Reading Oscar Hijuelos

In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme:
Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will
be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads
to hate and nearly always leads to love.
John Steinbeck

I’ve just finished reading A Simple Habana Melody. Because Oscar Hijuelos’s most recent novel revolves around music, as does his best known work, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, my first instinct was to search for common ground between the lead characters. Indeed, Israel Levi, the quiet hero of A Simple Habana Melody, shares much with the passionately intense César Castillo, the central protagonist of Mambo Kings. They both possess gargantuan appetites—for food and drink, in particular (allow me to leave aside, for this post, César’s insatiable craving for women).

Moreover, by way of their artistic endeavors, Israel Levi and César Castillo achieve fame: César with the song “Beautiful María of My Soul,” and Israel with “Rosas Puras.” But Israel’s eminence is lasting—unlike the ephemeral celebrity of César Castillo, which acquires a ghostly quality thanks to I Love Lucy reruns.

César’s music, as with everything else in his life, is instinctual, visceral, and firmly rooted in the present. He is an exuberant, outgoing individual who constantly seeks to be the center of attention. On the other hand, Israel’s creative inclinations are classical, cerebral, and intended to last through the ages. And, in opposition to César, he is an extremely inhibited, modest, formal man who shies away from the limelight and prefers the quiet solitude of his mystical reflections. These traits, then, makes it more appropriate for the reader to compare the protagonist of A Simple Habana Melody to another of Hijuelos’s memorable characters: the very proper and spiritual Mr. Ives, of Mr. Ives’ Christmas.

Both Mr. Ives and Israel Levi are devout Catholics, but they complement their desire to understand their place in God’s grand design by learning about other faiths. And, ultimately, it is their belief in a loving, almighty being that helps them survive the greatest traumas of their lives—Mr. Ives’ tragic and senseless loss of his son, and Israel Levi’s three-year internment in Buchenwald, which happens because he is mistaken for a Jew while living and performing in Paris during WWII. Because of the horror of their tribulations they eventually find themselves standing at the edge of a dark precipice, ready to cast themselves into the void because they’ve lost their faith in humanity.

In due time, though, their belief in a loving God is restored and they’re able to set aside the overpowering sadness that had been tearing away at their souls. They also recover their faith in the better angels of human nature—to borrow Abraham Lincoln’s beautiful expression—and they choose to abandon despair and, in the process, once again find peace.

I believe this is the greatest lesson a reader can take away from Hijuelos’s novels. In every one of his works, like those of one of his literary heroes, Charles Dickens, the Cuban-American Pulitzer Prize winning author shows us that in spite of suffering excruciating losses, we can always find redemption in the power of love.

When Historians Are Correct

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest
outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
Joseph Conrad

History is the version of past events that
people have decided to agree upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte


Recently, Francisco Linares, President of the Patronato de Panamá Viejo, and Gustavo García Paredes, Rector of the Universidad Nacional de Panamá, unveiled a bust of Pedrarias Dávila at the site where the capital of this nation was founded. Although I find the idea of honoring Dávila distasteful, it is the prerogative of the Patronato to pay homage to whomever they wish. Pedrarias Dávila is, after all, the founder of Panamá City.

What stunned me, however, was that Mr. Linares and Mr. García Paredes called upon scholars and students of history to help revise Dávila’s dastardly reputation. They claim that he was a good man whose only interest was to serve his monarchs.

In his speech, Mr. Linares, suggested that Pedrarias Dávila was a visionary, a man who fully comprehended the strategic importance that Panamá’s location would have for the conquest of South America—this, he argued, even before the Pacific was discovered.

Please.

Mr. Linares then stated that history has treated Pedrarias Dávila unfairly because of his rivalry with the charismatic discoverer of the Pacific, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa.

Jumping quickly on this odd revisionist bandwagon, Mr. García Paredes labeled Pedrarias Dávila an obedient servant of the Spanish Crown who was only following orders to murder and enslave the natives, take possession of their lands, and send plenty of gold to the Old World. The rector of Panama’s National University added that no person in his or her right mind should expect anything other than extreme violence as a result of such an enterprise. Thus, he said, it is our obligation to reevaluate Pedrarias Dávila’s historical legacy; to treat him objectively, as a man of his times whose only desire was to serve the emerging Spanish empire.

I am not making this up.

Let’s say that for a fraction of a second I’m willing to give Mr. Linares and Mr. García Paredes the benefit of the doubt and ask: have historians really given Pedrarias Dávila a bum rap?

