Bernardo and the Virgin: Making the Rounds

Recently, I discovered an online news article from the University of Costa Rica—dated April 7, 2008—that reports on a lecture that was centered on the novels The Tattooed Soldier, by Hector Tovar, and Bernardo and the Virgin. Needless to say, I was flattered and thrilled to learn of the attention.

The piece, written in Spanish, is titled “Central American Trans-imaginary Expressed in U.S. Literature,” and the author is Katzy O’neal Coto. The article begins by stating that Central American customs, traditions, language, and ways of being and thinking are still alive among the millions of immigrants who reside in the United States and are struggling to become part of a new multicultural reality.

Dr. Yajaira Padilla, Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas, who gave the talk, stated that both novels form part of a construct that allows members of the Central American diaspora to identify with an imaginary collective that exists beyond the borders of their homelands. These texts, she said, give readers a glimpse into the complex process of how immigrants define themselves as Central American or Central American-American, not only in relation to the multicultural U.S. imaginary, but also as part of what could be referred to as the Central American trans-imaginary.

The article goes on to say that the massive immigration of the 70s and 80s, due to the civil wars, lead Central Americans to establish economic, familial, cultural, and other such networks in their new homelands. Also, as a result of their displacement immigrants are constantly obligated to redefine their identities, both as a collective and as individuals.

Dr. Padilla posits that The Tattooed Soldier and Bernardo and the Virgin explore many of the questions that are raised by the evolution and transformation of Central American identities, particularly in those communities that have moved to the United States.

About Bernardo, she states that the novel provides an innovative look into the revolutionary and migratory histories of Nicaragua, incorporating the viewpoints of women and children of immigrants. Dr. Padilla goes on to explain that the novel is based on the true story of Bernardo Martinez, to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, as well as the stories of other fictional characters, among them: Sandinistas, an American priest, journalists, and Nicaraguans who reside in the States. Divided into three parts—covering the years of the Somoza dictatorship (1930-1979), the revolution (1979-1990), and the post-war years—the novel tells the story of what made Nicaragua what it is today.

The article concludes with the news that Dr. Padilla is studying the literary production of U.S. writers of Central-American heritage in an effort to help define Central American-American Literature, a branch of U.S. Literature that has yet to be recognized.

Click here to read the original.

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After learning about Dr. Padilla’s interest in Bernardo, I sent her an email expressing my thanks. In a most kind response, Dr. Padilla informed me that she is currently writing an article, for publication, on the novel. What’s more, she will be including Bernardo and the Virgin in the course on U.S. Latino and Latina Literature that she’s teaching next fall.

I can’t express how gratifying it has been to learn that a group of students will be reading and discussing my firstborn novel, come fall semester, in the University of Kansas.

Publicity Copy for Meet Me Under the Ceiba

To review the publisher's publicity copy—better known as catalog copy—of one’s forthcoming book can be a bittersweet moment: sweet because of the excitement of learning with what words the publisher intends to market the work, and bitter because, on rare occasions, a writer discovers that the publisher is out of synch with one's work. Because of this, I always approach this moment with a little trepidation.

As the release of Meet Me Under the Ceiba approaches, I was thrilled after reading the catalog copy for the novel. Marina Tristan, Assistant Director of Arte Publico Press, wrote the descriptor. She did a magnificent job—better than I could’ve ever done—capturing the spirit of the novel.

I’d like to share with you the draft of the copy:

Meet Me under the Ceiba
Silvio Sirias
September 30, 2009, 256 pages, $15.95
Trade Paperback
ISBN-10: 1-55885-592-0, ISBN-13: 978-1-55885-592-2

This affectionate portrayal of a small Nicaraguan town
reveals humanity in all its beauty and ugliness

“I’m not afraid of that old man,” Adela once told her niece. But everyone in the small town of La Curva, Nicaragua, knew that the wealthy land owner, Don Roque Ramírez, wanted Adela Rugama dead. And on Christmas Day, Adela disappeared. It was two months before her murdered body was found.

