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Just writing to write.
Munacra
Registered User
Registered User
The birds that were frozen in the branches like tiny glass statues fell from the trees and broke apart like ripe tomatoes the day Allende had begun to thaw. Typhon picked up the remains and gathered them all in a black trash bag which he threw into the garbage bin so the little corpses would not stink up the patio. Dona Leonarda hated the smell and she was not one to tolerate that kind of indecency in her house. The men who picked up the trash, riding burros that hauled rotten wood carriages where all the trash would go, would come to every house in Allende every morning for the next two weeks to pick up all the little corpses and take them to a giant furnace where the multitude of dead birds were burned to prevent the flu. The crematory smoke dispersed into the air as if all the little burned bones and ash had gathered together into one giant bird that soared into the air with new life.
Dona Leonarda gave Typhon many chores besides the one of animal undertaker, so he hurried, because the sun seemed like it wanted to race and finish its work before he could. Dona Leonarda was a despot, a daughter of the traditions of Franco and of Pinochet, but she was also a daughter of gypsies and fortune tellers and snake charmers. Her father was a fascist ex-army General who ruled his house with an iron fist and her mother was a beautiful black haired gypsy who had lost her arm in the conflicts. In Allende, she had cured migraines and established contact between living relatives and dead relatives in order that the dead ones would not miss the latest family gossip.
She married the General to murder him, because it was the General’s violent excesses during the conflicts that had taken her arm and her family. They had died together, but not in each other’s arms, but at each other’s throats. The gypsy had her one arm around the officer’s jugular and the General, with his face blue, had stabbed a fork into her breast so deep it had skewered her heart. Dona Leonarda thus inherited her father’s character and her mother’s trade.
-- He was a great military man -- Dona Leonarda would fondly talk of him, and about her gypsy mother she would say nothing.
Dona Leonarda at one point had fallen in love and married with a man who sold trinkets at the market, but since she would not tolerate the indecency of adultery in her house, she killed him. She had done so by putting a spell on him that brought an itch to his groin every time he made love to his prostitutes. It got so bad, that he finally decided that it was better to take his own life before he scratched himself to the bone. From then on, Dona Leonarda had no love for men, and her own kin most of all. She had only one son, and because she would not tolerate the indecency of him not having a mother, she kept him as a servant but not as a son.
Of Typhon’s father no one knew much, but what was known was that he had escaped from the endless life of servitude that Dona Leonarda had prepared for him to look for his fortune at the capital. He had found it with a young aristocrat girl from with fine golden hair and a gap in her mouth which her friends found unattractive and which she hid by never smiling. Dona Leonarda never forgave her son for missing work, so using one of her spells she placed a curse on herself that would give every male member of her lineage the little tail of a sheep so the world would forever remember her sons as cowards.
Day to night and night to day, Typhon would lead the life of servitude that Dona Leonarda had prepared for his father and which he had begun to repay so early in his life when he was given to her care after his mother died of a series of migraine attacks which had become increasingly stronger with the chirping of the cicadas. After her death, Typhon’s father had prayed and prayed until God granted him his wish to become invisible and escape his life of servitude after which he was never seen again. His inheritance to Typhon, apart from the little lamb tail, was his life of servitude. That way Typhon became the first boy in the world to be orphaned of both father and mother while one of them was still alive. Typhon smelled like loneliness, a dusty and damp musk which attracted the moths, and his appearance matched that aroma. Over his pants, he wore a sash which hid the sheep’s tail he had been cursed with. He didn’t mind it much and he found that it only got in the way sometimes. No one had ever been around to tell him that little boys don’t have sheep’s tails so he became a young man perfectly at comfort with his misshapenness.
The day when he bathed his grandmother she had told him that she had hired a young girl from Allende to help clean the house. She said, in very specific terms, that now that he was becoming a young man, she would not tolerate the indecency of a man doing woman’s work in her house. While he soaped her massive back which was full of pockmarks that retained the soap like a porous rock and which Typhon had to dip his finger with water to clean it out, she fell into a deep sleep in which she started counting to three hundred backwards and forward with a sonorous voice. She did this unconsciously; to keep away the spirits that forever hungered after her power.
