SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina. “Elena Garro's Recollections of Things to Come: ‘Exiles from Happiness’.” Confluencia 5, no. 2 (spring 1990): 69-77.

[In the following essay, Knapp discusses alienation in Recollections of Things to Come.]

Elena Garro's novel, Recollections of Things to Come (1963)¹ sketches certain events in the lives of a community of Mexicans during the politically difficult 1920's. Not only are the families involved cloistered in their small town, Ixtepec, and therefore exiled from the rest of their country, but they are cut off from the other members of their community—and themselves. Alienated, they are “exiles from happiness.”

Surrealistic in style, Garro's episodic narrative has banished rational and logical systems. Instead, spasmodic glimpses, flashbacks, and flashforwards into events revolving around a variety of lives are offered the reader. In keeping with the dictates outlined in André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto (1924), Garro explores hidden and neglected areas of the psyche in poetic images, forms which seem to have been molded from the very substance of her native Mexican landscape. (Like Breton's Nadja, Garro's Isabel is schizophrenic.) Although seemingly incongruous at first glance, in keeping with surrealistic technique, Garro's spontaneous combinations of unrelated objects disclose associations and implications which lead to a deeper understanding of the personalities involved and the forces at stake.

Analogies are, therefore, key to an understanding of Garro's literary technique. The prevailing and most significant object used throughout Recollections of Things to Come is the stone. Readers, however, would not be well served if they were to attempt to ferret out rational reasons for Garro's inclusion of this image at the beginning and conclusion of her novel. Nor should they try to justify the author's grounds for endowing the stone with a feminine voice. What is intriguing is the frequency of the stone like lamentations issuing forth from this inanimate object. Transpersonal or archetypal in dimension, its increasingly powerful tones takes on amplitude because it exists “outside of time.” As if emanating directly from within the ancient sculptures and friezes adorning Olmec, Toltec, and Aztec palaces and pyramids, the impact of its message is timeless.

EXILE INTO STONE

We learn at the very outset of the novel that the narrator, Isabel Moncada, whose voice we hear emerging from a large stone on top of a hill, is already dead. It is from the world beyond the grave that she not only articulates the events which come to pass, but also depicts the topography surrounding her native town of Ixtepec: “the spiny mountains and yellow plains” and valleys. At the novel's conclusion, we are told gratuitously that following Isabel's demise, she was “transformed into a stone.”

Only my memory knows what it [stone] holds. I see it and I remember, and as water flows into water, so I, melancholically, come to find myself in its image, covered with dust, surrounded by grass, self-contained and condemned to memory and its variegated mirror. I see it, I see myself, and I am transfigured into a multitude of colors and times. I am and I was in many eyes. I am only memory and the memory that one has of me.

Exiled from the world of the living in death, Isabel had been equally alienated from the realities of life during her earthly days. Austere, static, and secretive in her ways, she lived through events that had been carved out of pain. No free-flowing communication existed between her parents and herself any more than it did with anyone else in the community. She walked, talked, and comported herself in a stonelike manner—as if detached from her environment.

The stone images in Recollection of Things to Come are used with felicity. They not only serve to reinforce the separateness of individual existences, as well as the novel's restrained and slow-paced sequences, but their timelessness gives the impression of drawing deeply from a collective past: the very fundaments of Mesoamerica. The characters, be they the dark-skinned autochthonous Indians, the white-skinned invaders, or and the mixture of the two in the mestizos, seem to step out directly from the unfriendly and isolated terrain of Garro's ancestors, all having been molded in one way or another from its basic materials, which was used by pre-Columbian artists and craftsmen. Symbolizing immobility and solidity, stone images and associations, as used by Garro, also underscore the sameness of the human personality.

That Garro identifies the stone with death is not unusual in view of the fact that Mixtec and Toltec artists also carved their numerous stylized sculptures of death in stone. Indeed, in many pre-Columbian cultures, life and death were represented, to the right and to the left, respectively, in a single face or mask.² Quite in keeping with a culture in which violence and blood predominated, is the honored place accorded to the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, deity of Earth and Death: she who wore a necklace of skulls and a serpent skirt, was the mother of the Gods of War, of the Moon, and of the southern stars. Understandably as well, does Isabel's brother, at the novel's conclusion, refer to his sister as “the avenging goddess of justice.”

