One Day of Life

...LeRoy Percy married Camille, a French rights of the Delta Negroes, for instance, they also helped keep their labor force from fleeing north...

...In championing the largest and most radical of the guerrilla Gray Eagle of the Delta...

...While the father went hunting for rest and relaxation, once even hosting a hunt for Teddy Roosevelt, Will Percy went to the opera and New York's Greenwich Village...

...Above all, the threegeneration Percy effort to obtain flood control for the Delta combined personal and community interest...

...When the last great flood of 1927 came, wreaking havoc, LeRoy and Will's leadership and exhausting rescue operation provides an example of aristocracy in action, an elite Catholic belle of the Delta, and gallantly justifying its privilege...

...One Day of Life would be a special book even if El Salvador were not the scene of a growing civil war...

...The dramatic organizations...

...The military reacted by banning the book, seizing the existing copies and forcing Argueta into exile in Costa Rica...

...own writing...

...In this respect, the experiences of the family described in One Day of Life mirror those of Argueta and of thousands of other Salvadorans...

...LeRoy tain a tradition of "noblesse oblige...

...The Vintage-Random House edition inaugurates the Aventura Library of Contemporary World Literature...

...Indeed, Lewis Baker takes as the surviving son, Will Percy, eventually theme of his history the Percys' continupracticed law with his father, but he was ing ability to lead "the good life...

...LeRoy and Camille's only ture...

...Murc gdelman T HERE are exiled S~ Lvadorans who say that Manlio Argu, a was not tortured during the many time., ae was in prison in El Salvador...

...The final chapter of this history analyzes the contemporary novels of Walker Percy, the Gray Eagle's great-grandson...

...Supporting the FPL in Chalatenango are the real-life members of the Christian Farmworkers Federation, not unlike Argueta's Chepe and Adolfina...

...The brutalization of l[ l: YOU are obsessed with the South, the young priest in Argueta's novel is ]i Walker Percy, Faulkner's world, or very much like the 1977 assassination of family histories, you will read this acFather Rutilio Grande, whose death count with fascination...

...The main body of the book is devoted to the concerns and careers of Col...

...Set in a small village in the northern province of Chalatenang0 in the period just before the outbreak of El Salvador's civil war, One Day of Life is a collective biography about a rural family narrated in stream-of-consciousness form by a forty-five-year-old grandmother, Lupe Fuentes, as well as by her daughter, granddaughter, and "the authorities" who are often conscripted peasants themselves...

...PglICY| 0l' I~I$111111PP...

...thus the Percys could maintain their honor along with their wealth and social position...

...for Adolfina...

...Percy's son, LeRoy, and LeRoy's son, Will...

...This campaign was one of the first steps in converting Chalatenango into what it is today, a bastion of the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL), the ren Lives on the Brazilian northeast and Paulo Carvalho-Neto's as yet untranslated Mi Tio Atahualpa on the Ecuadorian Andes are as genuinely moving as Manlio Argueta's novel on the peasants of Chalatenango...

...IN TH17...

...NEW guards have visited yet another tragedy SOOTH on Lupe's family and she steels herself to Lewis Baker carry on and to deny them the satisfaction Louisiana State University, $20, 237 pp, of seeing her pain...

...It has since been translated into a dozen languages and published throughout Europe and Latin America...

...Argueta ;o managed to entrance his captors, il is said, that they banged leather straps ~ ~ainst the wall and told him to scream at1 Le top of his lungs, so the higher-ups wht gave the orders to torture would hear and think the guards were doing their duty...

...At home in the Delta, LeRoy and Will exercised their influence as eloquent advocates of progress, reason, and moderation...

...Senate, but Wealth buttresses a family against matepreferred exercising power behind the rial disasters and provides access to the scenes, working all his life for the good benefits of education and leisured culof his region...

...served for a term in the U.S...

...Lupe awakens at five in the morning and begins the day concerned with mundane things like feeding the children and watering thegarden...

...Federation organizers who urge them to Perhaps only Graciliano Ramos's Barunite to struggle for their survival and their fights...

...Happily, most of the time doing the good thing and doing well were not in conflict...

...Similarly, the its uneven treatment of topics and supersearch and destroy operation which ficial psychological analysis...

...Only gradually do we realize that she has already lost her son, a farmworker organizer, to a local death squad and a son-in-law to National Guard kidnappers...

...Few novels provide so authentic a picbeginnings of the Percy family might come straight from the pages of Faulkner's fiction...

...Adolfina protests by participating in the occupation of the San Salvador cathedral is clearly modeled on one which the military ironically dubbed "Operation Rutilio...

...Yet also dedicated to art, literature, and his Wealth and high social position may also Commonweal: 284...

...One Day of Life was first published in 1980 by the Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador...

...One Day of Life is only thinly- tgidneu C a l l a h a a disguised history...

...Only little by little does she tell us of her recent discovery "that something called rights existed" and that "we must learn so many things, so as not to live with our eyes shut.:' But even here, she admits that she knows little of such things and that Chepe and her granddaughter Adolfina are the ones who really seem to understand the baffling and arbitrary behavior of those in power...

...From the conflicts surrounding Reconstruction, to the dramatic fight against the Ku Klux Klan, the Percys courageously stood on principle and battled for the fight as they saw it...

...For those not catalyzed opposition to the government similarly entranced, this historical work among the peasants of his poor may, I fear, appear dull or frustrating in Chalatenango parish...

...carded on his father's profession of law, But at what price does an elite mainplanting, and political leadership...

...Lupe's day begins like any other, but by 9:30 in the morning the dreaded National Guard comes to her house, looking Tlr...

...As we watch her in the course of this one day, we hear her talking about life's hardships, but also about God, the beauty of the birds and the clouds, the spirits of the forest and her pet dog...

...In the first chapter the focus is upon the military and postwar adventures of Col...

...By early afternoon, the POLITICS AND LITEtlATIJR17...

...But in spite of these travails, Lupe's outlook is hardly political...

...William Alexander Percy, whose silver hair, piercing eyes, and qualities of leadership earned him the name, "the wealth, travel, and cultivated intelligence, the Percys possessed sophisticated enlightened views which inevitably embroiled them, generation after generation, in struggles against bigotry...

...It was the young priests that Lupe credits for first opening the eyes of people in Chalatenango, priests who wore work pants and visited with people in their huts and who formed cooperatives so peasants 4 May 1984:283 would get a just price for their eggs, ture of the world of the rural poor in Latin chickens, or pigs...

...Her husband Jost, or "Chepe," helped establish a cooperative and, like most men in the region, now sleeps in the mountains because there have been threats against him...

...Shaped by their traditions of A gentleman's history This version of the Percy story begins with the romantic tale of the founding of the Percy family in the pre-Civil War South...

...Gabriel Garcia M~irquez's Guard tries to intimidate people to keep works capture many of the absurdities them from going to Mass and then inherent in societies long dominated by brutalizes and drives into exile one young military dictators and oligarchs, but their priest, more and more people begin to often surrealistic tone reflects the vision listen to local Christian Farmworkers of a cosmopolite, not of the rural dweller...

...If it is unusual to find a novelist from Argueta's peasant background, it is still more unusual to find such a clear and lyrical description of what is called in Latin America la toma de consciencia, the process through which people oppressed for centuries develop an awareness that their condition is not the result of fate, but rather of an unjust social system imposed on them from above...

...When the National America...

...Bill Brow's translation captures well the Salvadoran peasant's vernacular and Argueta's austere prose...