Recollections of Things to Come — Elena Garro
I was in awe from page one. How could I not, when one of the book’s first lines reads: “I am only memory and the memory that one has of me.” I could already feel this would be a wonderful experience; few books can enthrall like that right from the start. However, as I read on, I started to wonder who exactly was narrating the story. After I reached the second chapter, I turned to the back of the book to read the summary and that is when I realized that the narrator was the town; not the people, but the place. So I went back to the beginning.
Recollections of things to come is set in the fictional Mexican town of Ixtepec, and it is Ixtepec itself who tells the story that happens among its streets. We are in the post-revolutionary years, at the start of a conflict known as “Cristero War”, towards the end of the 1920s, and the people of Ixtepec live under the control of general Francisco Rosas. As the story develops, we will get to know these people: the Moncada family, part of the high society of Ixtepec; the military and their kidnapped lovers; Juan Cariño and the prostitutes, and more. This is a small and conservative town, naive and envious, where people are in everyone else’s business.
The novel is divided into two parts and each one has a woman as a protagonist. Not necessarily because they’re the characters we see the most or have more dialogue, but because the story revolves around them and the consequences of their choices. In the first part we meet Julia, the lover of general Francisco Rosas, the most beautiful and mysterious woman of Ixtepec. Julia is an enigma even to the general, who suffers for “not being able to see what lived inside her” and takes it out on the town. This also makes Julia the most hated woman in town. Everything is Julia’s fault according to the people of Ixtepec. In the second part, the focus of the story shifts to Isabel Moncada, who has grown up with her parents and brothers in the isolated and suffocating high society of Ixtepec. Isabel feels like a stranger among these people who impose limits on her for being a woman, but her quest for adventure will be her doom.
Elena Garro is not as well-known as she should, not even in Mexico, although fortunately that is beginning to change. Pushed aside by the Mexican intellectuals for accusations of being an “informer for the student movement of 1968” to the government (which included the infamous Tlatelolco massacre, where police killed hundreds of unarmed students), the writer was forced to leave the country and her work was forgotten for decades. She was a woman of character and strong opinions which certainly didn’t work in her favor, and something tells me her story would have been different had she been a man.
Although this novel was published in 1963, Elena Garro had written it ten years before and some critics think of it as one of the first magical realism novels, a term that apparently she detested. This book is, as she herself declared, an homage to her childhood in the town of Iguala, Guerrero; a nostalgic glance to the harshness of her past. With a beautiful and lyrical prose, full of descriptions of the physical, the psychological, and the magical, the author transports us to this dusty and backwards town, where tragedy always wins.
“Cruelty was fiercely exerted on women, stray dogs, and indians.” Violence is omnipresent in Ixtepec, a violence that has many faces. Classism, racism, misogyny, and pure cruelty portray a Mexico of the past that reverberates in the present. Recollections of things to come is a novel about a town trapped in time, inside a country that seems to be trapped as well, and until we see a ray of light among the darkness that surrounds it, it seems fitting that the great Mexican novel should be a tragedy.
This review was originally published in Spanish at Cuaderno Reciclado.
