Burnt Water
Condini, N.E.
BURNT WATER Carlos Fuentes Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $11.95, 231 pp. N. E. Condini ONE can summarize the main concern in Carlos Fuentes's latest and quite engrossing book, Burnt Water, as the...
...In "Mother's Day," for example, (as in "These Were Palaces" and "The Old Morality") a boy reviews the performances of three generations, from the old days of Mexico's fight for independence to today's lusterless, non-heroic age...
...He wants to be found dead "to the strains of Schubert's 'Unfinished Symphony,' with Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood open beside him...
...in its crudest statement it is a longing for death that brings to mind the Spanish Inquisition and the Mexican morbid counterpart to the (Catholic) denial of the body ("The Son of Andres Aparicio...
...A quarrael between father and grandfather is eventually the key to a revelation of characters which is also a mirror of contemporary Mexico, caught between a dream that is ended (the Revolution) and a reality that can't be lived (today's millions of poor in Mexico City...
...To him, things remembered take on the quality of eternity because they are devoid of material interest: they are pure and irretrievably lost...
...Death is what the decadence of the past causes...
...Much more than the poverty scene, as one critic has pointed out, he projects an aristocratic culture that would rather go back to Aztec times than compromise with modern Mexican ugliness...
...His Mexico City setting bears in fact an astonishing and I believe deliberate resemblance to William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha, just as the juxtaposition of the ancient values and the new "snopesian incivility .brings to mind typically Faulknerian themes and attitudes...
...He dresses, speaks, moves like an aristocrat...
...It is also the source of the brutality of the present in the didactic "The Son of Andres Aparicio...
...As death is the arbiter in the incestuous story of a "pure Soul," so death is the ghost of "In a Flemish Garden...
...but the dream falls upon itself: instead of the prefigured, flamboyant ending, Federico is butchered by three punks on his estate...
...The clash reverberates to become a cleavage in manners, a "Tuchmannesque" Q versus non-Q tug-of-war between democracy and possession, egalitarianism and vulgarity, spontaneity and pomposity, passion and lust...
...A thrilling revelation of characters also unfolds in "The Two Elenas," where, thanks to Margaret Sayers Pe-den's exquisite rendering the author's gift for sensitive description comes into full play...
...But they have to be faced, whether we like it or not...
...But Fuentes is too intelligent not to see the pitfalls of a purely decadent or aesthetic conception: in "The Doll Queen," and especially in "The Mandarin," the futility of trying to live only in the past is excruciatingly explored and ultimately criticized...
...Fuentes is indeed a master of female portraiture...
...Federico Silva tries, in "The Mandarin," to preserve all the beauty and refinement of the past in a congealed form, in a life that's a work of art...
...It will only lead to ostracism, madness, or death., or death...
...In the middle stands the omniscient author, alias the young boy or young man in many of the eleven short stories...
...The towering figure to inspire the young man in the story is grandpa, General Vergara, a man of fire patterned, it would seem, after Robert Lowell's portrait of his own grandfather in Life Studies and Faulkner's Sartoris in The Unvanquished: "Seeing him from that distance, almost motionless, I thought he looked like a desert plant...
...Green, rubbery, dry as the plains of the north, a deceptive ancient cactus harboring the sparse rains . . . In his photographs, on horseback, he loomed tall...
...His dream of the past has resulted in death...
...His exploits are set against the background of a city full of pettiness and thievery, religious fanaticism and political terrorism, inhabited by a hybrid generation exemplified by the boy's weak and irresolute father...
...This clash between a dead dream and unbearable reality takes on several shapes: in its most delicate utterances it is a feeling of nostalgia for disappearing beauty, decency, and honor ("Mother's Day...
...It is our life, this life, and escapism will not help solve the problems of Mexico...
...N. E. Condini ONE can summarize the main concern in Carlos Fuentes's latest and quite engrossing book, Burnt Water, as the conflict between old and new Mexico, nobility and servility, prehistoric gods and modern idols of money, greed, and success...
...With a few exceptions, represented by recollections of childhood, adolescence, and youth, all the stories are about dream and reality, the elating legacy of the Revolution and the tawdriness of today's world of Coca Cola ads, gas stations, poisoned food and shanty towns...
...Modern things have instead the deformity of sores, or they wear the stench of poverty...
Vol. 108 • October 1981 • No. 19