The problem is that I have read good deal about Pedrarias Dávila. Invariably, the authors conclude that, to state it simply, Pedrarias Dávila was not a nice person. In fact, his cruelty and lust for power place him on the same plane with some of history’s worst tyrants. The facts are well-documented. Let’s examine just a few.

• Before Pedrarias Dávila arrived in Panamá, Balboa had worked out a truce with most of the local caciques. If Spain had followed his model for peaceful coexistence, much human suffering could’ve been avoided. However, under Dávila’s orders his captains ignored the truce and set forth on a campaign of enslavement and genocide.

• Balboa’s achievements earned him the gratitude of the Spanish Crown who created a special title for him: Adelantado del Mar del Sur. But it also earned him Davila’s envy. In league with Francisco Pizarro—another Conquisitador whose cruelty is well known, and who also wanted Balboa out of the way so the conquest of the Inca Empire could be all his—Pedrarias engineered Balboa’s capture, trial, and beheading (this, in spite of Balboa being Dávila’s son-in-law). Moreover, the governor moved quickly on the administration of “justice” because he suspected, correctly, that a royal document ordering that Balboa not be harmed was on its way across the Atlantic. Alas, it arrived too late.

• Because of the repeated complaints of Pedrarias Dávila’s cruelty and unscrupulous behavior, the Crown relieved him of the governorship of Panamá and assigned him the governorship of Nicaragua.

• As governor of Nicaragua, Davila’s first act was to behead Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, the man he had sent to conquer and settle this province, effectively eliminating any competing authority.

• Dávila ordered the capture of all Indians who, if strong enough, were sold as slaves and shipped to the mines of South America.

• Dávila ruled the Indians with an iron fist. He would not tolerate rebellion. To discourage dissent, he had two dozen dogs that had been especially trained to hunt and kill humans. In the most notorious and well-documented case, after members of the Chontales people killed two Spaniards in a surprise attack, Dávila ordered that fifteen chieftains be torn apart in the plaza of León Viejo. He presided over the ghastly event from a seat of honor.

• His cruelty was such that Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de la India is based in part on Dávila’s treatment of Indians (but because of the gravity of the accusations the publisher did not allow the Dominican friar to use names). It is not surprising, then, that El Protector de los Indios fled Nicaragua in fear of his life.

• As a result of Davila’s excesses, both against the indigenous and against his own men, the Spanish Crown, in an unusual move, eventually prohibited him from administering justice—although he was allowed to remain governor.

• Incredibly—or perhaps not so—after Dávila’s death his family continued behaving along similar lines. Rodrigo de Contreras, his son-in-law, inherited the governorship and only lasted a year because he was tried and found guilty of corruption and excessive cruelty. Isabel de Bobadilla, Pedrarias’s wife, established one of the first houses of prostitution in the colonies: hiring Spanish women, and enslaving the Indian ones. On February 26, 1550, Pedrarias Davila’s grandsons, Hernando and Pedro, led the first criollo rebellion against the Spanish Crown because some family properties had been confiscated. In the process they murdered Fray Antonio de Valdivieso, bishop of Leon Viejo. Dávila’s descendants then led a group of rebels to Panamá Viejo. They took the city, but within a few days the loyalists regained it and Hernando was executed. Pedro fled into the jungles and was never heard from again.

So ends the saga of Pedrarias Dávila and his clan.

I concede that Pedrarias Dávila was a man of his times and that he was far from being the only Spaniard who ruled by way of terror. However, to the members of el Patronato de Panama Viejo, I say: Honor Pedrarias if you feel you must, but please don’t ask us to waste our time searching for a nonexistent loophole. If we do this, then all war criminals, including Hitler, should be reconsidered in light of “their times.”

History has already passed judgment on Pedrarias Dávila, and he has been found guilty.

Rightfully so.

The Gang at Lario’s

“This must be heaven . . . .”
“No. It’s Iowa.”
W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe


Believe it or not, my wife and I had good reasons for going to Iowa this summer.

First of all, her extended family lives in Cedar Falls. Secondly, she was scheduled to attend an Advanced Placement workshop at the University of Iowa.

And last, but certainly not least, most of the Gang at Lario’s live in Iowa.