Isabel as stone is witness to events, memories, the vagaries of climate and political and religious dominants. Be it covered with dust, grasses, or shrubbery, or with the sands of time, concealing palaces, pyramids, raised causeways, cities, and empires of ancient civilizations, the stone for Isabel is a self-contained entity: a microcosm of the macrocosm. Inanimate and animate, it functions, as does the containing capacity of a uterus, like the collective and personal unconscious: “I am only memory and the memory that one has of me.”

Isabel as stone is not, like biological entities, subject to rapid change. As such, she symbolizes a kind of continuity and indestructible strength within nature itself. She and her stone, therefore, may be alluded to as an archetypal image, thus transpersonal. As a collective voice existing from time immemorial, it/she represents a magnetic field and energy center within the nation's and individual's collective unconscious. In her capacity as archetypal image, then, Isabel reveals inherited and recurring patterns of behavior within the Mexican psyche, like the “mnemic deposit” existing in life itself.³

That Isabel depicts her landscapes in mathematical and geometrical configurations, also viewed as archetypal, allows her to cross centuries and peoples, thereby adding a transpersonal note to the visual design of her narrative.

And as the memory contains all times and their order is unpredictable, I am now in the presence of the geometry of lights that invented this illusory hill like a premonition of my birth. A luminous point determines a valley. That geometric instant is joined to the moment of this stone, and from the superimposition of spaces that form the imaginary world, memory returns those days to me intact.

Her descriptions of the squat houses and stone churches of the Ixtepec of her day, a palimpsest for the ancient religious sanctuary of Tenochtitlan and the pyramids of Teotihuacan, lend a synchretistic note to her novel. Like the steps of a pyramid or the various stages in the construction of a palace, the imposition of layerings of religious beliefs and governmental practices on a people underscores the constancy of human instincts, needs, and yearnings. Like the stone of the landscape, names and ideologies may alter, but the fundaments remain the same.

Garro's archetypal geometric images (triangles, squares, circles, quincunxes) not only underscore the stylized and sculpturesque nature of her characters, but they also codify their traits, adding yet another collective note to Recollections of Things to Come. Automations of sorts, not one protagonist is a flesh-and-blood person; not one descends into himself or herself. Like isolated stone forms on a checker board, they seem to be pushed hither and yon by some outerworldly will or transpersonal force. Egos (centers of consciousness) are nonexistent. The transpersonal Self (total psyche or higher order) dictates their acts, relationships, and comportment. Enigmatic, mysterious, Garro's archetypal creatures are conjunctions of various time schemes, glimpses of reminiscences emerging from within the infinite memory of the cosmic flow.⁴

Geometric configurations and allusions in the novel also serve to bring order where there is volatility and unpredictability, limitation to where there is vastness of spirit. Squares, circles, spheres, axes, and the like, endowed as they are with a numinous quality, appear frequently in works of art or religious tracts when individuals or the collective suffer from some psychic disorder or anguish. Not invented by the conscious mind, geometric forms and the numbers emerged from the unconscious spontaneously as archetypal images when the need or desire arose.⁵

Garro's literary technique of using geometrical figures to articulate the meanderings of the deeply introverted Isabel underscores the fragmentation of her psyche, the irrationality of her behavior, and the potential tragedy of her situation. As containers for her chaotic and continuously turbulent emotions, they help her function in the real world, at least temporarily, thus compensating to some extent for her psychologically confused and bleak existence. On a broader level, Garro's orderly configurations are devices intended to help her protagonist restrain the emotions of terror activated by the continuous collective threat of bloodshed triggered by both governmental and church officials.

Isabel's search for psychological order, continuity, and serenity, as symbolized by her geometric references, not only is evidence of her intense personal need for organization and regularity, but is evocative of the systematization implicit in many pre-Columbian cultures, as revealed by the ancient king-God Quetzalcoatl (the Plumed Serpent) to his worshippers, when he told them that the greatness of humankind emerges from the awareness of spiritual order.

