A Son of the Rock

Bloomsbury, 2003, 156 p. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (into USian) from the Spanish Inez.

Fuentes is the first Mexican writer I have read and his style has similarities to fellow Latin Americans Gabriel García Márquez and Maria Vargas Llosa but couldn’t be mistaken for either. Throughout Inez his prose has that assuredness – even in translation – of a writer in full control of his material and vision, one whom the reader feels instinctively can be trusted to know what he is about.

Here, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara is a famous conductor, precious enough to regard himself not merely as a conduit but as a chef d’orchestre. He will make no recordings, only performing live, so that each concert is unique, unrepeatable, believing that this forces audiences to listen. The story of his involvement with the Inez of the title, born Inés Rosenzweig but professionally known as Inez Prada, revolves around three performances of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust; in bomb-ravaged London in 1940, Mexico City in 1949 and London again in 1967. This tale is intercut with the much more obscure account of the pre-historical first encounter between a man and a woman, known respectively as neh-el and ah-nel, told mostly in the future tense. Due to that use of tense these passages are rendered trickier to read, a blend of myth and destiny lending a distancing to the events, at least until this second narrative crashes into the first during that third concert.

As well as love, sex and death (“Sex teaches us everything. It’s our fault that we never learn, and again and again fall into the same delicious trap,”) Fuentes touches on music as a wellspring of human existence. “Was music … the true fig-leaf of our shames, the final sublimation … of our mortal visibility…?” He also describes “the acrid odour of English melancholy, disguised as cold and indifferent courtesy,” and comments on his background when a Mexican tells Atlan-Ferrara, “The cruelty of war in Latin America is fiercer, maestro, because it’s invisible and has no time frame. Besides, we’ve learned to hide our victims and bury them at night,” adding, “In Mexico even we atheists are Catholic, maestro.” Fuentes notes, too, that, “a man… is slow to give up his childhood. There are few immature women, but many children disguised as men.”

While the book at first seems an odd mixture of the traditional love story (if an intermittent one) and the all-but mythic second strand, this is clearly good stuff, the whiff of magic realism (OK, outright fantasy) bends the final intertwining of the two into a strange orbit of its own. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more Fuentes.

Pedant’s corner:- no opening quote mark when a chapter starts with a piece of speech or quotation. “‘Him and his object. Him and his tactile, precise, visible, physical thing’, (‘He and his object. He and his tactile, precise, ..’,) “more that a perishable flower” (more than.) “‘The Moon makes two orbits around the Earth every twenty four hours and fifty minutes. That’s why there are two high tides and two low tides every day.’” (Atlan-Ferrara is mistaken here. The Moon makes one orbit every twenty seven – and a bit – days. The tides occur because the Earth is spinning once a day ‘beneath’ it and so its gravitational effect varies accordingly,) platform shoes (not in 1967.)