Women In Translation Month is a great opportunity for me to
sort out my bookshelves, find female translated literature, make a new “to be
read” pile and see how far through that pile I can get. With Cristina
Rivera-Garza’s “No One Will See Me Cry” I personally have absolutely no idea
why this book is sitting on my shelves, I don’t recall buying it, I don’t
recall reading anything about it which would have prompted my purchase,
although I did plan a “World Heritage Listed” literature challenge in 2014,
which never got any traction and this work was on my planned reading list –
why? I have no idea. However I am glad it was on my shelves....let’s see why.
Our novel opens with Joaquín “a tense man, a man who feels
comfortable only on the margins of days, behind mirrors” a morphine addicted
photographer working at the insane asylum photographing the inmates.
One of the inmates, Matilda, asks him “How does one come to
be a photographer of crazy people?” and this sparks a memory in Joaquín, he’s
met her before, in a bordello:
Like all the other women whose
portraits he had made in that particular bordello, Matilda chose the scene and
the poses. Some of the women preferred to remain in their own rooms, lying on
the same mattresses they worked on. Other, though, suggested a visit to a
nearby brook. Some removed their clothes without the slightest hesitation,
while others chose exotic Chinese regalia, and a few decided to face the camera
in their customary dishabille. They had all no doubt seen the erotic postcards then
in vogue on the market, and although Joaquín explained that heir photographs
had no commercial value whatsoever, most of them went through efforts partly
ludicrous, partly sincere ti imitate the languid or provocative poses of divas
such as Adela Eisenhower or Eduwiges Chateau. Then, as the session went on and
Joaquín’s unthreatening attitude managed to create a tenuous confidence, some
of the models, never many, would begin to “flow,” as he called it. When that
happened, it would be slow, almost subterranean, and might even pass unnoticed.
At those times, Joaquín always thought about the movements of a sunflower.
Sometimes it was just a gesture of amazement, a flicker of shyness or disgust
and tiredness, the interrogation barelu visible on the face: “What the hell am
I doing here?” And then the women would turn inward once more, to the place
where they saw themselves as they wished to see themselves. And that was the
exact place that the photographer yearned to know, yearned to halt forever. The
place where a woman accepted herself. There, seductiveness did not turn
outward, nor was it one-way; there, in a gesture indivisible and unique,
seductiveness was not a hook but a map. Joaquín was convinced that it was
possible to reach that place. Joaquín Buitrago had still believed in the
impossible that day when Matilda removed her clothes with no embarrassment
whatever and, reclining on the marble table as she sought his eyes behind the
lens, she asked him:
“How does one come to be a
photographer of whores?”
Joaquín becomes obsessed with Matilda, a fellow liver on the
margins of society, and hatches a plan to get closer to her, and her story by
beforeinding the asylum’s Chief Doctor, eventually getting to borrow Matilda’s
file. Joaquín researches Matilda’s background in the local library.
We then enter a period of “interviews” or discussions
between Joaquín and Matilda and we learn that she is originally from a vanilla
growing village, and moved to the city to be under the care of her uncle at age
fifteen. Matilda’s story of moving from housekeeper to lover to cigarette
factory worker to prostitution is slowly revealed to us:
In Mexico City, twelve percent of
the women between fifteen and thirty years of age were prostitutes, or had been
at some time. Many of them were orphans and single women, although there were
also widows, married women, even women with children. They had been maids,
seamstresses, washerwomen, machine operators, and street vendors, and they had
probably never earned more than twenty-five centavos a day. Of those who
bothered to answer the questions on the registry, half reported that they had
been forced into prostitution by poverty, the other half by vice, or a certain
personal propensity for the profession. The story that Matilda decided to tell
the women where she worked was that she had been dishonoured by a furtive love
affair. Lying skilfully, she told of her seduction by a law student and, tears
coming to her eyes, she related in detail his cruel abandonment of her and the
inevitable expulsion from her family home. They had all told the same story
since Santa made it famous, and they had all proven its efficacy. It softened
the hearts and wallets of the men that paid them for their services, and also
left the men convinced that fornication had actually been an act of charity.
Thus, the morality of both the men and their whores remained unsullied.
But this is not a simple tale of a former prostitute being
sent to an insane asylum and then coming across a photographer from her past.
We follow Matilda’s journey from housekeeper onwards toward love and living in
a desolate silver mining village with an engineer who is certain he’ll make his
fortune, she is wooed by six metres of pure silk.
We also have Joaquín’s tale, of morphine addiction, of
staring at the ceilings, of being disinherited by his own family, unless he can
become clean of the drug, his wasted talent, his propensity for remaining
alone.
Light also plays an important part in our tale, the stark
black and white photographic image being brought to life with our two
protagonists through many references to daylight, night time, the qualities and
shades of light, breaks in clouds and more. Verbally we are given a wonderful
image of the starkness of the times.
We also have the historical element, what progress means to
Mexico in the 1920’s, the political influences of the time and of course a
detailed historical analysis of insanity treatment. There is one chapter in the
novel which explores a number of inmates of the asylum, the self admitted, the
morphine addicted, the religious fervours, schizophrenics and the notations of
the attending doctors.
In an interview for “BalleTrista” author Cristina
Rivera-Garza explains how the work came about, from finding a medical file in
an archive:
CF: Joaquín and Matilda, the two protagonists of No One Will See
Me Cry, are very damaged people, and the book is quite dark in tone. What was
your inspiration for these complex characters?
CRG: She comes directly out of a medical file I found at the archive of
the General Insane Asylum—her picture, in which she could not hide a smile,
fascinated me from the very beginning. It was a gesture I could not accommodate
easily in my notion of insanity or mental institutions or even history at
large. A novel is at times just that: a place for a gesture that seems to be
out of place.
Joaquín emerged out of the initials an anonymous photographer wrote at
the bottom of some porn portraits taken during the early twentieth century in
Mexico City. How does someone become a photographer of the mad?—that question,
not the most optimistic of all, defined his character.
For the full interview go to http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue5/features_1.php
Beautifully researched and poetic in style and tone, in
summary this is an novel full of ephemeral snippets, a story of unrequited love, an
historical gem, a search for meaning in a world that is progressing too fast.
Another glittering addition to my Women In Translation Month reading.
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