The pyramids consecrated to Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan, said to have been built by the Gods at the outset of the world, were in keeping with his injunction to adhere to regularity and uniformity, and thus were constructed with incredible mathematical rigor and knowledge. The friezes of bodies and heads of serpents ringed with feathers, the stylized carvings of Tlaloc, the god of rain, with his eyes depicted in symmetrical circles, the long stairways, the straight and parallel holy avenues of Teotihuacan trod upon during Olmec, Toltec, and Aztec times with profound solemnity—all remain as a fundament: a primordial image within the collective unconscious of the Mexican people and of Garro and her verbal transcriptions.⁶

That Garro should use stone as well as geometric or archetypal forms as part of her creative process suggests the powerful role these active energy centers play in the psyche of her protagonists. The Aztecs Law of the Center, for example, according to which conjunctions of opposites hold antithetical forces together, is ever sought for but never achieved by Isabel, her brothers, her parents, and the other creatures peopling her fantasy in Recollection of Things to Come. Unlike the mathematically oriented Aztecs, the inhabitants of Ixtepec live divested of a center. They are splinter personalities, each impulsively acting out his or her fragmented vision. They do not face their inner worlds. No questions are asked; no psychological growth comes into being. Nevertheless, although exiled from the empirical domain, some find solace in a world of fantasy—in dream or non-time.

EXILE INTO NON-TIME

Isabel's loneliness, her stone-voice intimates, has caused her to seek solace in non-chronological memory. In so doing, she has not only ushered into her mind's eye individual recall, but as previously suggested, recollections of an inherited or archetypal past comprising mnemonic deposits that dwell within the collective unconscious.

Defined by C. G. Jung as a suprapersonal matrix, a storehouse of typical behavioral patterns and “inherited potentiality of psychic functioning,” the collective unconscious contains accumulations of contents millions of years old.⁷ Looked upon as an inner cosmos or ocean, this neutral or objective sphere contains undifferentiated values and notions. Divested or judgmental views, which are products of the conscious mind with its prohibitions and injunctions, the collective unconscious not only includes, but fuses what the empirical domain divides into past, present, and future. Jung wrote:

In my experience, the conscious mind can only claim a relatively central position and must put up with the fact that the unconscious psyche transcends and as it were surrounds it on all sides. Unconscious contents connect it backwards with physiological states on the one hand and archetypal data on the other. But it is extended forward partly by subliminal perceptions depending on the relativity of time and space in the unconscious.⁸

That Isabel's memory has been transformed into sensations, that her minutes, hours, and days are depicted by her as shapeless accumulations, is understandable in view of Jung's definition of the nature of non-time as experienced from the vantage point of the undifferentiated collective unconscious.

Isabel's ego (center of consciousness) has been inundated by the flood tides of the collective unconscious. Never has she asserted her independence; never has she cut out her own, broken the umbilical chord: the act that could pave the way for increased understanding and maturity. Rarely if ever does she distinguish between various value judgments except in the broadest of terms. Incursions of her unconscious, of that non-time, serve to obliterate any possibility of clarification concerning her own acts, her ability to discriminate, to analyze—even to order her world.

Isabel's non-chronological experience is not of her invention. It came to her naturally: from her father, Martín Moncada. It is, therefore, an inherited mode of psychic functioning. His entire life—and subsequently, that of his wife, dona Ana, and his children, Nicolás, Juan, and Isabel—revolved around the non-time-oriented attitude.

The non-chronological approach to life adopted by Martín disclosed an inability on his part to adapt to present circumstances; it also encouraged him and his entire family to regress or reintegrate into a past where events and relationships, after taking on the patina of time, became bearable: in the non-time of the collective unconscious the future had already become past. Living as they did in an eternal present, the Moncada family looked upon each day as had the primitives of old: as a cycle or circle to be understood and experienced in eternal patternings without beginning or end. The concept of past, present, and future had been abolished, as the title of Garro's novel suggests: Recollections of Things to Come. Like archaic people who live close to nature, Isabel and her family also placed themselves within the endless series of cycles—but only after nine at night and until the next morning. During those sacred hours no consciousness of themselves as separate entities; no split between them and the forces of nature, existed.

