{"id":107622,"date":"2017-02-14T10:30:10","date_gmt":"2017-02-14T15:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107622"},"modified":"2017-02-14T11:10:46","modified_gmt":"2017-02-14T16:10:46","slug":"the-crying-cat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/the-crying-cat\/","title":{"rendered":"The Crying Cat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amparo D\u00e1vila\u2019s translator discovers the truth behind her fiction.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Amparo D\u00e1vila.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The stories of the Mexican author Amparo D\u00e1vila intrude on \u201cexternal reality\u201d in unnerving ways. To illustrate, I\u2019ll offer a personal tale: my brush with her story \u201cMoses and Gaspar,\u201d which appears in the Winter issue<\/a> of The Paris Review<\/em>. Last fall, when Audrey Harris and I were at work on the translation, I visited a friend who was moving house in Oaxaca. We\u2019d packed some of her books into boxes and paused, at twilight, to sit down for dinner at a table in a large half-covered patio. My friend said that her two cats sensed the upcoming move and had become agitated. At that moment, we saw that one of them\u2014a big marmalade cat, an intelligent and communicative fellow\u2014was crouched at the far end of the tabletop. In the meager glow of the single bulb that lit the growing gloom, the cat began to cry soundlessly: tears filled his eyes and dripped onto the edge of the table and the floor below, while he stared into space. \u201cSee?\u201d said my friend. \u201cHe knows we\u2019re moving.\u201d It was an uncanny, inexplicable scene. Cats are emotionally sensitive to changes, I know\u2014I\u2019ve heard cats cry, moan, yowl in distress\u2014but never had I seen one mourn in a way that seemed so peculiarly, exclusively, jarringly human. I went home that night to find a new round of corrections on \u201cMoses and Gaspar\u201d in my inbox. <\/p>\n

Those who have read D\u00e1vila\u2019s story know that a scene seemed to have leaped from it straight into my personal life. Without spoiling the tale, I will say that I experienced a manifestation of the ambiguous, uneasy continuum between the animal and the human (or the animal and the human and something else), an instability of borders that lies at the heart of D\u00e1vila\u2019s story and makes it linger, disquietingly, in the reader\u2019s mind. In \u201cMoses and Gaspar,\u201d I read silently weeping pets as a clear narrative signal of things out of the ordinary. But now, faced with my friend\u2019s cat, I found that it was entirely true to the world I live in.<\/p>\n

This play between fantasy and reality is a fitting introduction to D\u00e1vila\u2019s place in Mexican letters. Essentially unheard-of in the English language, D\u00e1vila is often known in Mexico as a writer of short stories touching on the fantastic and the uncanny. (The latter, ironically, has no good translation into Spanish that I\u2019m aware of: sometimes I\u2019ve seen it called lo siniestro<\/em>, \u201cthe sinister,\u201d which doesn\u2019t quite get at the strange relationship with the familiar that is embedded in the English word uncanny<\/em> or the German unheimlich<\/em>.) A prize bearing her name in Mexico, the Premio Nacional de Cuento Fant\u00e1stico Amparo D\u00e1vila, is awarded explicitly to stories of the fantastic by emerging writers. Yet D\u00e1vila herself has said that she writes \u201cla literatura vivencial\u201d\u2014that is to say, experiential, always taking what she has lived and known as a seed or starting point\u2014and her literary reputation rests squarely on how she deals with the psychological stuff of real life.<\/p>\n

Born in the town of Pinos in the state of Zacatecas, D\u00e1vila\u00a0published her first book of stories, Tiempo destrozado<\/em>\u2014from which \u201cMoses and Gaspar\u201d is taken\u2014with the prestigious Fondo de Cultura Econ\u00f3mica in 1959. During the previous decade, she had published several volumes of poetry, but it was fiction that made her name. Her stories immediately commanded respect, and it\u2019s hard to overstate how grudgingly such respect was granted to women in that era: Tiempo destrozado<\/em> was published barely six years after women in Mexico were granted suffrage. The 1950s were a rich decade of Mexican literature only peppered with female names, such as Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro\u2014heavyweights who nevertheless had to fight against being overshadowed by male colleagues and partners. D\u00e1vila herself was secretary to the great Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes, and Reyes opened literary circles to her and encouraged her to publish her stories. At the same time, we shouldn\u2019t reduce D\u00e1vila\u2019s history to the male figures who helped smooth her access to the patriarchal milieu: she built herself a literary career in willful defiance of both peers and parents who believed that it was absurd for a woman to move to Mexico City from the provinces in hopes of pursuing such a vocation.<\/p>\n

