LOOSING MY ESPANISH
By H.G. Carrillo
Pantheon. 325 pp. $23
Oscar Delossantos won't be teaching high school history classes much longer. The narrator of H.G. Carrillo's debut novel, Loosing My Espanish, Oscar has 34 days before he loses his post in a Chicago parochial high school. Of course there are rumors about the reasons for his imminent dismissal -- wasn't he accused of a sexual indiscretion with a student? But at least Oscar knows what he wants to do before he leaves: inspire in his indifferent students a love of family and of Cuban history.
It won't be an easy task. For the most part, the students just aren't interested. Far from being Castro-obsessed Cubans, they're heartland Americans, Midwesterners who ski in Aspen and dream in English of Hawaiian beaches. Unlike Oscar, they have no idea of what it's like to have "dangled from a little piece of twine over the Florida Straits" with sharks circling beneath. These blessed young boys have never had nightmares of bearded revolutionaries waving their rifles in the air.
In this complexly structured novel, Oscar's narrative moves backward and forward, alternating between the present and historical time. If one considers the present moment as a force field that holds together all the disparate elements in the book, a cohesive tale emerges from a seemingly disorderly series of scenes.
An adroit writer, Carrillo is a master of these kaleidoscopic techniques. In one scene, Oscar's mother, Ama (who may be in the early stages of Alzheimer's), accidentally sets her house in Chicago on fire and burns it down. At the same time that she notices that the "little casa blanca" is in flames, the increasingly confused Ama imagines that she's been delivered into the past, back to the time when, brown and long-limbed, she was a flamboyant beauty crossing the Sierra Maestra carrying in her head the recipe for flan con guayaba, the beloved Cuban dessert.
The strains of the mood-setting folksong "Guantanamera" suffuse the narrative. Alma listens to her grandmother, the abuela who scolds her for not acting like a proper Cuban black girl. "Negrita. Negrita, there's laundry still on the line; there's ironing to be done; cover your hair, negrita, nobody wants to see that wool." What possessed Ama, a Cuban farm girl, to do something as unimaginative as open a beauty salon in Chicago? Wasn't she the daughter of a black woman who could lift a bowl an inch from the table without touching it and drag her eyeless betrothed by his woolly hair from the ink of the midnight Caribbean?
"History," Carrillo argues, "is only the memory of others into which you insinuate yourself." Filtered through Carrillo's extremely romantic sensibility, the early history of Cuba has the unbounded playfulness of Shakespearean comedy. In an imaginary terrain, a mustard field in full bloom, Columbus chases the lusty and seductive Spanish monarch; Carrillo asks only whether Columbus's regal mistress was really raven-haired. With narrative exuberance, he writes of swashbuckling French Corsairs, of the dashing pirate Jacques de Sores plundering the gold, the silver and the jewels of Las Americas. In a mock somber tone, Carrillo reminds us that we shouldn't be shocked if we find a wolf or a wicked stepmother or even an island made of sugar in his fictive, historical garden.
Carrillo's Cuba is a concoction. "Why remain las victimas de la historia," he asks, "when it's yours to write, yours to control?" It's my guess that H.G. Carrillo doesn't think of himself as a traditional American novelist. His literary ancestors are the fabulous Latins with their reverence for myth and for memory, their penchant for surrealism: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende. (We shouldn't forget the late, tormented Reinaldo Arenas, whose Cuba was such a hell.) But Carrillo also owes a debt to both Nabokov and Borges. These two literary giants believed that the writer creates the fiction that is the world, describes it and sets its boundaries. When Carrillo constructs a Cuba that exists only in words, he and his fictive island coexist in what Henry James called "a rare state of the imagination." For a young novelist, that's a pretty good place to be. •
Wendy Gimbel is the author of "Havana Dreams."