An American professor of Nicaraguan descent spending the summer in his parents’ homeland learns of Adela’s murder and vows to unravel the threads of the mystery. He begins the painstaking process of interviewing the townspeople, and it quickly becomes apparent that Adela—a hard-working campesina who never learned to read and write—and Don Roque had one thing in common: the beautiful Ixelia Cruz. The love of Adela’s life, Ixelia was one of Don Roque’s many possessions until Adela lured her away.

The interviews with Adela’s family, neighbors, and former lovers shed light on the circumstances of her death and reveal the lively community left reeling by her brutal murder, including: Adela’s older sister Mariela and her four children, who spent Christmas morning with Adela, excitedly unwrapping the gifts their beloved aunt brought them that fateful day; her neighbor and friend, Lizbeth Hodgson, the beautiful mulata who early in their relationship rejected Adela’s passionate advances; Padre Uriel, who did not welcome Adela to mass because she loved women (though he has no qualms about his lengthy affair with a married woman); Adela’s former lover Gloria, the town’s midwife, who is forever destined to beg her charges to name their newborn daughters Adela.

Through stories and gossip that expose jealousies, scandals, and misfortunes, Sirias lovingly portrays the community of La Curva, Nicaragua, in all its evil and goodness. The winner of the Chicano / Latino Literary Prize, this spellbinding novel captures the essence of a world rarely seen in American literature.

Praise for the work of Silvio Sirias:

"The details of Bernardo's Nicaragua are wholly entertaining and enticing, with images of Catholic mysticism juxtaposed against the particulars of life in the dusty village of Cuapa. Sirias' prose is lovely."—San Antonio Express-News on Bernardo and the Virgin

SILVIO SIRIAS is the author of a novel, Bernardo and the Virgin (Northwestern University Press, 2007), and he has written and edited several books on Latino/a literature, including Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion (Greenwood Press, 2001) and Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya (University Press of Mississippi, 1998). He received his doctorate in Spanish from the University of Arizona and worked as a professor of Spanish and U.S. Latino and Latina literature for several years before returning to live in Nicaragua in 1999. He currently lives in Panama.


Although the information regarding Meet Me Under the Ceiba has yet to be uploaded onto the website, if you wish to learn more about the publisher, Arte Publico Press, click here.

El laberinto del fauno: When Impossible Monsters Triumph Over History

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

In the infinite lie of that dream . . . .
Julio Cortázar, “The Night Face-Up”

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of arts and the origins of marvels.
Francisco de Goya

I am responsible only to God and to History.
Francisco Franco


El laberinto del fauno—translated into English as “Pan’s Labyrinth”—has become one of those few films that grows on me with each viewing as I keep uncovering new layers of meaning.

To dismiss this movie as a children’s fable constitutes a refusal to consider the serious issues this tale explores: the nature of reason, of reality, of time, of freedom, of duty, of obsessions, and of the human need to believe that in the future something better awaits us.

Guillermo del Toro’s masterful fantasy, released in 2006, is set in post-civil war Spain, during the viciously repressive aftermath of a brutal conflict in which over half-a-million Spaniards lost their lives and at a time when the rest of the world lived in the gloom of World War II. The heroine of the story is an eleven year old girl named Ofelia—superbly played by Ivana Barquero. Her mother, a widow—played by Ariadna Gil—has remarried; and Ofelia’s new stepfather—played by Sergi López—is the sadistic Captain Vidal: a fascist who believes in the moral superiority of the victors, the Falangist Party, and in the necessity of cleansing Spain of all Republican sympathizers.

Captain Vidal has ordered his family to leave the city and move to an ancient millhouse from where he commands a garrison of soldiers that has been charged with annihilating a small column of socialist rebels resisting Francisco Franco’s reign through guerrilla warfare.

Throughout her short but turbulent life, the heroine has found refuge in fairy tales. In the film’s present, Ofelia’s avid reading of her treasured books has become an especially important sanctuary because she intuitively knows that her stepfather is capable of acts of extreme cruelty.

