On Argueta's Cuzcatlán,
Berman, Paul
CUZCATLAN: WHERE THE SOUTHERN SEA BEATS, by Manlio Argueta, translated by Clark Hansen. New York: Aventura/Vintage. 255 pp. $7.95 paper. Czca dein , the title of Manlio Argueta's new novel, is...
...And if these particular themes later disappeared along with the Indian names, if we came to snicker at the early writers and their cheap rhythms and to consign their works to children, we might ask ourselves: Was this solely because the themes were handled in sensationalist ways...
...You could almost imagine that an interviewer has arrived from a newspaper or university department with a list of questions, and that the characters have decided to make themselves agreeable by answering at loquacious length...
...We learn basic information about campesino life and Indian tradition, about courtings, births, how the people farm, the making of stone bowls, what a good fiesta is like, what diseases they suffer from...
...Or also because the Indian question was, in the manner that everyone knows, closed at last, after which we no longer had to tax ourselves with a certain class of troubling questions...
...Sentimentality about the Indians was, after all, the failing of Whittier and Longfellow, too...
...Writers have had trouble imagining the Indians for as long as there has been a New World literature, which, if you think about it, makes the horrors and traumas that Argueta describes seem even graver, less easy of resolution.q...
...This history has been horrible in ways that North Americans, for reasons having to do with our own culture, find supremely easy not to know about...
...they were also glad to hear the pulum-pulum of the marimba playing pretty songs...
...The new book tends to be calmer, less shocking than One Day of Life...
...In the age of Cooper and Longfellow, the Indian question, to use an old term, was far from closed politically or even, in the West, militarily...
...And since most of us went barefoot it was all right to dance in the puddles, and if God was willing, the rain would let up and the puddles would dry out quickly because the water gets absorbed into the porous earth and the hot air makes it evaporate...
...What was the distinctive trait of imagination in the United States...
...What a terrible history these Salvadorans have had, a "nocturnal history," in the phrase of Sergio Ramirez, a history of darkness that has lasted ever since the Conquest...
...What is it that makes Central America different from Europe or from the United States, and what will set Central American literature on its own distinctive course...
...But in coming across such a title on a modern Central American novel, we might remind ourselves why it was that United States writers once bothered with such matters...
...Old Emiliano, the maker of stone bowls, marries his daughter to the boarder...
...In our own United States literature, names like that used to crop up often a century and a half ago: "Hiawatha," "Chingachgook...
...as it exploded near the clouds...
...Yet though this massacre occurred only a few hundred miles from the United States and though their 1932 was worse than ours, I think it safe to say that no awareness of it exists among North Americans...
...In Central America, the Indian question has never been closed, not even militarily...
...The deeper issue is contained in Central America's traditional social structure...
...Five hundred years have passed since the Spanish Conquest, yet in the fundamental shape that society has taken, Central America still conforms to certain original contours...
...Argueta is especially good at projecting a woman's voice, at evoking, say, the excitement of a fiesta, and at making you curious about flirtations or courtships...
...Chapters one through six are labeled, in turn, 1981, 1936, 1950, 1981, 1948, and 1945, in order to weave together history and personal life...
...Argueta's novel follows the Martinez family, ordinary Salvadoran campesinos possessed of a good amount of Indian culture, through several generations to the present...
...She points out that 40,000 Salvadorans were killed in three years...
...Soon the first firecracker was thrown into the air and everyone was glad to hear the double crack...
...Plainly the practical realities were not to be ignored...
...It's not just that Indian tribes like the Miskitos of Nicaragua continue to dominate certain districts and have yet to work out a settled political relationship with the Spanish-speaking populations—though that is true...
...The calmness tends, however, to make the interview technique look a little odd...
...Actually it was just a sprinkle and we weren't making much of a sacrifice for the saint...
...a landscape of fading trails and arrowheads presented itself...
...And as Argueta presents this in his sober realist manner, he manages to evoke a larger history of the Salvadoran peasantry...
...When there's really trouble, when a plane has crashed or calamity has occurred, you don't want a traditional narrator, you want a reporter, you want to see a microphone stuck in the faces of eyewitnesses...
...One character blurs into another...
...We've had too much of it—more even than we realize...
...The third son marries a nice woman and has a little girl —and so on through the years...