When they were old enough to work, Juan and Nicolás left for the mines of Tetela. Although only four hours away from Ixtepec, this mountainous region was difficult to reach in the 1920's. Once her brothers moved away, Isabel saw little of them. Her mood turned melancholy: her house was viewed as “an empty shell”; her existence, as wandering through its empty rooms. Her estrangement from everything and everyone grew increasingly pronounced. Even her parents were virtually transformed into ghosts. Their voices, like those of the servants, seemed to emanate from disembodied powers. Alienated from the world and from herself, she felt detached, aloof, lost, divided, and insensitive to the feelings of others.

Isabel had developed what has been defined as a schizoid personality. Unwilling to form social relationships, preferring to remain alone, self-absorbed, and daydreaming excessively, she could at will sever herself from her surroundings while moving back in time and losing herself in space. By indulging in such activity, Isabel was courting danger.

EXILE INTO THE HETAERA

Besides Garro's interweaving of the stone symbol and of non-time, another important image to be found in Recollections of Things to Come is that of hetaera (courtesan). It serves to emphasize the pronounced surrealistic climate in Garro's novel as well as to underscore yet another form of psychological exile.

The hetaera archetype has existed since time immemorial. Beautiful, entertaining, and charming, she was associated with worship of Aphrodite and was introduced into Greek society by an ordinance of Solon. Her function was to see to the pleasures of unmarried men, thereby preventing any threat to the structure of marriage. Many hetaerae were well known for their refined and exquisite ways and attracted men of renown. Aspasia of Miletus drew to her the most extraordinary men of her day, including Socrates and Pericles; the latter abandoned his legal wife to marry her. There were many other hetaera types: Semiramis, Cleopatra, Diane de Poitiers, Jeanne d'Aragon.

The hetaera occupied an important place in Aztec society, where she was “valued” as the helpmate and companion of warriors. Unlike the Christian world, which rejected the courtesan on the surface yet sought her favors clandestinely, the Aztecs were open in their attitude. Interestingly, although their culture was patriarchal, they neither denigrated nor looked down upon the hetaera; nor were women in general subjugated or oppressed.⁹

In Recollections of Things to Come, Julia is the hetaera. She lives in the Hotel Jardín along with the other kept women of Ixtepec. Her lover, the tall and vilent General Francisco Rosas, has been sent there by the government to impose order in the area. Sad and sullen, he sometimes drowns his sorrows in drink or gambling the whole night through. Nevertheless, he has been bewitched by Julia's alluring, silent, and mysterious ways. Although able to carry out his military duties, he has little taste for anything but his obsessive passion for his hetaera. General Rosas is a prisoner of Julia's ungiving and sensual ways: an exile from the world.

The General's fixation on the hetaera archetype is understandable. As a collective figure, she is the source of pleasure, energy, and life for the man. Archetypally, she has come to encompass an ideal because it is by her charms that a man indulges in the sexual act, which he regards as creative, and yields to the illusion of being forever young and eternally reborn. The hetaera type does have positive attributes: when acting as a man's helpmate or femme inspiratrice on an intellectual, spiritual, or sexual level. But she may also be a destructive force in a man's life, as was the case with Pygmalion, who fell in love with his statue of Aphroditre. So, too, is it to be with General Rosas. Julia, the seductress, attracts him away from his true destiny and his realistic frame of reference.

When not preoccupied with his passion for Julia, General Francisco Rosas, chief of the garrison of Ixtepec, walks through its streets macho style: “striking his leather books with a riding whip,” looking coldly at its inhabitants, and speaking to no one. His presence imposes fear on the town, abolishing the “art of fiestas” and dance. Significant are the images Garros uses to describe him: he has “tigers within him”; the pistol he carries is decorated in gold letters enlaced with eagles and doves. Each in its own way reveals elements of his personality.

