how Verne, writing in the 19th century, foresaw things that only came true in the 20th. Verne also presented us with a villain and antihero with depth in Captain Nemo. He was no early James Bond villain. Captain Nemo was a genius, in fact, his knowledge made him depressed and ultimately, nihilistic and suicidal. In this, Verne, through Nemo, predated suicidal nihilists that also would come of age in the 1900’s. Then again, I didn’t care back them about these subtexts. I only cared about Verne’s prophetic, technological acumen - and to me Captain Nemo was just a bad man gone crazy. You can watch Disney’s movie version of the book, here.
Three Stories by Abelardo Díaz Alfaro
Puerto Rican author Abelardo Díaz Alfaro presented me a turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico that I could still recognize in the late 1970’s. He captured an Island in transition by the onslaught of American culture in the first few decades after the U.S. invaded and annexed Puerto Rico in 1898. He captured the fashions, the voices, and the worldviews of the Puerto Rican jíbaro, the hillbilly countryman that still defines us but more as a memory now than as a living entity.
Three stories stood out to me: Santa Cló Va a la Cuchilla and Peyo Mercé Enseña Inglés. In the first story the writer reminisces about the arrival of Santa Claus to the Puerto Rican Christmas season up in the mountains, and the ensuing clash of worldviews and expectations. In the second story, an elementary school teacher attempts to teach English to the students of his single-room schoolhouse, with hilarious yet self-defeating results.
El Josco was a poignant allegory with a simple plot: the owner of a Puerto Rican-born stud bull named “El Josco” (El HOHS-coh) had it replaced by an imported Mainland American bull “of higher quality.” The owner meant to turn El Josco into a plowshare-puller, an ox’s job. El Josco would have nothing to do with the scheme, triggering a fight against and winning over its American counterpart. Unimpressed, the owner still made El Josco a plowshare-puller but El Josco resisted with violence. El Josco then went into a mad depression and killed itself. You can read the full story here.
La Llamarada
La Llamarada (jah-mah-RAH-dah), in English, The Blaze, is in my opinion the best novel by Puerto Rican author Enrique Laguerre. Set in a pseudonymous 1930’s sugarcane processing central where the unskilled laborers lived miserable lives but managers and owners lived well at the laborers’ expense. Enter the protagonist, a young agronomist named Juan Antonio Borrás, who was ready to prove his worth. Circumstances conspired against him. A love ( a flame?); an old, retired, saintly socialist activist; and the misery he saw around him set Juan’s conscience ablaze. He married his sweetheart, quit his job with lots of drama, and then headed back home to take charge of his once estranged and then deceased father’s coffee plantation in the mountains, away from the heat and the blazes of the sugarcane field and of his own conscience. The novel is a masterpiece. There’s little else I can add. I’ve read other novels by Laguerre but this one I judge to be the best. You can watch a made-for-tv movie version here.
La Carreta
La Carreta, in English, The Ox Cart, was a play written by Puerto Rican playwright René Marqués. It’s divided into three acts. Each act takes place in a different geographic location: the countryside outside San Juan; a slum in San Juan; and The Bronx, NY. The play follows a Puerto Rican family moving from one place to the next in search of a better life, a quest that proved very elusive for them. The play is so-named because the family used an ox cart to transport their meager belongings the two times they moved within Puerto Rico. The cart becomes a symbol of their transiency. Marqués captured in his play the vocabulary and modalities of the Puerto Rican jíbaro, including many considered profanities when I was growing up. Puerto Rican actress Lucy Boscana defined the role, and actresses Gladys Rodríguez and Johanna Rosary followed in Boscana’s footsteps. The play has been interpreted numerous times. You can watch one such rendition here.
Afro Puerto Rican Poetry
Luis Palés Matos is by far the first and foremost writer of Afro Puerto Rican poetry and a founder of an Antillean-wide literary movement that fused African and Spanish voices. He wrote Calabó y Bambú among so many others. Fortunato Vizcarrondo Is another Afro Puerto Rican poet and his ¿Y tu agüela, aonde ejtá? is a classic in the genre. The late Juan Boria’s interpretation of this poem is unparalleled. You can listen to him here. It is the African blood in us that give us our music beat, a beat powering our own heartbeats and adding salsa into our very souls.