Typhon woke her up and dried her with a towel that was as massive as the shower curtains and then they would go into a ritual that would last for two weeks until the girl from Allende came.
“Before you go to sleep,†she would tell Typhon while he dressed her, “remember to wash the dishes and clean the bathtub. The chickens need to be fed at midnight exactly because if not they will get worms like the last time.â€
“Yes grandmother†he would say, and she would tell chore after chore that took Typhon from night to morning and them from morning to night to finish, to the point where he was worked so hard that sometimes he fell asleep with the mules at the stable. He would finish dressing her for bedtime, like a giant geisha doll, at which point the endless procession of chores would stop for the meantime and then resume when he would walk her to her room.
“…and the candlesticks need polishing and so does my rocking chair. You know I like the brightness of it, I can’t sleep if it’s not shiny. And don’t forget to get the dough ready for tomorrow’s dessert. I’ve wanted to eat something sweet for a long time now. And the – “
She fixed Typhon with an abrupt stare that he felt stabbed like daggers down his spine.
“Stand up straight!†she would yell and hit Typhon with a massive arm the size of a tree trunk which uprooted him like a frail and thin tree being swung around by the trunk of an elephant.
And when she was in bed, she would continue giving orders until they became unintelligible murmurs as she drifted to sleep.
“…and the birds…they’re stinking up the patio…throw them in the trash…â€
“Yes grandmother†Typhon would say.
And so it would go on, until on a Sunday afternoon, when the ice had completely melted and the birds did not fall from the branches anymore, the girl from Allende came to the house with a big suitcase with its side full of postage stamps from all over the world that she had stolen from her father and that she had glued to the side of the suitcase with the bubblegum she liked to chew.
So I wrote what amounts to Gabriel Garcia Marquez fan fiction. What ya'll think?
Munacra on
Posts
Stop saying "Dona Leonarda"! Is that a surname/forename or both combined? Break up the repetition by referring to them by title a little :?
In fact, although I quite like it ("married the General to murder him"- that kind of line really sticks with me because of the simplicty of the phrasing belying the actual impact of the words) you repeat things an awful lot.
In the first paragraph, we have three "trashes", "little burned corpses" twice: and the formatting at the very end is blocked-together and hard to read.
But I like the descriptions and ultimately enjoyed it despite the genre not being my bag, and the premise is actually enthralling. You really soften your own impact through repetition and clunky phrasing... I can't help feeling that you set out to emulate this Gabriel fella and that I'm just not "getting" a style that you're imitating, but I can't say it's fantastic.
Tighten up your copy and let us see it again!
I like it, and I like the ideas.
However, whilst I appreciate magic realism, there are aspects to it that I'm not sure you want to copy wholesale. The long, wandering digressions add flavour, but you have to be pretty careful with pacing, because blurting them out on the page as you think of them robs them of impact. You have two massive paragraphs about her history breaking up the flow, and you segue straight into one about his history? Hold your cards closer to your chest, and let your reader see them at the appropriate time.
Also, I think the large expository paragraphs tend to undercut character in favour of that general flavour. This is a matter of personal preference I suppose, but I would much rather have Dona reveal these things in coversation to Typhon - filtered through her own experience and prejudice, of course. Giving her a few lines is a bit cruel.
Also: It's so cold that birds freeze on the branch, but you don't even mention the temperature once after that? Even the invalid old lady doesn't seem to be worried about the sub-arctic conditions.
There is no place called Allende (there is however, a writer. If that's a lame in-joke, so help me god). Don't just set it in South America because you've got a boner for it at the moment.
So - good ideas, mired by a preoccupation with style.
My old school teacher is from Allende. It's a little town about 30 miles south of Monterrey.
I'm going to take your comments to heart and write it down my own way instead.
My bad. Google Earth lied to me.