The tiger and eagle images are characteristic of Nahuatl Indian motifs. Every night the Earthly Sun, when traveling through the subterranean world to the Center of the Earth, takes the shape of a tiger; every day, upon rising in the brilliant heavens, it becomes transformed into an eagle, reverting back into its tiger shape with twilight. Daily, during the Sun's circular trajectory, the warlike and fiery nature of eagles and tigers is put to the test. The sacred battle waged by this igneous mass against its enemy—the darkness of matter—reveals the terrifying archetypal image under which the Aztecs lived: the ever-constant threat of annihilation. Without the Sun life would cease. Being, then, is viewed as forever struggling against the Void. The goal of the important Aztec military Order of Knights, Eagles, and Tigers attests to the continuous tension of waging this “blossoming war.”¹⁰ The Christian dove, embossed on General Rosas's pistol, is antipodal to the warlike tiger and eagle of the Aztecs. It represents that other side of human nature: the soul and spiritual power of sublimation. The Holy Ghost is frequently depicted in the form of a dove as well as in the image of a tongue of Pentecostal fire.

Psychologically, the Sun's descent into the subterranean world in the Aztec myth suggests a concomitant descent into the realm of the unconscious. That the image of the tiger, popularly believed to be violent, vicious, and destructive animal, is identified with this trajectory reveals the potent conflictual forces at work in General Rosas's unconscious. So powerful and so carnivorous is his pulsating libido, that it overwhelms his rational sphere; or, to continue the metaphor, eats up his ego. On a conscious level, Rosas has an eagle personality: like that of the diurnal bird of prey noted for its strength and size, and identified with the fulminating power of war. Rosas, who preys on the weak, is noted for his cruelty. The dove, or self-effacing side of his personality, is manifested only in the presence of Julia, the hetaera.

General Rosas is a programmed individual: always acting true to type. When, for example, Julia avoids him or in some way arouses his jealousy, he takes out his rage on the poor and the feeble: the Indians, the peasantry, and the rebels. He is always present to see to the summary hanging of cattle thieves—or anyone accused of infringement of rules or regulations. As previously mentioned, General Rosas also takes out his sense of defeat in gambling or drinking to excess.¹¹

General Rosas spends as much time as possible with his hetaera in the Hotel Jardín. Life within this temple of passion is filled with beautiful and flamboyant women, mistresses of the other officers. Differences exist, however, between the devotion to the pleasure principle as enjoyed by the twentieth-century Spanish officers and their paramours and the practices of those in Aztec society. A hetaera in ancient days, companion to her warrior, encouraged and helped her lover in arranging for the ceremonies of warfare which played such a significant role in his society.¹² To enhance her beauty, thus her role and power, the Aztec hetaera took time to prepare herself: she “grooms herself and dresses with such care that when she is thoroughly ready she looks like a flower.”¹³

From the moment Julia had gotten off the troop train at Ixtepec, she was considered a danger to any and all men: an “alien presence” and different from all other women. The very way she talked, walked, and looked at a man left her imprint forever engraved in his mind's eye. So captivated was General Rosas by this unattainable femme fatale that he allowed no one to go near her. In the evening, however, when she strolled with him on the plaza, he could not prevent all eyes from converging on her. She “wore a pink silk dress covered with white beads, put on her gold necklaces and bracelets … She looked like a tall flower brightening the night, and it was impossible not to stare at her.” But if a man approached her to talk or even to look at her for any length of time, the general's fury would mount. Once back in the safety of the imprisoning Hotel Jardín, he would bombard her with questions. The more adamant he was in extracting an answer from Julia, the more elusive she became, and the more unrelenting grew the momentum of his accusations.

Julia was no novice. Indeed, she was well versed in handling such a type. Her method: she would simply break away and withdraw without uttering a word, lie down on her bed, and close her eyes. Her silence, her unwillingness to communicate with her lover, cut him off still further from her world. Untenable. At times General Rosas was virtually driven out of his mind. The tiger in him reached the point of explosion, whereupon he ruthlessly whip-lashed her. Unafraid, and perhaps to arouse his anger still further, Julia would remain behind her wall of indifference. Her listless and aloof comportment revealed better than words her feelings of estrangement from this man she not only did not admire, but could barely endure. Impassible and silent for the most part, she never betrayed any feelings, either through her gestures or her facial expression. Nor did she ask for anything. When he gave her gifts of jewels (taking government money away from the poor to do so), thinking these would arouse her passion, she remained unimpressed and unreachable. “He gazed into her eyes, tried to find what she was hiding behind her eyelids, beyond herself. His mistress evaded his eyes, tilted her head and smiled, looked down at her naked shoulders, and withdrew into a distant world, noiseless, ghost-like.

