Fuentes signals This content downloaded from Arroyo speaks and Harriet thinks as the characters in whom we have been implicated thus far never could; they utter the motives we might create for them.
Arroyo narrates the receiving of his patrimony from a silent peon called Don Garciano and describes his plight as a prisoner of the Revolution; Harriet attempts to assert sexual power over him and is left unsatisfied.
At this key moment in our reading of the novel, we should recall that Octavio Paz, introducing Fuentes at his inauguration into the Collegio Nacional, stressed the power in Fuentes' work of eroticism and politics, "the bedroom and the public square," love and revolution.
In The Old Gringo, events in the bedroom not only reflect but govern consequences in the public square. Fuentes is at pains to represent oppression in sexual exploitation and sterility, from the camp-follower seduced by the Revolution who becomes any man's object, to Arroyo's resigned common-law wife once married to a money-lender who despised her femaleness and punished her for it. Harriet just skirts her gender's clear fate: "our General Arroyo. Aren't you his new woman? Fuentes has given them commonalities that run deep: the children of fugitive fathers who in different ways betrayed their mothers and whose deaths obsess them, both find a brief, betraying in revolutionary substitute Pancho Villa or misanthropic Ambrose Bierce; dispossessed, both are haunted by decaying mansions, in desert and in Washington swamp, in which the ruling passions of their adult lives have been delivered to them.
The chasm between them, however, is wide. Both have worked for the Mirandas, but Harriet ismindlessly loyal to their property rights, Arroyo their implacable, constitutional oppponent.
To Arroyo, Americans? The question is, who is the chingadal Harriet Winslow's frustrated inability to conquer a Mexican brings about the novel's d? She can achieve her father's sensual freedom with Arroyo, but she cannot bear his witness to her naked abandon, nor the impossibility of a shared future.
Even when he is sexually generous she rejects him and "this country that was like a brown body. Does she achieve her own ends? She brutally saves the life of a whore's child with her own mouth and claims to be "good with" children, but, we are repeatedly reminded, in this novel of fathers, sons, and generations she remains childless. Politically, though her Utopian notions vanish when she knows some Mexicans, at the last she discovers "she had never looked at this man," Mansalvo.
When she can finally see that "I want to learn to live with Mexico, I don't want to save it," she is left? She has emerged to a life outside herself of which Arroyo is part, but she will never be what she has seen she could be.
In a fantasy-conversation with Arroyo she once said, "memory is our home," a remark that, back in marble Washington, becomes her fate.
As for her mark upon Mexico, in the last 'moment' she possesses, "their backs were turned to her, and they saw her forever entering a mirror-lined ballroom without looking at herself because, in reality, she was entering a dream. Fuentes shows us the old gringo as he imagines El Paso, and a challenge at the border, and the world's deserts We see the gringo with scribbled sheets of paper and a stubby pencil, know he chooses "to sit down and write to compensate for his physical exertion," and overhear his mind "name the furtive growth of the smoke tree.
But he is also a newspaperman; the fiction he directs to his ideas, he has realized, is This content downloaded from Just so in The Old Gringo do the lurid mystery and sensational trappings compete with the story that is the truth of Mexico's history.
And we? Hypocrite[s] lecteurfs]. The texts that obsess the three characters are measures of their separation: for the gringo history, for Harriet schoolbooks, and for Arroyo the sealed papers "brittle as old silk.
In the novel's symbolic sexual oppression, girls must use circumlocutions for "legs" and "buttocks. Imprinting and dignity, justice Arrroyo's teacher speaks "of talking like we talk, not parroting the speech of others.
Thus the many voices of Pedrito, La Gardu? Fuentes their needs not to stoop in the fields, not to be smothered by strutting aristocrats. Thus Tomas Arroyo takes on an unexampled eloquence to tell us the history of his people and their burdens, a task Fuentes characterizes as "picking up his narrative.
The campesinos know nothing of the personal agort that brings on their calamity; their final view is the one from which we depart. Arroyo's woman knows that he is not a man of words? While baying for This content downloaded from And at the old gringo's death, the words on the papers flying across the desert say, we feel dead if we aren't fighting, pray God this revolution never ends, but if it ends we'll go fight in a new revolution Should we, in Arroyo's last words, call out "Viva Villa"?
Is that what Fuentes' words brought us to see? When the gringo disabuses Harriet about Arroyo's motives and his own, Fuentes lets the old man's roving consciousness ask him, "Did you know she has been creating you just as you were creating her? Did you know we are all the object of another's imagination? Their fate is in our consciousness, and consciousness is the little worm in the bottle of mescal that "you carry all your life" like a good comrade, who will sometimes attack you because he cannot recognize what you have eaten.
These two gringos have come to Mexico "to confront the next frontier of American consciousness Fuentes leaves the answer indeterminate. Like Distant Relations in which Fuentes appears as a character, The Old Gringo ends with a single consciousness carrying the burden of knowledge, attempting unsuccessfully to exhaust all the possibilities of the narrative and so achieve release. But the story requires a reader to complete it.
Within Fuentes' oeuvre, The Old Gringo is a silver work. Lean and accessible, it is a vade mecum for the newcomer to Fuentes' ideas and images. Beyond the narrative no mean exception , voice it shows scant trace of the modernist's urge to stylistic innovation. The narrow time-frame This content downloaded from Long reaches of the prose are quite crisp, the early pages indeed as stark as sun-dried bones; the invocations of Mexican landscape and flora and early Mexican history, conversely, are richly lyrical.
Fuentes brilliantly evokes sounds and smells, especially the bodily and quotidian which he uses in scorn to equalize humanity across classes.
Comic notes, studded throughout, illuminate both tone and meaning: the old man has "the teeth of a gringo or a horse," a horse dealer finds that "revolutions are good for business," cleanliness' proximity to godliness proves insidious. It should go without saying that the novel's elegant structure is perfectly, if a bit aridly, realized, with witty juxtapositions of scene and contrasts of tones as characters talk past one another and struggle for conflicting ends.
In another gesture toward Huston, three distinctive chapters are virtual set-pieces that anchor the novel's character and meaning: the semi-stream-of-consciousnesss through which we are shown Harriet's loneliness and her dreams; Arroyo's wife's hypnotic narration of the shuttered house of her first marriage, incorporating the surreal experience in which she resurrects Arroyo; the tour-de-force of Pancho Villa riding glinting and jingling onto the scene to? What gives The Old Gringo itsmodernist quality is the consciousness expressed by the authorial voice.
Together with the plot itself, that voice forbids any easy, romanticized American response toMexico. The reader is invited? If you want to practice your Spanish listening skills , all you really have to do is pop on some music or a podcast, kick back and relax. Not so with reading. Short stories allow those of us with shorter attention spans to enjoy reading as well.
This is imperative to expanding your Spanish-language vocabulary. It also brings us to our next tip:. FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Click here to check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app. No matter how you prefer to learn new Spanish vocabulary, make sure to study these new words.
Depending on how much you had to study, this process could take a day, a week or maybe even a month. These four tips should be enough for now to get you on your way to effectively reading Spanish short stories. Though he also wrote plays and poetry, Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga is far and away most famous for his short stories.
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