It
Pierces the Skin: out of the universe of fiction, images, the word and
astonishment.
by
María Esther Quintana Millamoto
The
mini short stories in It Pierces the Skin (FlowerSong Press, 2020), which straddle the divide
between prose and poetry, could generally be classified as vignettes because
of their emphasis on the description of characters, scenes and landscapes, and also
because they evoke the feelings and sensations belonging to the protagonist, Violeta,
whose presence throughout the text unifies the collection of brief stories that make up the book. Violeta,
a Salvadoran refugee in the United States and a writer and traveler, appears in
different places throughout the narrative, such as New York, Madrid, Lisbon and
Athens. These spaces constitute the geographic framework of her psychological trajectory
along the pathways of melancholy due to a love lost, with no hope for return or
atonement. Far from telling Violeta’s story in a lineal fashion and tracing any
causality between the narrated events, It Pierces the Skin avoids temporal
markers with the goal of emphasizing the emotional effects that key experiences
in her life have had on the protagonist. These include childhood abuse, her emigration
to the United States, her travels and the breakup with Pedro, among other things.
The
first text, which also gives us the title of the collection, is an indictment of
the brutality of the war in El Salvador, since the protagonist remembers that
when she was a child she had to flee abruptly—by train—from the Salvadoran soldiers
who suddenly appeared near her house with machine guns. That thought leads to
another, current and present: the cancelation of the Temporary Protected Status
or TPS for Salvadorans. Both reflections are sparked by the sound of a train and
by a small cut that the protagonist suffers in her kitchen. In this way, a
connection is made between Violeta’s private experience, in other words, the microcosm
of the violence she has experienced personally, and the macrocosm of the violence
in El Salvador and the anti-immigration politics carried out by the U.S. government.
As with other texts in this collection, nature, here embodied in the song of
the woodpecker that Violeta hears in the garden and in the trees that she sees
from her kitchen window, helps her find peace in a foreign land: “She was
soothed by the chirping sounds coming from the thick bushes.” The social theme, constant in Caraza’s
writing, is also found in “43,” a story that alludes to the disappearance of
the 43 normalistas in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, in September 2014, where the narrative
voice imagines itself as one of the victims who lie beneath the sun with no tomb
and no justice: “In the darkness of the night, I felt warm blood trickling
toward my eyes. . . ‘I’m from Ayotzinapa’. . . I am the 43.”
Beyond the social
commitment, It Pierces the Skin’s
poetic and introspective prose is designed to evoke universal feelings and moods
through the emotions that the protagonist experiences, especially the ones that
have to do with disappointment in love and the sorrow that stems from it. In this
sense, the landscape is fundamental since it situates the protagonist’s
memories geographically, thus facilitating the work of mourning, as we see in “Lisbon
and the Sea”: “The song of forgetting is embroidered upon its history. That
which remains is fading: the sighs, one hand that barely touches the other. Nothing
remains, not even blood laden with pain.” In other vignettes, the protagonist
ventures through the terrain of a more direct erotism, such as in “The Nereid,”
where Violeta imagines herself as one of the sirens enshrined in the blue tiles
of a museum she visits in Lisbon: “If I were a design on the clay surface, I
would be a whirlwind engraved for all eternity. I rest in the small cloister,
drawing words, imagining colors on the page . . . . If I were an azulejo tile,
I would live in this house as well, waiting for you, disrobed and aroused.” “The
Nereid” emphasizes the intimate connection that It Pierces the Skin establishes
between the visual arts and literature, like technologies that capture the instant
to preserve it in images and writing.
Another
element that is fundamental to It Pierces the Skin is the musicality of the
sentences that, along with the beauty of the images, emphasize the author’s
stylistic concerns. One paradigmatic example of this is found in “Peacocks,” a micro-fiction
that reveals Caraza’s intuition and her confidence in the power of anaphor to orchestrate—sometimes
alone and at other times with alternating alliteration—the rhythm of her prose:
“The females—absent, distant,
naked—waiting by the sea. Born of Venus, born of sea foam.” The précieux
description of the peacocks and the musicality of the prose brings to mind the modernism
of Darío’s swans. However, their personification creates a sense of estrangement
in the reader and, in this way, she is able to imagine them from an innovative perspective,
thus adding originality to their description.
If
It Pierces the Skin is in dialogue with the literary tradition, using images
conventionally associated with the landscape of romantic poetry—especially its connection
with the feelings of the poet—images such as the moon, the waves, twilight or the
wind (“Once Again, the Train,” “A Pinch of Sunshine,” “I Am Yours,” “It Blows
Toward the South,” “The Voice of Dawn,” “The Time of Swallows,” the last one as
an obvious homage to Bécquer), on the other hand, some vignettes emphasize the
contemporary nature of the writing, mentioning elements of technology or the
current urban landscape (such as the skyscrapers or boats of New York) with
which Violeta connects emotionally or intellectually. The vignette “False
alarm” is one example: “‘The light from the screen and from the moon are
similar,’ she thought: white, cold, penetrating.” The computer screen acts as a
metonymy of the writing, which is the only activity that can take Violeta out
of her “chaotic thoughts” and lead her to a “A world of words, metaphorical. A world where . . . [t]hings happen . .
. , poems are born from the tables, from glasses, from cups” (“Parallel
Life”).
Like Pablo Neruda, Caraza discovers poetry
even in the simplest of objects, which is something only the intuition of a poet
can achieve. In addition, the author reminds us that literature is an effective
way of creating order within the chaos of life, denouncing injustices, seeing
the world with new eyes through a filter of sounds and metaphors and, in that
way, creating and imagining a different world, out of the universe of fiction, images,
the word and amazement.
María Esther Quintana Millamoto
Texas A&M University
(Original text in Spanish, translated by Sandra Kingery)