In that General Rosas projected contents of his unconscious onto Julia (not a real woman but an anima, or soul image: a collective figure colored by his own subjective reactions), he was blind as to her motivations and personality. Even more deleterious to his psychological well-being was the fact that by projecting his subjective contents onto her, they remained unrecognized as belonging to him. What he viewed in Julia, then, were attributes which he assigned to her and which he claimed to love. Unaware of the process of projection, he could never develop or integrate what he saw in her into his own psyche. Thus did he divest himself of what lived inchoate within him and become increasingly incapable of coming to terms with his anima as hetaera.¹⁴

By secreting her in the Hotel Jardín, Rosas thought erroneously that he would force her to express her true feelings of love for him. So great was his inherent arrogance that he could not conceive of her not being passionately attracted to him. His inability to see clearly into himself and into his hetaera reached such a peak of frustration that he was not only jealous of her present lack of interest in him, but grew jealous of her past and the other men who had been in her entourage.

How dissimilar had been his life, he believed, prior to his meeting Julia. A power, he commanded everyone's attention when riding horseback across the mountains of Chihuahua—when, for example, he betrayed Villa by siding with Carranza. “The day he met Julia he had the impression of touching a star from the sierra sky, of crossing its luminous circles and teaching the girl's intact body, and he forgot everything but Julia's splendor.” Although very much aware of the fact that their liaison had changed him into “a lonely warrior in the presence of a besieged city with its invisible inhabitants eating, fornicating, thinking, remembering, and he was outside of the walls that guarded Julia's inner world,” he could not resist her. She was the center of his magic circle: of every man's.

Her secret? She never gave of herself, escaping from Rosas “shining and liquid, like a drop of mercury, slippin away” into nameless places, accompanied by hostile shadows.” Yet this seemingly silent, frigid, and unreachable vamp could, were the right man to come along, become passionately involved. Her distancing from General Rosas may have been used as an unconscious shield: armor protecting her from any confrontation and obligations.¹⁵

Taking advantage of the general's absence from Ixtepec, Julia ventured forth from her imprisonment in the Hotel Jardín. Her goal was to warn a mysterious stranger, Felipe Hurtardo, of the danger he was running by remaining in town. He had incurred the general's jealousy by staring at Julia on several occasions. He was a marked man.

Upon reaching the home in which Felipe was staying, Julia exchanged virtually no words with the stranger. Her eyes, nevertheless, filled with tears, and he, too, was visibly moved. It seemed as if they had been drawn together by some inexorable power—“as if they belonged to another order.” Because Julia and Felipe transcended the world of reality, they managed the miracle of leaving town, despite the general's eagle eye; of crossing the border between “light and darkness.” No one heard of them again.

EXILE INTO SCHIZOPHRENIA

Isabel, from within her stone and living “outside of time, suspended in a place without wind, without murmurs, without the sound of leaves or sighing,” recounted her impressions of General Rosas and of Julia with, perhaps, a twinge of pain. She had to admit that Julia's presence in Ixtepec had made such a powerful impression upon everyone—men and women alike—that she had taken on the dimensions of a Divinity. Never would her presence be forgotten.

After Julia's departure, Isabel's shapeless and empty days pursued their meaningless course, every dawn and dusk resembling the preceding ones. Everything in the time-ridden differentiated world seemed useless, divested of interest, alien to her. Her increasing apathy and detachment from her surroundings and her family intensified her already extreme reclusiveness.

Alone and silent, she lived in a closeted world of her own manufacturing. Unbeknown to everyone, “The face that appeared in her dreams was a face that had never looked at her.” She, like General Rosas, the object of her love, experienced the secret agony of one who loves but is not loved. Although she intuited only ominous results of her efforts to attract his attention, she decided to wear a red dress to a party given in honor of General Rosas.

Red, indeed, was a felicitous choice. An intensely passionate color, that of blood and fire, it conveyed Isabel's inner climate, thus obliterating momentarily her seemingly apathetic exterior. Inciting to action, red sparkles, radiates incandescent and powerful energetic charges; it provokes and arouses a whole sexual realm. Symbol of the “red light” districts, its tones invite pulsions to surge forth, instinctual activity to flare and burn.