La Tuerca
La Tuerca (“The Nut,” as in the one paired with a bolt, not the one that grows in trees, and then you toast, salt, and eat.) is one poem out of many by Jacobo Morales. Don Jacobo is a Puerto Rican author, playwright, poet, social critic, director, actor, comedian, singer, musician, producer, and entrepreneur. As a poet, Don Jacobo channeled the Beat Generation for the rest of us on the Island. His poetry makes one laugh, cry and always, think. La Tuerca tells the story of a young inventor preoccupied with upgrading a nut. The inventor puts an all-out effort on this new nut as life passed him by, laughed at by friends and neighbors. In the end, his nut redesign was akin to a Swiss Army knife - integrated circuit capable of undreamt of applications across the sciences and engineering. Suddenly, his friends and frenemies claimed they’d been loyal to the inventor all along. The inventor doesn’t care about his false friends for he’d embarked upon a new redesign and upgrade — to the bolt. Junior High and High Schoolers at la Academia performed it at the direction of Mr. Félix Borrero, our Choir Director. I sat away, watched from afar, and enjoyed their performance sad that I didn’t volunteer for it, and that no one invited me to.
Doña Bárbara
Written in 1929, Doña Bárbara is the grand mother of every novela de la tierra or “novel of the soil” in Latin America, and the ancestress of novels like La Llamarada. It was the first long novel in Spanish I’d ever read, well before I read La Llamarada. The plot is somewhat similar to Laguerre’s novel: college boy graduates from university and then returns to his ancestral countryside hacienda where he encounters a fine mess; tries to fix it and does, leaving some collateral damage and a broken heart in the process. Written by Venezuelan author Rómulo Gallegos, the novel captured the voices and the livelihood of Venezuelan peasants in the mid 20th century. Gallegos became the first freely-elected President of Venezuela in 1948, only to be overthrown by a military coup a few months later. Thieves desecrated his tomb in 2016 and stole his remains, thereby demonstrating that having being a good writer doesn’t pay even in death.
Don Quijote
The Mother of All Spanish fiction, Las Aventuras del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha by the Castilian writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is the flagship of Spanish literature’s golden age. Written in the 16th century, Don Quijote (dohn keeh-HOH-teh) set the standard for spoken and written Spanish, much like Shakespeare did for modern English. The general plot is simple: Don Alonso Quijano, a poor member of the lesser nobility (an hidalgo) goes mad from reading knightly romances to the point he believed himself to be one of their number. He mounts his elderly horse, Rocinante, and accompanied by the town’s drunkard, Sancho Panza as his esquire, off they go knight-errandring. Don Quijote and Sancho Panza also became the first comedic pair in modern literature in the process. But Don Quijote’s demented view of the world was much more beautiful than the surrounding dismal reality in Spanish La Mancha region. He is best remembered for having charged windmills with his lance, believing them to be giants. The giants won and he lost. Toward the end of the quest, Sancho was buying into Don Quijote’s delusions while Don Quijote was becoming more rational, inverting their earlier roles, when Sancho was the most rational of the two. In the end, Don Quijote’s relatives forced Don Quijote’s surrender through a ruse, and he died in his manor, having reverted to Don Alonso Quijano a final time, and the he died with Sancho at his side. Yet, this is just the top of a giant iceberg of secondary plots and subplots, other characters, that my short review can’t do justice to. As an aside, Puerto Rico’s foremost distilled rum, “Don Q,” is named after Cervantes’ knight-hero. Thank you Mrs. Raquel Figueroa (RIP), the Spanish Language teacher who forced us to read the novel and taught us to enjoy it in the process.
Novelas Ejemplares
By the same author who brought you Don Quijote, these “Exemplary Novels” were in reality short stories that ended with some sort of moral lesson, hence the “exemplary” on their titles. Though I don’t remember any in particular, I do remember that I wondered if attaining the end moral lesson made the characters’ travails worthwhile. Was attaining moral knowledge worth so much effort or was it better to remain innocent and ignorant as before the quest? I sense that was Cervantes’ subtext. He was poking understated fun at moralistic stories of his time.
El Final de Norma
Of this novel by the Spanish Pedro Antonio de Alarcón the plot I barely remember. Norma is a tragic opera by the Italian Vicenzo Bellini. Something happened at the end of a show the main characters attended, something bad. Or maybe it almost happened. I do remember someone named Rúrico de Cadiz as a character in the novel. I must re-read it here.
