Context
Reading Luis Rafael Sanchez
Gregory Rabassa
For some time now I have kept hidden in
the surrealist recesses of what passes for a rational mind a pair of
imaginative notions: What does the music sound like when Berthe Trepat
in Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch plays her "Pavan for
General Leclerc," by Alix Alix, and also what the pervasive notes of
Macho Camacho’s guaracha sound like in Macho Camacho’s Beat. Luis Rafael Sanchez has pulled off an amazing feat as he spins his tale
around a song with no audible music, leaving it up to the reader, who
must try to supply it. In this way, as with Cortazar’s scheme for his
novel, there will be any number of different valid versions of the song
and, therefore, of the novel itself. What is startling is that Sanchez
has nonetheless supplied the rhythm of the guaracha by using the very
words of the text. As I have implied above, it is an extended case of
lyrics awaiting their accompanying music. In many ways the song is the
real protagonist as we see how its theme of "Life is a phenomenal
thing" touches upon the activities of all the characters if we look
upon these activities as phenomena. Tomas Navarro Tomas, the
wise old Spanish philologist whose combination of name and surnames has
bedeviled bibliographers, held that the popular poetry of a people
coincides with the natural rhythmic pattern of its spoken language.
Along the way he was also the author of a study of the Spanish of
Puerto Rico. I think that if Don Tomas had gone a step farther he would
have found that popular music also follows spoken expression to a large
degree. If we compare the Caribbean guaracha to the Argentine tango we
will find a similarity with a comparison of the two regional accents.
The language that flows along in time to the rhythm of the unheard
music in this book is most often the vernacular of Puerto Rico. Luis
Rafael Sanchez (Wico to his friends and fans) thought that the
translation really should have read "Translated from the Puerto Rican"
rather than from the Spanish. It was my job, therefore, to change the
text into an English that would somehow preserve the Puerto Rican touch
and spirit and at the same time not sound contrived. The very first
problem was the title and as Wico, my wife Clementine, and I pondered
it she came up with the word Beat; it fit the text as a
rhythmic expression and also added a sense of following the rounds of a
policeman or watchman, thus showing how the guaracha travels
pervasively about the city of San Juan. My wife also noted that
this novel is one more indication of the thesis she maintains in her
book on the Ecuadorean novelist and playwright Demetrio Aguilera-Malta
that the epic is alive and well and survives in the contemporary Latin
American novel. In the matter of the book at hand and its rhythmic
proportions, we must remember that ancient epic in the time of Homer
was chanted, not read, and that its rhythms were those of the demotic.
Here, too, the song is all-invasive, like the spirit of Hermes the
Messenger or his Yoruban counterpart Eshu, also a mischief maker. Just
as in Joyce’s Ulysses, an epic derivative, the action of this
novel takes place in a single day with explanatory flashbacks, although
here Odysseus, having been rejected by his pure Penelope, appears to be
heading back to Calypso’s isle, while Telemachus is off in search of
nothing in particular, not even himself. The fusion of enduring classical themes with contemporary local problems is evident in Sanchez’s earlier play The Passion According to Antigona Pérez, which is the Sophoclean tragedy acted out in the setting of present-day
Puerto Rico and dealing with the island’s troubles as they fit the
themes of the Greek play. In the novel, too, he has used the elements
of age-old human tragedy, albeit cloaked in the banalities of the
everyday life of everyday people. If we have the acumen to look behind
these people we will see the tragedy of their homeland, of which they
are not in the least aware. The characters in this novel are
representational, especially since they are given to us in
larger-than-life Rabelaisian caricature. Senator Vicente Reinosa
exemplifies the crooked Politician: venal, selfish, and shallow, but
holding power all the same. He is the striver moving up through the
bourgeoisie as his ilk comes to dominate so many aspects of life on the
island. He also represents those who will sell out Puerto Rico to the
Americans. Sanchez makes use of repetitive epithets for him much in the
manner of Homer and also of the Spanish epic, The Poem of the Cid. These epithets are based on political campaign slogans and are
inevitable lies. His wife, Dona Graciela Alcantara y Lopez de
Montefrio, represents those on the island who flaunt ancestry that goes
back to the first Spanish conquerors, often through bogus genealogy but
always with high-sounding appellations. We must also note that the
names of these two characters could possibly carry additional meanings;
Reinosa has connotations of government, from reinar, to rule, and the suffix -osa, in the manner of, while Montefrio could refer to the frigidity of the lady’s privy parts. Their
offspring Benny is in love with his Ferrari, a material thing and an
extension of his very being, making him a sort of narcissist if not
simply a hedonist, although the two are difficult to separate. The car
has the beauty and physical prowess that he lacks and there is a
reassuring transfer of his drives. Benny and his companions all bear
American nicknames, evidence of the creeping Yankeefication of the
island’s culture and manners. This same acculturation is also the
purveyor of the rampant "creeping meatballism" that the late Jean
Shepherd used to decry. When one culture is passed on to another it
always seems to be at a banal, most often culinary level: more kielbasa
than Copernicus, more pizza than Petrarca. In many ways Puerto Rico,
after it was taken over by the United States, became the pre-mature
victim of what is now called globalization. The island’s
cultural problem, along with the economic and social ones, is that it
has yet to experience a situation in which it can be "an island entire
of itself." Until 1898 it remained a Spanish outpost that had been
established for the protection and maintenance of the colonies and
after the Spanish American War it passed into the possession of the
United States. American colonialism was quite unyielding in the
beginning, with the insistence that English become the language of
government and education, resulting in a generation that was often
semiliterate in two languages. Even the first postage stamps issued for
Puerto Rico were U. S. stamps surcharged Porto Rico, showing
the degree of the new owners’ ignorance and entrenching a
mispronunciation that would be ever so hard to correct. The drive for
independence from Spain led by Eugenio Maria de Hostos and others
simply shifted gears into opposition to the American occupation.