When Isabel approached General Francisco Rosas and asked him to dance, he was, understandably, suprised. As the two twirled to the music, Isabel's “cheeks rouged and her eyes, riveted on the General, seemed to be roaming through a bloody world.” That it was only a matter of time before she became his mistress was not surprising; that she should have done so knowing that Rosas had had one of her brothers killed and the other imprisoned during a political uprising, was disturbing.

No one understood Isabel's reasons for moving into the Hotel Jardín. Was she hoping, perhaps, to erase Julia's memory in her lover's heart? Impossible. Just as Julia had felt nothing for her lover, so General Rosas was uninterested in Isabel. They were not even sexually compatible, and “in bed he found himself with a strange body that did his bidding without saying a word.” As soon as it was light, he left the room. Isabel remained. At night, upon his return, he encountered her “obstinate eyes.” Whereas Julia's way had been indifference, Isabel's presence “asphyxiated” him. Rosas realized too late that he had made a mistake by taking Isabel as his mistress. Each time she mentioned her brothers, he felt trapped and stifled. The situation grew virtually unbearable after Nicolas, who was in prison, was tried for having attempted to rescue Father Beltrán and don Roque. The people of Ixtepec, and certainly those of the Hotel Jardín, thought that Isabel would finally take a stand and speak out on behalf of her brother. It was not to be, for there were, indeed, two Isabels living within her: the one who had loved her brothers and the other who accepted deceit. Each lived in its separate and incompatible dimension.

Isabel's exile into schizophrenia was irreversible. Attempting to live the life of another—Julia—so as to secure a love that was never to be, she became increasingly divested of the modicum of ingrained ability to communicate that remained. Gone was any pretense at an interpersonal relationship. Maladaptive reactions and their antisocial and nonconforming patterns dominated. Indifferent to reality, estranged from herself, she found even her fantasy life growing dull and grey.

General Rosas did not attend Nicolás's trial. His disconfiture at the idea of imprisoning the brother of his mistress had aroused his long-buried sense of right and wrong. When he returned to Isabel after the trial but before the verdict had been pronounced, fear took over as her “red dress shone beneath her dark eyes by the oil lamp.” Disoriented by the sight, “he was lost, treading on unknown nights and days, guided by the shadows that the brothers and sister had cast over him.”

Nicolás, who wanted to die, confessed to all the accusations. When he was sentenced to be hanged, still protective of his sister, he alluded to her with pride as an “avenging goddess of justice.” At the cemetery, after Nicolás was buried, General Rosas rode out of Ixtepec never to return. Isabel, rushing off after him, got lost in the endless desert and mountains. Her body, found down the hill, had already turned into stone. In death, as in life, she felt nothing: “From her heart stones sprang forth; they ran through her body and made it immovable.” As she looked out into the past that was her present and future, she understood—“We were exiles from happiness!”

Notes

1. Elena Garro, Recollections of Things to Come. Translated by Ruth L. C. Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969, 189.

2. Leopoldo Castedo. A History of Latin American Art and Architecture. Translated by Phyllis Freeman. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969, 20.

3. Jolande Jacobi, Complex Archetype Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung. Translated by Ralph Manheim: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, 48.

4. Ibid., 65.

5. C. G. Jung, Collected Works. 8. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, 456.

6. Laurette Séjourné, Burning Water. Berkeley: Shambhala, 1976, 87.

7. Jacobi, 20, 59.

8. C. G. Jung, Collected Works. 12, 132.

9. Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs. Translated by Patrick O'Brian. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970, 184.

10. Séjourné, 112.

11. Unlike the once-strict Aztec law governing drunkenness (dignitaries found inebriated in the palace were put to death; if discovered outside the palace, he would, and without scandal, lose his office and be stripped of his titles), infractions of this nature were tolerated under Spanish rule. Soustelle, 157.

12. Ibid., 84.

13. Ibid., 131.

14. Esther Harding, The Way of All Women. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1975, 9.

15. Ibid., 20.