La Amortajada
This novel by Chilean María Luisa Bombal is chilling (no pun intended) because its main character is dead and on display at her wake, hence its title, The Embalmed One. The character’s “soul,” one might say, is deeply embedded into her corpse. From there she can perceive everyone coming to see her laying in state in her open casket. She remembers each one, and shares a memory of each visitor with the reader in the first person. The memories knit together her story, and it is a sad story. You can read it here.
La Invención de Morel
Morel’s Invention is Argentinian Adolfo Bioy Casares’ answer to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. In fact, Bioy invented the concepts of hologram and of holographic projection before these words were coined later in the 20th century. This is the plot: the main character finds himself on an island where weird things pop in and out of existence, like people vacationing, evening parties and in particular, a mysterious beach-going woman with whom he falls in love. However, none of these people acknowledge him. He’s like a ghost to them and to the woman he’s becoming infatuated with. He then discovers that all the people he’s interacting with are projections in the air — they, not he, are the ghosts. We would call today Morel’s invention a holographic machine that immortalized all those it filmed. The price of holographic immortality, however, was the actual death of all those it filmed. They remained “alive” in their repetitive holographic existence forever. Our protagonist fixed Morel’s invention which was falling into disrepair, and then filmed himself in scenes and poses suggestive of loving intimacy with the beloved holographic woman he’d never met in real life, thereby assuring himself of a holographic immortality together with her. Then he died. All very creepy. In fact, the protagonist narrates the story in the first person as he laid dying. You can read La Invención de Morel, here.
La Misa Campesina Nicaragüense and La Misa Jíbara
This is a series of songs Nicaraguan Carlos Mejía Godoy write and compose to inculturate the Catholic Mass into Nicaraguan themes, idioms, and environment. I came in touch with it because our Choir Director, Mr. Félix Borrero, was intent into adapting elements from this work and from another “peasant Mass” version by the Italian Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Tony Croatto. Then, all of a sudden, the production was halted without explanation. The fact of its existence was consigned to an Orwellian memory hole. It never happened, never took place, no explanation. I suppose that school authorities squashed the production because the Nicaraguan Mass was suffused with a Sandinista political worldview of Marxist class warfare and such — which it is. Croatto’s version is free from such defects. You can listen to the Nicaraguan Campesino Mass, here. You can listen to Tony Croatto’s Misa Jíbara, here. The differences are stark: Mejía’s work makes one go on to man a street barricade alongside one’s comrades. Croatto’s songs leads one into prayer, thanksgiving, peaceful solidarity, an appreciation of natural beauty, and family. Judge for yourself.
The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables
Now, switching to some stories in English that impacted me, these first two by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I have but a foggy recollection of both their plots. In The Scarlet Letter, a woman is accused and convicted of adultery by a mixed civil and religious court in Calvinist New England. As a consequence she must wear a scarlet letter “A” for “adulteress” on top of her clothes, presumably so that can others can recognize and point and sneer at her. I remember a forbidden love story and a more or less happy resolution. In The House of the Seven Gables I remember a Gothic novel set in an old house with seven gables, a young couple in love frustrated by ancient enmities and lost inheritances, and paranormal visitations. I also recall the once young couple coming together again when all the untied knots are retied, much later in time. In the late 1980’s, already stateside, I recall watching the movie version mid-way and recognizing the story immediately.
The Raven and The Pit and the Pendulum
Yes, we read Edgar Allan Poe back in the day. We were captivated by the poem’s rhythm and pathos, but spent too much time looking up words like nepenthe and the correct pronunciations of older English words. We also wasted time lamenting Poe’s tragic, untimely departure into the night’s Plutonian shore on a Philadelphia street. In The Pit and the Pendulum I found a story reminiscent of a horror story. That’s because it was, the most recent modern predecessor of the horror genre. I felt a bit restless as the story was about someone being tortured by the Catholic, Spanish Inquisition. Later on I came to understand the story’s direct or indirect dependence on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a Protestant propaganda work chronicling the deaths of Protestants at the hands of evil, God-damned Catholics, but unconcerned about the death of Catholics at the hands of Protestants. Maybe because Mr. Foxe omission was due to his belief we Catholics deserved our bloody comeuppance at the hands of “true Protestant Christians.” I doubt Poe shared the sentiment, but he exploited the Catholicphobia of Protestants to paint his horror story and he did so very well, at a guttural level.