There was nothing glamorous about Lario’s—a rustic restaurant in the small town of San Marcos, Nicaragua, that served adequate food and cheap pitchers of beer. But the group that met there on most nights was very special, indeed. The Gang consisted of several professors who taught at the local college and their families. And over the course of two years we became an extended family. More remarkably, to my eyes at least, we formed an inspiring literary group led by Nina Forsythe and Rhonda Patzia, both talented writers and, as I later discovered, excellent editors. They, as well as my wife, have blessed me twice: serving as readers for my novels, including the recently completed manuscript, Meet Me Under the Ceiba. (Rhonda’s a world-class photographer as well—her work is featured on the cover of the July 2005 issue of The SUN; and she graced me by taking the author’s shot for Bernardo and the Virgin. Nina has been busy as well, publishing her poetry in various journals throughout the States.)

When the time came for us to move on with our lives, during the summer of 2002, we left Nicaragua, sad over the Gang’s breakup. Amazingly, three families from this cluster ended up in Iowa: the husbands obtaining teaching jobs in Cedar Rapids, Sioux City, and Pella. I believe this “coincidence” was divinely designed. Just ask yourself, what are the odds of a group of close friends independently ending up in Iowa, and all the way from Central America at that? Somehow I feel that the patron saint of friendships, whomever that may be, was asking us to remain a tight-knit community.

We stayed in touch, thanks to the internet, and we started to plan a reunion for the summer of 2005. At last, during the second half of July, the Gang at Lario’s congregated in the quaint Dutch community of Pella, where Mike, Rhonda’s husband, teaches philosophy at Central College. In spite of not having seen one another for three years, our coming together felt as if we had just stepped out of Lario’s a few hours earlier. We had fun reminiscing, of course—and that included mutilating the piñata of a clown disguised as the Grand Inquisitor (but that may be the subject of a later posting)—but mostly we talked about the future, absolutely sure that this would not be our last reunion.

Words will always fail me when asked by outsiders to explain why the Gang at Lario’s has meant so much to me. But I tell them to take a glimpse at the dedication of Bernardo and the Virgin, and then they begin to understand.

On Being A Late Bloomer

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something
you’ve understood all your life, but in a different way—Doris Lessing

I’ve always been a late bloomer. My parents never heard the word “precocious” when my teachers summoned them for conferences. Instead, terms like “easily distracted,” “unfocused,” and “undisciplined” always made them leave Vernon Avenue School, in South Central Los Angeles, with a frown. Even when I was attentive in class, trying my best to capture whatever concept the teacher was trying to get through to us, the light went on in my head long after my peers had understood. But when it finally did, boy, did it shine brightly.

Bernardo and the Virgin was published when I was fifty-one. It wasn’t my first attempt at writing a novel. Two completed manuscripts, and another one that was shelved half way through—all three written in my late thirties—are today lost, mercifully, casualties of my many moves. For years I consoled myself with the thought that I gave my dream of becoming a published novelist my best shot, but the itch to write creatively never went away. But by then, wholly engaged in the pursuit of my doctorate, I chose to retreat to the sanctified halls of scholarly writing.

As far back as I can remember I’ve enjoyed putting my thoughts down on paper. Like many Latino and Latina writers, I grew up in a culture where spinning a good yarn is highly regarded. As a youngster I spent many hours in rapture, listening tirelessly to the gifted storytellers in my extended family. Thanks to them, I learned early in life how to sense when I was in the presence of a great story.

As a novelist, my breakthrough came after I completed writing Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, for Greenwood Press. For this study of the Dominican-American’s novels, the press’ editorial rules required that I divide the chapters into sections that explore plot development and structure, point of view, character development, and thematic issues. Diving headfirst into Alvarez’s work (who, incidentally, is one of my literary heroes) in this straightforward, fundamental manner (as opposed to viewing the novel through the lenses of highly esoteric literary theories, like I had been trained to do in graduate school), allowed me to glimpse the novelist’s craft from within. This time the light went on with a fiery explosion. I now understood exactly how to go about writing a novel.

So, at a somewhat late age, Bernardo and the Virgin was finished. Elaine Markson, after reading the novel, agreed to become my agent, and Northwestern University Press decided to take a chance on an unknown and easily-distracted middle-aged writer.

Getting back to being a late-bloomer, I take solace in the knowledge that Miguel de Cervantes, at the ripe old age of 58, after a lifetime of failures, finally succeeded in writing a classic that has endured the passage of time (this year we celebrate the 400^th anniversary of its publication). I would never assume to place my writings alongside his—God forbid I ever develop an exaggerated sense of my small contribution to Latina and Latino letters. But . . . still . . . it’s comforting to know that compared to the author of Don Quijote de la Mancha, I’m somewhat precocious.