Santa
Santa
A book in the series Latin America in Translation / en Traducción / em Tradução
Sponsored by the Consortium in Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University
Santa
A NOVEL OF MEXICO CITY
Federico Gamboa
Translated and edited by John Charles Chasteen
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
Translation of the books in the series Latin America in Translation / en Traducción /em Tradução, a collaboration between the Consortium in Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University and the university presses of the University of North Carolina and Duke, is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
© 2010
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
All rights reserved. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Merlo with Milk Script by Rebecca Evans. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gamboa, Federico, 1864–1939
[Santa. English]
Santa : a novel of Mexico City /
Federico Gamboa ; translated and edited by John Charles Chasteen.
p. cm.—(Latin America in translation/en traducción/em tradução.)
ISBN 978-0-8078-7107-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Chasteen, John Charles, 1955– II. Title.
PQ 7297.G3S3 2010 863□.62—dc22 2010004478
cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
paper 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
TO PROFESSOR BILL BEEZLEY,
who inspired this translation and who has
done so much to promote the historical study of
Mexican popular culture in the United States.
Contents
INTRODUCTION Why Read Santa?
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Part Two
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Introduction
WHY READ SANTA?
Why read Santa, a novel written more than a century ago? Because of its quality, above all. This is a sophisticated and beautifully executed novel. Santa, the paradigmatic prostitute of late nineteenth-century naturalist fiction in her Mexican incarnation, is rendered by Federico Gamboa with carefully researched veracity, a cinematic eye, and, it must be admitted, not inconsiderable lust.
No wonder that Mexican filmmakers have done so many movie adaptations of the novel, no fewer than four. Though the novel immediately attracted an avid readership when it was published in 1903, it is the cinematic and other nonprint versions that have given Santa its enormous projection in Mexican popular culture. There was a silent Santa film in 1918. Then, in 1932, Santa became the first Mexican “talkie,” with notable box office success and a soundtrack hit song, “Santa,” by the immortal Agustín Lara, who might be described as Mexico's Cole Porter. A bit later, Santa also became a pornographic comic strip. Historian Katherine Elaine Bliss has found that some young Mexican prostitutes of the 1930s told their life stories to social workers in terms that sounded much like Santa's and that, in doing so, they often mentioned the 1932 film version starring Lupita Tovar, Mexico's first glamorous movie actress. Meanwhile, Santa found its way into a steady stream of stage productions and returned to the big screen in 1943 and 1969. In 1978, it became a primetime television series, or telenovela. An analog to Santa in the United States would have to be a novel like UncleTom's Cabin or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of Santa's familiarity to the nation at large, rich and poor, readers and nonreaders over several generations.
But Santa is a very different sort of novel from those two American classics. Santa is a naturalist novel that one might also compare to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Literary naturalism supposedly made novelists into literary scientists studying human behavior much as naturalists might study a colony of birds, that is, through systematic observation. Literary naturalists more or less went out with notebooks to observe the social environments in which they planned to place their fictional characters. Federico Gamboa kept a detailed journal that reveals his observational notes for various scenes in Santa. He never recorded details of a Mexico City brothel, but this does not mean that Gamboa did no participant observation in that department, because he most certainly did. Here is the point: literary naturalists created quasi-documentary historical sources from detailed re-creations of social environments in crafting the settings for the stories they wanted to tell.
A surprising lot of naturalist novelists wanted to tell stories about prostitutes. Émile Zola, the leading exponent—and more or less the inventor—of naturalism wrote about a girl named Nana in his widely influential 1880 novel that takes her name. Gamboa even visited Zola in France, where he became linked, for a time, to a prostitute of the Moulin Rouge, whom he used as something of a nonliterary model for Santa. Likewise, a brothel piano player that Gamboa knew in Mexico City became the model for Santa's blind admirer, Hipólito. In their desire for an unsentimental, scientific understanding of human behavior, naturalists wanted to strip away the clothing of civilization to expose the human animal. That led them to portray socially marginal characters, whose animal instincts were thought to have been laid bare by corrosive poverty, pathology, and exploitation. Naturalists were particularly interested in showing how social environments determined their characters' behavior, how a nice girl like Santa, in other words, could end up as she did. Naturalists wanted to demonstrate in their characters and plots that sex—supposedly among the most animal of instincts—was a mainspring of human behavior.
The naturalist aesthetic, out of style for several lifetimes, is not itself a reason to read Santa now, of course. For most readers, the appeal of Santa will come from the fact that naturalist novelists really did know the everyday sorts of places and people portrayed in intricate detail in their novels. Following his French influences, Gamboa believed that a novelist's mission was to tell the composite stories of people whose lives were never recorded individually as biographies, to become, in words that he himself used, a historian for people without a history. This makes Santa an interesting lens through which to view life in Mexico City circa 1900.