There Will Come Soft Rains
This was a short sci-fi story written by the great American writer of the genre, Ray Bradbury. The plot is simple yet poignant: a fully automated house continues its daily cleansing and entertainment routines though the owners are gone. The owners are gone because they were vaporized during a nuclear war, only their shadows remaining on the side of the house. Finally, the house’s automation system short-circuits and burns down, taking the last memory of its owners with it. There was a line in it that has remained with me all this time. It was a description of the house as a “temple” where the cult still went on while the “gods” had already departed. I would use a similar description in something I wrote, and since lost, about my then future service in the South Dakotan ICBM fields. That story, however, lies still ahead.
Effects
All that reading had an effect on me. Verne’s wondrous imagination ignited my own. I dreamt of submarine exploration powered by an unknown source. “Life is much wetter down where is wetter - take it from me!” — sang the Hermit Crab in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Unless, your name is Captain Nemo, a depressed millionaire genius seeking a memorable death while playing a dirge in a piped organ. If that’s your name, then enjoy your drowning death.
Abelardo Díaz Alfaro’s stories left me pining for a Puerto Rico that was long gone, but still intelligible to me in a way that isn’t to my children and grandchildren. Enrique Laguerre’s work informed me that the world wasn’t rose-colored and that “progress” carried a price weighed in human lives. René Marqués taught me that sometimes the road to one’s human flourishing might mean one staying put and not moving. The Afro Puerto Rican poetry of Palés Matos and Vizcarrondo smells of sweat and earth and blood and the sounds of drums. Afro Caribbean poetry is the rhythmical heart pounding within us no matter where we go. Jacobo Morales’ poetry inspired in me a certain optimism and the very beginning of a social consciousness, though I can’t tell you what such a consciousness meant to me at that time.
Rómulo Gallegos’ novel taught me that misery is a constant in human relations, as well as love. I’m not sure what Alarcón taught me, perhaps the fact I could enjoy a short work and understand its surface level well enough.
In Bombal’s and Bioy’s work I learned that any character, dead or alive, could be a first person narrator in a work of fiction. Bioy’s science fiction also taught me that certain themes in that genre come and go like a carrousel. One learns about them now because once we learned about them in the past. The past become present and becomes future only to become present and past again. We are the ghosts inhabiting this island Earth.
The Peasant Masses of Puerto Rico and Nicaragua taught me to sing about distinct realities and viewpoints, despite my preference for the Puerto Rican Mass. Mejías Misa was not wasted on me. It taught me the equal sacrality of both the menial and the intellectual. Both are holy before God. But it is Croatto’s music that I sing to this day and prefer.
Hawthorne taught me about the mess we human beings do with the time allotted to us. Suffering leaves a mark even after redemption had been attained. Deep hurts never really heal, they only become more manageable in time.
Edgar Allan Poe works intrigued me so much I’ve bought a book of his collected works. I now know what nepenthe means, and I don’t fear the Spanish Inquisition as much as King Henry VIII did much worse. He, I can detest better.
Finally, in his short story, Bradbury reemphasized something I’d come to accept as true: nuclear war-waging is a bad, bad idea and a sin against God and humanity.
Thank you, Teachers
Thank you Mrs. Yolanda Torres for reading us Reader’s Digest stories while in fifth and sixth grades. They made my imagination soar. Thank you teachers Flor Grana de Pérez and Raquel Figueroa for teaching me to read fiction well. May you dance and read a lot in Our Father’s house. Thank you Dr. Brenda Figueroa, happily alive and kicking, having recently celebrated her Golden Wedding Anniversary. Your lessons and drills in Spanish grammar, literature history, and poetic meter had paid off. Additionally, thank you Mr. Ed Martínez and Mrs. Hernández — sorry I don’t recall your first name. Yes, thank you both for force-feeding us English literature and grammar! Your efforts weren’t wasted on most of us, I assure you. Today I’ve mastered two different languages, thanks to all of you.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻♥️🙏🏻🙋🏻♀️