In The Odyssey, Circe warns the homeward-bound Odysseus of the menace of the Sirens, who, surrounded by the mouldering skeletons of men, lure and bewitch the unaware man with the music of their song. Yet just beyond their lovely voices—that Odysseus escapes by having himself lashed to the mast of his ship—lurks peril, a choice between annihilation on the sheer cliffs of the Wandering Rocks or a meeting with the double menace of Scylla and Charybdis, the former hideously fishing for a passersby with her twelve dangling feet, the latter but a bow's shot distance away threatening to suck men down into the deep waters near the foot of a luxurious fig tree. Certain death is the fate of the man who succumbs to the sweet lure of the sirens. The peril of life, and yet the promise of home, is the alternative.

A similar theme is developed by Rudolfo Anaya's use of the la llorona motif in Bless Me, Ultima. In the novel, Antonio, symbolically both Christ and Odysseus, moves from the security and from the sweet-smelling warmth of his mother's bosom and kitchen out into life and experience. As he weighs his options—priesthood and the confinement represented by the farms of the Lunas’ or the Marezes’ freedom on the pagan sea of the llano—and as he grows from innocence to knowledge and experience, the la llorona motif figures both on a literal mythological level and as an integral part of Antonio's life.

As “literal” myth, la llorona is the wailing woman of the river. Hers is the “tormented cry of a lonely goddess” that fills the valley in one of Antonio's dreams. La llorona is “the old witch who cries along the river banks and seeks the blood of boys and men to drink.”¹ This myth is closely related to Cico's story of the mermaid.² The mermaid is the powerful presence in the bottomless Hidden Lakes. Her strange music is a “low, lonely murmuring … like something a sad girl would sing.” (p. 109) Cico relates that all that had kept him from plunging into the bottomless lake when he heard the sound was the Golden Carp, whose appearance caused the music to stop. Not that the singing was evil, he relates, but “it called for me to join it. One more step and I'da stepped over the ledge and drowned in the waters of the lake—” (p. 109) Cico continues with the story of the shepherd taken by the mermaid. A “man from Mejico,” working on a neighboring ranch, not having heard the story about the lakes, had taken his sheep to water there. Hearing the singing, he ran back to town and swore he had seen a mermaid.

“He said it was a woman, resting on the water and singing a lonely song. She was half woman and half fish—He said the song made him want to wade out to the middle of the lake to help her, but his fear had made him run. He told everyone the story, but no one believed him. He ended up getting drunk in town and swearing he would prove his story by going back to the lakes and bringing back the mer-woman. He never returned. A week later the flock was found near the lakes. He had vanished—”

(p. 109)

As an integral part of Antonio's life, the la llorona motif emerges in his experiences with nature. La llorona is the ambivalent presence of the river, which Antonio fears and yet with which he senses a sharing of his own soul and a mystic peace. La llorona speaks in the owl's cry and in the dove's cou-rou. Even the dust devils of the llano bear la llorona’s signature, embracing Antonio in swirling dust as the gushing wind, which imprints evil on his soul, seems to call his name:

Antoniooooooooooooooo …

(p. 52)

But more significantly for Antonio, the la llorona motif emerges in his relationship with his mother and in the imagery of the women in the novel. It is the primary image associated with the mother, Maria. Her frequent extended calls of “Antoniooooooo,” like that of the whirlwind, reflect the wailing call of the la llorona of Tony's dream:

La llorona seeks the soul of Antoniooooooooo …

(p. 24)

In the same dream, Tony hears his “mother moan and cry because with each turning of the sun her son [is] growing old …” (p. 24) On his first day of school Antonio awakens with a sick feeling in his stomach, both excited and sad because for the first time he will be away from the protection of his mother. As he enters the kitchen his mother smiles, then sweeps him into her arms sobbing, “My baby will be gone today.” (p. 50) At Ultima's stern but gentle persistence, Antonio is separated from his mother, yet as he leaves, following the sisters Deborah and Theresa up the goat path, he hears his mother “cry” his name. Maria, as she prays around the Virgin's altar for Antonio and his three older brothers, is la llorona. On the return of Andrew, Eugene, and Leon from the war, Maria alternately sobs and prays until Gabriel complains, “Maria, … but we have prayed all night!” (p. 58) Mother and Virgin both assume the mournful aspect of la llorona in one of Antonio's dreams just prior to the three brothers’ return:

Virgen de Guadalupe, I heard my mother cry, return my sons to me.

Your sons will return safely, a gentle voice answered.

Mother of God, make my fourth son a priest.

And I saw the virgin draped in the gown of night standing on the bright, horned moon of autumn, and she was in mourning for the fourth son.