Shortly after the heroine arrives at the grim millhouse, a fairy lures her into a labyrinth that descends into an underground universe, well below the historical world of Spain. There, a faun—a mythical deity, half man, half goat—informs the girl that she is a long-lost princess, but that if she wishes to return to her kingdom she must successfully complete three tasks that will determine whether or not she has become fully human during the centuries her spirit had been away. If she has become human, she cannot return to her kingdom.

It is precisely at this point that Ofelia’s fantasy world and the historical world of Captain Vidal become destined to collide. Guillermo del Toro, who in addition to directing the film also wrote the script, doesn’t give viewers many opportunities to catch their breath—the pace of his storytelling is relentless and both worlds, those of the labyrinth and of history, are grim and inhabited by terrifying creatures.

Time plays an essential factor for both lead characters, but particularly for Captain Vidal who kills his perceived enemies without much thought or remorse because he is obsessed with his father’s heroic death on the battlefield. Time is so important for Captain Vidal, in fact, that he’s unnaturally attached to the pocket timepiece he inherited from his father. In spite of Captain Vidal’s best efforts to live up to his father’s legacy—who held the rank of general—he fears the clock’s ticking and suspects that he doesn't have enough time left to emerge from under the paternal shadow. The Captain’s frustration at coming up short manifests itself in self-loathing, which he eases through physically torturing and killing his enemies.

With death and destruction as the primary method for resolving existential conflicts, the world of history would easily overwhelm Ofelia’s magical universe if Guillermo del Toro hadn’t resorted to the legacy of two Latin American literary giants: the Argentinians Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

(The movie director understands, and perfectly, movie-making’s indebtedness to literature: when Ariadna Gil expressed that she was having trouble understanding the mother’s absolute dependence on her cruel husband, Del Toro selected several passages from Dickens’s novels to help the actor come to terms with the role).

From Borges, of course, Del Toro borrows the device of the labyrinth—the leitmotif with which the Argentinian writer is most closely associated. In Borges’s literary construct, the labyrinth is our world, our universe, through which we wander and are constantly obligated to make choices, with every choice altering the course of our lives. The fairy guides Ofelia through the maze, but ultimately the girl will have to make a difficult decision, and although in the labyrinth she can momentarily hide from her nemesis, Captain Vidal, the maze cannot protect the heroine from the confrontation that awaits her at the final intersection where the historical world and the fantasy world at last collide. (It is indicative of Del Toro’s fondness for Borges that the book the faun gives the heroine to help her make decisions is titled “El libro de las encrucijadas”: The Book of the Crossroads.) According to Borges, when we’re confronted with situations similar to that of the girl/princess, the choices we make define us and move us one step closer—for better or for worse—to our destinies.

Borges’s writings often place characters at the center of the universe—as Ofelia eventually is—where time and space ultimately collapse, leaving readers to reflect upon the multiple significances that a character’s decisions have on the resolution of an enigma.

But to rely on Borges’s labyrinth alone could not carry Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy against the massive weight of the historical world that Captain Vidal represents. To make Ofelia’s visions utterly believable, Guillermo del Toro appropriates the obsessions that Julio Cortázar instills in the psyche of his characters. In this Argentine’s stories, a character’s fixations and visions become so compelling that the fantastic events surrounding them are rendered far more believable than everyday reality. In “La noche boca arriba” (The Night Face-Up), the reality of captive of the Aztecs who’s about to be sacrificed is far more credible than the thin dreams of his other self: a modern man who experienced a motorcycle accident; or, as happens in “Las babas del Diablo” (The Devil’s Droolings), it becomes easier to believe that a photographer has unknowingly surprised the devil by taking his picture than it is to believe in the character's insanity.

The difference between the Argentinian writers is that Borges wants his readers to ponder the endless possibilities his stories intelligently pose, while Cortázar enjoys making the reader question which of two worlds is the real one.

Guillermo del Toro, in borrowing from the storytelling legacies of both writers, asks his viewers to enter the labyrinth with Ofelia, judge her choices, and in the end determine which of the outcomes is reality: Is she a human dreaming of being a princess? Or is she a princess, ready to return to her kingdom?

As witnesses to the confrontation at the final crossroads of El laberinto del fauno, Guillermo del Toro, most appropriately, leaves the choice up to us.