Readers need a sense of the author and his historical moment in order to interpret Santa. Gamboa was born into Mexico's upper class in 1864. In his youth, he wrote the society column for a Mexico City newspaper. He then spent much of his life as a career diplomat in a variety of foreign capitals, eventually returning to Mexico to become a literature professor and a government minister. He lived in the United States several times in his life, including a year in New York, a stint at the Washington embassy, and a brief political exile in Galveston. He knew English well, but he was distinctly not an admirer of the United States. In keeping with a proud conservative tradition in Mexico, he warned against U.S. influence.
Gamboa was a strong supporter of Porfirio Díaz, the famous Mexican dictator whose decades-long reign was at its zenith in 1900. Díaz was a liberal dictator, meaning that he postponed the introduction of democracy on the theory that average Mexicans would require decades of tutelage before they could govern themselves. Gamboa, on the other hand, was a true conservative in that he abhorred the very idea of democracy. He preferred a monarchy or, in its absence, a dictatorship. Gamboa supported Díaz partly because of this preference for law-and-order authoritarianism and partly because of personal loyalty to someone who was a friend of his family. But Gamboa was out of step with the Europhile, positivist ideological tilt of the Díaz regime. Gamboa was an outspoken opponent of the Científicos, the technocratic advisers who surrounded Díaz. In Santa, Gamboa adopted a nostalgic, traditionalist view, skeptical about the power of science and the benefits of untrammeled Progress.
Catholicism is at the heart of that traditionalist view. Gamboa's religious attitudes make him a highly atypical naturalist novelist and suggest comparisons to Tolstoy, whose novel Resurrection (1899) Gamboa read just as he was about to begin work on Santa. The church seldom enters the story and, when it does, in a negative light. Religious language pervades the book, however, providing many of Gamboa's favorite metaphors. Furthermore, the structure of the plot—with Santa's fall from grace, judgment, penitence, and redemption through suffering—is strongly Christian. Most naturalist novels are bleaker than Santa, offering no hope of redemption.
Gamboa ran unsuccessfully for president of Mexico as the candidate for the Catholic Party in 1913, and during the 1920s he sided with followers of the “Cristero” insurrection, a religious reaction against the Mexican Revolution. Being politically pro-Catholic was part and parcel of Gamboa's larger conservatism, his nostalgic, pro-Spanish attitude toward Mexico's colonial heritage. Santa was written during the U.S. occupation of Cuba, which occurred in the wake of the 1898 war on that island, and Gamboa became one of the prominent Latin American intellectuals waving pro-Spanish banners and standing against Anglo-Saxon materialism and aggression. Spain's trouncing by the United States awakened traditionalist feelings of cultural kinship from Mexico to Argentina. For example, Santa gives loving attention to bullfighting, a tradition powerfully emblematic of Spain. (By way of contrast, one could point out that by 1903 Cubans, whose bid for independence distanced them from Spanish traditionalism, already preferred baseball to bullfighting.) In addition, most of the novel's secondary characters are Spanish, including almost all the women other than Santa herself.
Naturalist authors tended to write with a didactic purpose. What lessons did Gamboa want to teach in Santa? A Christian lesson about sin and personal salvation, clearly, but beyond that, what message about Mexico? How does the political order called the Porfiriato appear from the perspective of the street in 1900? What is Gamboa signaling about Mexico's incorporation into what was already, by that time, a process of rapid globalization? And what on earth is Gamboa saying about women in this story? Can he really be defending the traditional honor ethic that turns Santa's sexual “slip” into her inevitable doom? (Gamboa's men, by the way, resemble nothing so much as a pack of baying hounds, and this is clearly self-critical on the author's part. After all, as a young man he had been just like the novel's fashionable clubmen who flock around Santa in her heyday as “queen of the night.”) And where, oh where, in this novel, is race? Racial descriptions are not applied at all, aside from a few glowing references to Santa's soft brown skin. Finally, if one reads Santa's story as a metaphor for Mexican history, as Gamboa probably intended, what is the lost paradise, what the perdition, and what the redemption? Questions to ponder.
Meanwhile, you will not be bored. However one regards Gamboa's social and political attitudes, one cannot doubt his skill as a storyteller. The Spanish-language original is a spectacular achievement that can be only partly re-created in English. Santa contains a notable range of styles, from quite formal to quite colloquial. Formal descriptive set pieces like the courthouse scene deploy elaborate syntax and bombastic diction in sentences half a page long. On the other hand, Gamboa's dialogue is quite colloquial, capturing people talking in a variety of accents. So when the bullfighters or the madam of the brothel open their mouths, they sound Spanish, not Mexican. Alas, such distinctions disappear in translation. In the absence of dialect, I have transferred the natural, colloquial quality of the dialogue to a contemporary U.S. idiom. Likewise, I have tried to reproduce the elaborate syntax and bombastic diction of the tour-de-force descriptions only within the limits of what works naturally. As editor, I have reduced repetition and privileged reader comprehension above all else. As translator, I have worked to maintain the polish, poise, and vividness of Gamboa's prose.