...The different generations, who married whom, which is the daughter and which the grandmother—these little details sink into the rainy-season mud...
...and the early writers saw their new civilization as a ghastly tragedy, the scene of a race's disappearance, the collapse of a certain kind of dignity and morality...
...244 • DISSENT Books We're weary of that sort of thing...
...One day, when Jacinto stopped by on his way from the lagoon, I saw him in a different light...
...But the hopscotching around only manages to conceal the didactic purposes of his book...
...In One Day of Life, the technique by and large succeeds because Argueta was able to evoke a feeling of shock that made interviewer methods seem appropriate...
...The nature of the American civilization remained unclear and American writers had to ask themselves: What did it mean to be an American...
...It was also because of cultural realities, the problem, namely, of discovering and defining the national character...
...The same technique in Cuzcatldn has its moments of success, too...
...Unscrupulous poets seized on Iroquois syllables to solve all the problems of English-language prosody...
...The Central American writers still have to ask themselves: What does it mean to be a Central American...
...You begin to wonder about the interviewer: who is he and what are his purposes...
...You wonder, why would the campesino woman say that "most of us went barefoot," which is the sort of thing that would be too obvious for comment...
...Doubts arise about the relation between narration and characters...
...It might even be that if the structure were less complex, a revolutionary sentimentality would be seen to animate Argueta's imagination in this novel, the kind of sentimentality that intends to celebrate "the people" but succeeds only in rendering them bland...
...For the United States was far from having taken final shape...
...Argueta has established the technique, both here and in an earlier novel, One Day of Life, where some of the same characters appear, of telling his story and also providing his historical and anthropological documentation by having his characters step forward and speak as if into a microphone...
...But Argueta also means to suggest, through the political choices of the greatgranddaughter, that this endless night may be drawing to a close...
...What are the distinctive traits of imagination in Central America...
...The Indian question is too urgent for that, politically, militarily, culturally, even personally, because in a country like El Salvador nearly everyone is either a pure Indian or some kind of mestizo, Indian and Spanish...
...Naturally, eyes look in Indian directions and see the ghastly tragedy...
...In the 1980s has come the new revolutionary movement and the new repression...
...There has been something like five hundred years of fascism...
...Czca dein , the title of Manlio Argueta's new novel, is the old Indian name for El Salvador...
...Emiliano's greatgranddaughter, the last of the generations that Argueta sketches, becomes a revolutionary militant...
...It's been generations since we looked at the classic American writings on Indian themes as anything but children's literature...
...Yet the interviewer never appears...
...Central American society, though older by a hundred years or more than society in North America, exhibits in this respect features of a young culture, not yet defined...
...That is a main difference between Central America and ourselves, and a main source of Central America's troubles...
...The relation of Miami- or Madrid-oriented oligarchs to folkculture campesinos, the feudal domination of tenants by landlords, the tendency toward political absolutism and despotic cruelty—these things derive from the domination originally established by Spaniards over their Indian slaves and peons...
...Eyes looked down...
...Perhaps in an echo of Julio Cortkar (who provided the inspiration for many left-wing Central American writers of the younger generation), Argueta has given an especially complex structure to his epic of the Martinez family...
...The split between El Salvador and CuzcatlAn is a split that runs through the individual personality...
...The campesinos, he means us to think, are ceasing to be victims, though God only knows what the consequences of taking such a step will be...
...You notice that everyone is fairly sweet and nice among the campesinos, no one is an old pill...
...The daughter and her husband have three sons, two SPRING • 1988 • 243 Books of whom peddle pigs and are impressed into the Guardia Nacional...
...He strikes the casual, offhand tone of the Central Americans: The marimba was also brought out into the rain...
...only in Central America this has never been a matter for elegiac contemplation...
...it's only the Guardia Nacional and the gringo advisers (whom we never see, but their influence is big) who emerge as truly detestable...
...Whittier was always going on: Cranberries picked in the Squamscot bog, And grapes from the vines of Piscataquog We laugh...
...There was a Communist uprising among Salvadoran peasants in 1932 that was put down by a massacre of many thousands of people, "The Slaughter," which is how Indian uprisings have always been put down, with or without the hammer and sickle...
...What made America different from Europe and set our New World literature on a different course from Europe's...
...Why add the observation that hot air makes the water evaporate...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
