Power and love
Francis King
Innocent Erendira and Other Stories Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Cape £4.50) When Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude first appeared in translation in this country, there was general agreement among the reviewers that this was — as one of them put it — 'a classic on the grandest scale'. But while praising the luxuriance of its imagery, the breadth and humanity of its comedy, and the inventiveness of its interwoven plots, not one of them, myself included, showed much inclination to say precisely what the book was about. Even that most perceptive of critics, V.S. Pritchett, declared that it 'denies interpretation', before tentatively suggesting some possible ones.
The novella and the 11 short-stories that make up Innocent Erendira pose the same kind of problem. Like the poems of, say, Mallarme, the later Yeats or Neruda, they leave one in no doubt that here is a master; but for the most part they either cannot be paraphrased and explained or else they admit of a number of different paraphrases and explanations. The finest story is undoubtedly the longest and it is therefore right that it should have given its title to the whole collection. Garcia Marquez comes from Colombia and the setting, here as elsewhere, seems to be a hallucinatory version of the hinterland of the Gulf of Darien, between Cartagena and Barranquilla.
Erendira is a 15-year-old girl, who lives alone in an 'enormous mansion of moonlike concrete lost in the solitude of the desert', With her whale-like, domineering grandmother, for whom she has to perform every menial task from serving tip her food to scrubbing her in the bath. Worn out, she collapses one night on to her bed without first putting out the candle — with the result that the mansion is guttted. Ominously, the monstrous grandmother tells her: 'My poor child. Life won't be long enough for you to pay me back for this mishap.' Grandmother and Erendira begin to travel, accompanied by a band, Indian servants and a photographer on a bicycle. The girl is prostituted over and over again, to anyone however repellent, in orde,r to make restitution; and, having briefly found refuge in a house of missionaries, she is then even shackled to her bed, so that she cannot again escape.
Eventually, after many humiliating and even horrible adventures, one of her suitors, half-Dutch and half-Indian, murders her grandmother and so sets her free. But it is typical of a story that reads like some primitive myth, retold by a man of extreme sophistication, that Erendira should then vanish — running off into the desert, with the gold vest that the dead women used to wear, 'beyond the and winds and the never-ending sunsets'. The story concludes: 'She was never heard of again nor was the slightest trace of her misfortune ever found.'
Death is the main preoccupation of four of the •remaining stories. 'Someone has been Disarranging the Roses' has the ghost of a dead man as its narrator, with an opening sentence that runs: 'Since it's Sunday and it's stopped raining, I think I'll take a bouquet of roses to my grave.' In 'The Third Resignation', the narrator is a 25-year-old man, confined to a coffin after a crippling childhood illness, who awaits, through years of 'living death', the arrival of death itself. 'The Other Side of Death' begins with a man awaking in the early hours of the morning to the smells of violets and formaldehyde that seep through to him from the room in which the corpse of his twin brother, recently dead of cancer of the stomach, has been laid out. A magnificent story, 'Death Constant Beyond Love', has as its protagonist a South American politician, who has only stx months and 11 days to live. He arrives in a remote and forlorn township and delivers a speech in which, like many another politician, he makes a number of promises that he knows that he cannot fulfil. As he speaks of rain-making machines, new houses and an upsurge of trade, his aides erect, as in a theatre, prop trees and prop houses and then make an ocean liner of painted paper pass behind them.
If life and death merge into each other, so too do past and present and present and future. In 'Dialogue with the Mirror', for example, a man suffers a disconcerting time-warp, so that his movements while he shaves gradually cease to be synchronous with those of his reflection in the shaving' mirror. Waking and sleep and reality and illusion also merge. Thus, in 'Eyes of a Blue Dog', a man and a woman meet only la dreams, with the man always saying to he! the identifying phrase 'Eyes of a blue Dog • Garcia Marquez must be fiendishly chfficult to translate. Since Gregory Rabassa has proved his skill with other South American novels, the oddities of this version must, one feels certain, be oddities 01 the original. 'Astral buttocks'; 'pontifica,1 coiffure'; 'twilight breasts'; 'taciturn waltz epithets of this kind abound, to puzzle and startle the reader. 'Fable' and 'myth' are words often used when this extraordinary author comes to he discussed. In these fables or myths, the past is an Eden that has now become a desert;.3 once imperious mansion in a state of squalid, ruin; a formerly prosperous town denude° of its trees, its people and its wealth. EverY character is making the same journey — the grave; and every character hungers afte! the same things — power and love. Garel,a Marquez is not an easy writer and he IS sometimes an extremely boring one; but he leaves an ineffaceable impression of magic' mystery and mastery.
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