One of the delights of Santa, should you give in to the guilty pleasure it affords, is its sentimentalism. It may seem odd, and it is quite out of keeping, really, with the naturalist aesthetic, but sentimentality is powerfully present. The scenes of Santa's girlhood in Chimalistac are particularly lyrical and sun drenched. In contrast to the rest of this rather dark novel, these childhood scenes read like sentimental local color meant to idealize small-town life, a chapter of costumbrismo amid the naturalismo. I confess to liking that chapter best. And then, of course, there are the wrenching final scenes during which, as I dutifully strived to reproduce Gamboa's tear-jerking intentions in English, I found myself having to wipe my eyes in order to see my text. Readers impervious to sentimentalism may prefer to concentrate on how a high-class brothel, a low-class dive, or a modern hospital or police station operated in 1900 Mexico City; or they may even turn, and pardonably so, to Gamboa's leering descriptions of our protagonist's firm brown flesh and the rippling muscles of the bullfighter who really loved her.
Santa, indeed, has something for everyone.
JOHN CHARLES CHASTEEN
Santa
Part One
One
“This is it,” said the coach driver, suddenly stopping the horses, who shook their heads in protest at his roughness. The passenger stuck her head out the door of the coach, looking to the left and right, and hesitantly, not recognizing the place, she asked in surprise:
“Here? Where is it?”
The driver, contemplating her with a wicked expression from his high perch, pointed with his whip:
“There, straight ahead. That closed door.”
The woman climbed out of the coach and reached back to extract a small bundle, her luggage. Then she stuck her hand in the pocket of her petticoat and handed a peso to the driver.
“This should cover it, sir.”
Very slowly and without taking his eyes off her, the driver stood, pulled several coins out of his pants pocket, put them on the roof of the vehicle, counted them, and finally returned the peso.
“I don't have change. You can pay me some other time when you need me. I'm at the cabstand with a red flag at 317 San Juan de Letrán. Just tell me your name.”
“My name is Santa. No, but go ahead and charge me. I don't know if I'll be staying here. Keep the whole peso,” she added as an afterthought, anxious to get away.
And without waiting for a reply she set off quickly, looking at the ground, her body half hidden by the shawl that barely clung to her shoulders, as if she were embarrassed to be seen in that place at that time of day, with so much light and so many people who surely observed her and knew where she was going. So, hardly noticing the anemic, unkempt little garden to her right or the unsanitary-looking eatery to her left, she walked straight ahead to the closed door and knocked on it. She did get a vague impression of patchy grass, stunted bushes, a few tree trunks. She did get a whiff of food and cheap liquor, a rumor of men's conversation and laughter. She even sensed, without daring to stop or turn her head, that several men had gathered in a doorway to stare brazenly and make loud, mocking comments about her. Agitated, she vented her feelings repeatedly on the door knocker, giving it three hard knocks each time.
The truth is that nobody, aside from some loiterers in the cheap restaurant, paid any attention to her because, although it is the domain of prostitutes and their clients by night, by day this neighborhood is as honest and hard-working as any other in the city. It has many small industries: workshops producing gravestones and Italian copper work, a French dry cleaner's shop with a big sign and an enormous brick chimney in the courtyard, a charcoal seller's shop always covered with a fine black dust that attaches itself stubbornly to pedestrians, making them snort, dust themselves with their handkerchiefs, and pick up the pace as they pass by. On one corner stands a modern and neatly painted butcher shop, La Giralda, with three open doors, smooth artificial stone flooring, and a counter of marble and iron, the ceiling supported by quite narrow pillars to maximize ventilation. La Giralda's large scales sparkle with cleanliness, and from its range of heavy meat hooks hang huge, headless, beef carcasses split down the middle to display their dirty white ribcages and the revolting, bloody redness of their fresh, recently killed flesh. The butcher shop attracts clouds of unquiet, voracious flies and one or two stray dogs with rough fur who lie heavily on the sidewalk without quarreling with one another, dozing or nosing after fleas with an intent gaze and erect ears, patiently awaiting scraps. On the opposite corner, advertised by its traditional banners, stands a pulque shop, its walls painted with primitive murals, a small tin roof over each of its doors: The Corner of the Magi, trusty dispensary of the famous Santa Clara and peerless San Antonio Ometusco brews. In addition to the garden, with its small circular fountain, its primitive fountainhead forever welling over without ever running out of water despite the furious assault of the water-carriers and of the neighbors who carelessly spill more than they ought to, so that the edges of the fountain and its surroundings are always soaked—in addition to that garden, the block can boast no fewer than three electric streetlights and as many as five houses with fine fronts, three or four stories tall, with whitewashed balconies and plaster cornices. The pavement is of compressed-cement blocks, traversed by streetcar rails. And on the other side of the garden that helps hide the brothels there is a public school.