Now: Will Google Earth be used in the same sinister manner? Will you wake up one morning in your swanky New York flat, walk outside, and fall from Ayer's Rock? Is this a chance you can live with? Sign my online petition!
EDIT: Only after reading the whole piece I think I understand it: She had a son, the son had a son with a whore, the whore died, and the son fled, and now he works for his grandmother?
The international reference breaks with the isolated feel of the piece.
Dona should read Doña, shouldn't it?
Gabriel Garcia wrote Spanish, and IMO, Spanish lends itself better to long sentences than English does, even though English does a good job of it too. However, your style reads as a translation from Spanish, which, to me, feels a tiny bit forced.
Also, like Zsetrek said, be careful with pacing.
All in all, I really like it. I don't mind long sentences or calm expositions, especially not in this kind of story. They play a part in setting the mood.
9 out of 10 points for a Gabriel Garcia M. fan-fic. I will, however, add the same comment that you added to the one thing I've written here so far: I expect something to happen in the stories I read.
Make something happen.
Edcrab: “Doña Leonarda†is a title and then a name. It is sort of like “Ms.â€, but usually used with the first name, not the surname. It comes very naturally in Spanish, but sounds a little more forced in English, probably because it's one of those kinds of words you don't translate to keep some of the original flavor, like the Japanese words in Shogun.
Overall impression: :^:
I get the feeling that if this is a style you want to pursue, or even mimic simply for the moment so that you can incorporate elements of it into your own style, you will have many darlings to kill! I can see that bit about the tree trunk being something that was fun to write, and possibly it might even have some cool literary device name, but I wasn't really feeling it.
I like the bit about her giving the men in her family sheep's tails. That's just the spiteful sort of thing I can see a dishonored South American woman doing. (For point of reference, my ex-girlfriend's family was from Nicaragua and while not the same thing, there were definite parallels between the personalities of her relatives and the character you've created here)
I also had some confusion with regards to the retelling of the family's motives/misfortunes. Specifically, whenever you used a pronoun I thought it referred to Typhon and had to go back and reread a few times to figure out that you were talking about his dad, and the same went for the mom; I kept thinking you were talking about Dona Leonarda.
Also: I do not know why, and I would usually never advocate this sort of thing, but after hearing about Typhon I for some reason require an explanation of the look in his eyes. Maybe revealed by Dona Leonarda, or the new girl, or self-critique, but it seems necessary. I can offer no explanation for this!
I liked it, but I did have some trouble reading it. I'm a fan of prose afflicted with wanderlust, but it's rough in its current state. I didn't really understand what happened my first time reading it. The three paragraphs of history scrambled the characters and pronoun trackers in my head.
And I agree with Draug about the geisha doll reference. I'm not sure if latin america has anything similar to a geisha.
With some more editing, I think it will serve well as an introduction, but not so much as a stand-alone piece. The pacing is very slow and doesn't change throughout.
i love the name Typhon and i really like a lot of the imagery. one of my favourite things about marquez is not the fact that he can get away with ridiculously long sentences that seem to contain magic, history, characterization, absurdity, and poignancy all at once, but the rhythms with which he does this. someone already mentioned how effective your line was when "She married the general to murder him, ..." gold. not just because it's so simple yet loaded with meaning, but also because that kind of image really breaks the dominant rhythm (which is more lyrical). a good example of this is the intro to my favourite of his stories:
most of his sentences read like the first one. but it's the ability to know how and when to throw in one of those short and sweet sentences that i find really engaging and the key to making the other stuff work. marquez also uses dialogue to the same effect and you did that quite well in the latter part of the piece.
so now the question is how do we turn a marquez fan-boy into something wonderfully unique? hmmm. well, for one thing, don't set it in latin america! how about some good ol' texan magic realism? i'd be curious to see what you'd do with that. and the pacing here seems "novely". if it's a short-story then we need to see some critical tension around which to organize all those wonderful descriptions.
spcmn: Thanks for being all cool with my rip-off.