The Street of Aguascalientes
A combination of less-than-common abstract adjectives and very precise sensory images serve to bring to vivid illustration life in a Mexican city that is not Mexico City. Context helps define the adjectives and one needs no dictionary for the sights and smells to hit one like a slap across the face. In a moment of clarity, this locale that is likely quite unfamiliar to most readers instantly becomes a very real place descried with clarity:
“The streets in Aguascalientes were so many refuse piles. Men in khaki moved to and fro like bees before their hive, overrunning the restaurants, the crapulous lunch houses, the parlous hotels, and the stands of the street vendors on which rotten pork lay alongside grimy cheese.”
The Crucible of a Revolution
The novel begins with a showdown between government authority and powerless peasant. As is so often the case, give some people authority and they abuse it. That abuse in this particular case will have long term consequences as it serves to transform simple peasant Demetrio into a fiery revolutionary with fire being the appropriate centerpiece of the imagery:
“The moon peopled the mountain with vague shadows. As he advanced at every turn of his way Demetrio could see the poignant, sharp silhouette of a woman pushing forward painfully, bearing a child in her arms. When, after many hours of climbing, he gazed back, huge flames shot up from the depths of the canyon by the river. It was his house, blazing”
Camilla
Intertwining within the novel’s preoccupation with the Mexican Revolution is a complicated and ultimately tragic love story. Imagery associated with the natural terrain and wilderness in which the revolution is being carried out is one way in which the two narrative remain interrelated:
“The river seemed to have been sprinkled with a fine red dust. On its surface drifted now a sky of variegated colors, now the dark crags, half-light, half shadow. Myriads of luminous insects twinkled in a hollow. Camilla, standing on the beach of washed, round stones, caught a reflection of herself in the waters; she saw herself in her yellow blouse with the green ribbons, her white skirt, her carefully combed hair, her wide eyebrows and broad forehead, exactly as she had dressed to please Luis. She burst into tears.”
Viva la Revolución
The novel’s final image of Demetrio as the last guardian of the revolutionary idea standing alone among an ocean of corpses is haunting and romantic. It is also almost certainly the most famous image from the narrative and one that lingers in the mind long afterward:
“Suddenly, Demetrio finds himself alone. Bullets whiz past his ears like hail. He dismounts and crawls over the rocks, until he finds a parapet...lying flat on the ground, begins to shoot…The smoke of the guns hangs thick in the air. Locusts chant their mysterious, imperturbable song. Doves coo lyrically in the crannies of the rocks. The cows graze placidly. The sierra is clad in gala colors. Over its inaccessible peaks the opalescent fog settles like a snowy veil on the forehead of a bride.”