Tiempo destrozado<\/em><\/a> was followed by the story collection M\u00fasica concreta<\/a><\/em>, in 1964; her third collection, \u00c1rboles petrificados<\/em>, arrived thirteen years later, in 1977, and won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. That was all until 2009, when a collection of five new tales, Con los ojos abiertos<\/em>, was included in her volume of collected stories, also published by Fondo de Cultura Econ\u00f3mica<\/a>. By then, she had been neglected for years by the reading public in Mexico, and the collected stories coincided with a long-overdue resurgence of interest in her work. Her output is scant in pages: D\u00e1vila has professed to being an undisciplined writer who produces a story only when it insists on being written, through the surfacing of some compellingly powerful memory or feeling. But with this small body of work, she has garnered a reputation for the precision and fineness of her writing; her skill at snapping off the end of a narrative with a sharp and concise twist; her powerful expression of fatalism, fear, and a sense of entrapment; and her destabilizing use of ambiguity.<\/p>\n

D\u00e1vila has always declined to associate herself with any movement or group. Some of her stories employ the supernatural, but perhaps a greater number of them have no fantastic elements whatsoever. You might say that her stories, whether \u201cfantastic\u201d or \u201crealistic,\u201d tend to revolve around characters gripped by extreme states of mind, psyches stoked with an uncertain mix of imagination and fact. D\u00e1vila herself simply says she writes about the three fundamental mysteries of life: love, madness, and death. She names Kafka and D. H. Lawrence as primary influences, but not Poe, whom she didn\u2019t read until after the publication of her first two story collections (his tales were apparently such a wrenching experience that they left her with nervous colitis). She has also said, in an interview, that \u201cwhat I do in literature is come and go from reality to fantasy, from fantasy to reality, the way life itself is.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

D\u00e1vila and cat.<\/p><\/div>\n

One effect of this coming and going is that it\u2019s often impossible to be sure whether the events in her tales are supernatural or imagined, leaving the work carefully poised between contradictory interpretations. A woman in one story from M\u00fasica concreta<\/em> is being stalked by a malevolent toad, unless the toad is actually a paranoid fantasy about the lover who is destroying her relationship with her husband. In a tale from Tiempo destrozado<\/em>, a woman is unhinged by insomnia caused by hearing rats in the walls of her house, yet the reader can never be sure of the source of the noises or whether they are the product of the woman\u2019s anxieties. Again and again, D\u00e1vila\u2019s characters are menaced by phantoms or assailants, are trapped in enclosed spaces or enclosed lives. The \u201creal causes\u201d may be ambiguous, but the mental states manifested\u2014fear, desperation, and nervous obsession\u2014are familiar, only heightened to an excruciating intensity.<\/p>\n

D\u00e1vila grounds these mental states in concrete scenarios true to the world we inhabit: the anxiety that infuses the life of a young woman from the provinces trying to eke out a living in the Mexican capital, perhaps, or the pressures and suspicions directed toward an older woman who hasn\u2019t married. When unusual or exaggerated events disrupt her characters\u2019 routine existences, those events seem to arrive not from outside but from inside, to express the underlying power dynamics present in their lives. In \u201cThe Guest,\u201d one of her very few stories translated into English (published in the 2011 anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic<\/em>), a woman is driven to murder by a strange and malevolent houseguest; the guest is seen as a threat, however, because of the prisonlike domesticity to which she has been confined by her cold, controlling husband. It\u2019s no accident that many of D\u00e1vila\u2019s protagonists or sufferers are women: their entrapment, lack of agency in the face of violence, and explosive responses to the pressure to be dependent, deferential, and controlled form a disturbingly accurate reflection of D\u00e1vila\u2019s real world. But not all are women, as \u201cMoses and Gaspar\u201d demonstrates, nor is D\u00e1vila\u2019s work, which she resolutely labels \u201cuniversal,\u201d intended to have a feminist or gender-specific slant.<\/p>\n

What has kept readers in Mexico enthralled and troubled by D\u00e1vila is that even her most fantastic or morbid stories offer no escape. Instead, they relentlessly turn the reader back toward the real, toward aspects of our lives we know to be true even if we relegate them to the realm of the not-talked-about. Some we don\u2019t want to see directly\u2014that, for instance, we may be subject to violence and terror within our own homes or that our emotions and perceptions can cross the fine line into what is defined, always in culturally fraught terms, as insanity. Others we have a hard time seeing because they are strange and complex and interfere with the stable categories on which our daily lives are dependent. I think of my friend\u2019s cat silently crying, so clearly illustrating that the border between human and animal is less distinct than we might believe.<\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t surprise me if D\u00e1vila, who is fascinated by cats, knew, when she wrote \u201cMoses and Gaspar,\u201d that animals can weep this way. I only learned this after being attuned to it\u2014primed to notice it\u2014by her story. And, reoriented to see the real-world stuff her fiction is made of, I look at the eerie way in which Jos\u00e9 Kraus is thoroughly dominated by his pets in \u201cMoses and Gaspar\u201d and find this unlikely power dynamic, too, more plausible than I had first thought. What other unsettling elements in D\u00e1vila\u2019s stories might, in fact, be observations made from life? Her stories wait\u2014quietly, modestly\u2014not to be unlocked but to pry open the minds of their readers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Matthew Gleeson is a writer, editor, and translator based in Oaxaca, Mexico.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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