Spanish domination was easier to handle in some ways with a language, a
religion, and many old traditions in common. One reaction on
the part of the dominant ruling rural landowners was to cling
ferociously to their Spanish heritage and blood. Previously this had
been their way of drawing away from the masses and their African and
Taíno admixtures; now it was their protection against the culture that
to them was alien and barbarian. The merchant class, however, hitched
its wagon to the progressive and hard-driving economy of the new
masters. The blending of these two attitudes can be seen in the union
of Dona Graciela and Senator Reinosa. Benny is the product of this
blend, a superficial cipher. The masses, having lived in
peonage and slavery under their old masters, fell into a similar yet
more industrialized status as United States firms moved onto the island
in search of cheap labor and tax benefits. People abandoned the land in
great numbers and moved to urban centers or started to migrate to
mainland cities, in both cases to an unstable and transient existence.
The new culture penetrated this class through a sort of unnoticed
osmosis, coming to be accepted as something that had always been there,
showing that what is often thought to be tradition is only a generation
old. I believe that it was Wico himself who told the tale of a country
girl named Guiba. Her mother was quite religious and named her children
for the saint on whose day they were born. This poor girl had the
misfortune to have been born on the day of San Guibe (Thanksgiving). In
the novel contact between upper and lower classes is illegitimate.
There is not even any knowledge of one another as individuals, only as
they play their roles: The Old Man and The Mother who was The Mistress
of the Old Man, for example. Their product, The Kid, is not only
illegitimate but is also a cretin. Sánchez does a fine job of relaying
the poor little thing’s notions of what is going on about him. As it
turns out, he is the final and we might say collective victim of all
the circumstances (phenomena?) of the novel and he is tragically or
maybe happily unaware of it all. The only figure in the book that has
some semblance of being solidly grounded is The Mother’s friend Dona
Chon. In her limited way and in spite of her own travails she does
manage to instruct The Mother from her experience and "mother wisdom."
She knows that instead of being a phenomenal thing, "life is a bundle
of dirty clothes." With this earthly eloquent statement we have the
antidote to Macho Camacho’s guaracha. And yet it is her failure to be
where she was supposed to be that brings on The Kid’s demise. The
novels of the Latin American Boom have many traits in common. One of
these is the presence of many-faceted characters with often
exchangeable identities, like Cortazar’s Doppelgangers or Vargas
Llosa’s people in The Green House, who change Identity as they
change roles. In this book we have The Mother, who links its two worlds
together when she is The Mistress, and Senator Vicente Reinosa, who
becomes the Old Man as he enters her world. The two worlds finally come
together in bitter confraternity when Benny, in an almost orgastic
ecstasy of speed, destroys his little idiot half-brother. Ever so many
things can be read into this. There is the full circle, there is
anagnorisis (for the reader, ignorisis for the characters). We are even
tempted to think of Amadis of Gaul and Parsifal, both of whom find
their long lost half brothers Florestan and Feirfis, although the
situation here is more Cervantine than chivalric and therefore
tragicomic. Could the tears and wails be for Puerto Rico? Luis
Rafael Sanchez grew up in the small city of Humacao in the eastern part
of the island (hometown of The Mother and her cousins Hughie, Louie,
and Dewey), and moved to San Juan as a young man. His studies and
travels took him to Madrid and New York where he earned his degrees in
literature. He is now a distinguished professor emeritus at the
University of Puerto Rico and the City University of New York. He has
also traveled in Europe and other parts of Latin America where he has
been involved in teaching and work in the theater. Macho Camacho’s Beat was written in part in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, and cognoscenti will
recognize in it certain aspects of what Brazilians call jeito, a relaxed, ironic outlook on life, difficult to translate or define, but something which Epicurus might have understood.