(p. 43)

Similarly, the la llorona motif is echoed in the tolling of the church bells and in the imagery of the mourning, lonely women as they are called to mass on the morning following Lupito's death. “Crying the knell of Lupito,” the bell “tolled and drew to it the widows in black, the lonely, faithful women who came to pray for their men.” (p. 32)

La llorona emerges in the patterns of imagery that surround the episode at Rosie's on the day of the Christmas pageant and of Narciso's death. The “single red light bulb” which shines at the porch door over the “snow-laden gate of the picket fence” is “like a beacon inviting weary travelers in from the storm.” Light shines through the drawn shades, and from “somewhere in the house a faint melody” seeps out and is “lost in the wind.” Antonio knows he must get home before the storm worsens, yet he is compelled to linger “at the gate of the evil women.” The music and laughter intrigue him. His ears “explode with a ringing noise,” and he is paralyzed to flight. (p. 155) Instead, he must remain to learn that he himself has lost his innocence. The cry of the sirens prevails over Andrew, too, as the red-painted woman calls him from the back of the house:

“Androoooooo. …”

(p. 156)

When Andrew is summoned by Narciso, it is the giggling girl, her voice “sweet with allurement” that holds Andrew back. He fails to assume the responsibility that would have meant help for Narciso. Instead he succumbs to the allure of the siren.

Wherever it emerges in the novel, the la llorona motif harbors ambivalence. La llorona invites with music and warmth, and she offers security. Yet, like the mermaid in the hidden lakes, la llorona threatens death. For Antonio, his mother offers warmth, fragrance, security. But his own maturity demands that he deny it. To succumb would mean the death of his own manhood and who, like the fate of William Blake's Thel, unwilling to accept the consequences of the generative life of experience, withdraws to an original state of primal innocence. Yet this world holds an even darker fate for her because it becomes at once prison and paradise, a state of natural innocence and a state of ignorance.³ This is the choice Antonio must make. He moves from the fragrance and the warmth and the security of his mother's kitchen, from the reassurance of her call, out into the world of experience, the world of school and his companions.

Antonio is introduced into the inferno of school life by Red, who leads him on the first day into the dark, cavernous building, its radiators snapping with steam and its “strange, unfamiliar smells and sounds that seemed to gurgle from its belly.” (p. 53) Antonio races the Kid and Time across the bridge to and from school as the years pass and he matures chronologically. With the tutoring of Samuel he learns of the Golden Carp which is to provide apocalyptical knowledge and understanding, an illumination which burdens him with doubt and responsibility. Cico leads Antonio to Narciso's magic garden where he tastes of the fruit—the golden carrot—and to El Rito Creek where he at last experiences the Golden Carp, the “sudden illumination of beauty and understanding,” an understanding he anticipated but later failed to find in the ritual of the Holy Communion. Coincident with his vision of the carp, Antonio doubts his own Christian God when he suddenly realizes that Ultima's power had succeeded in curing his Uncle Lucas where the Christian God had failed.

Antonio sees the powers of good and evil contend in Ultima, who serves as his guide through life, and in the dark, diabolic Tenorio. He experiences the deaths of Lupito, of Narciso, and of the angelic and heretical Florence. He sees his brother Andrew deny his responsibility at the summons of the girl at Rosie's, of la llorona. Andrew remains to indulge in pleasure, yet the knowledge that he has failed in his responsibility to Narciso drives him, finally, away into the death, the world of lost wanderings, of his other brothers, Eugene and Leon.

The experience at Rosie's is equally ambivalent for Antonio. He is at once lured and repulsed. It marks for him the beginning of a ritual death as he becomes abruptly aware of his own loss of innocence.

I had seen evil, and so I carried the evil within me. … I had somehow lost my innocence and let sin enter into my soul, and the knowledge of God, the saving grace, was far away.

(p. 158)

The illness which follows is a “long night” as Ultima sits by “powerless in the face of death.”

A long, dark night came upon me in which I sought the face of God, but I could not find Him. Even the Virgin and my Saint Anthony would not look at my face.

… In front of the dark doors of Purgatory my bleached bones were laid to rest.

(p. 167)

But, unlike Andrew's death, Antonio's experience at Rosie's becomes one that leads to death and ultimate rebirth. Antonio recovers from his illness, and though the events of the spring, of catechism and first communion, do not provide the enlightenment he finds with the carp, Antonio is a new man. His life has changed; he feels older. He faces directly the question of the existence of evil, and he is ready to accept his father's explanation that “most of the things we call evil are not evil at all; it is just that we don't understand those things and so we call them evil. And we fear evil only because we do not understand it.” (p. 236) Antonio learns to accept the greater reality of life, that he is both Marez and Luna, that he does not have to choose one but can be both. He accepts his father's explanation that the understanding he failed to find in the Holy Communion will come with life. He comes to realize that one's dreams are “usually for a lost childhood.” (p. 237) More importantly, he learns from Ultima that “the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart.” (p. 237)

Antonio spends the summer working on the farms with his uncles in El Puerto. Finally, as he struggles to get back to Guadalupe and his family to warn Ultima of Tenorio's threat when his second daughter dies, Antonio encounters la llorona once more:

With darkness upon me I had to leave the brush and run up in the hills, just along the tree line. … Over my shoulder the moon rose from the east and lighted my way. Once I ran into a flat piece of bottom land, and what seemed solid earth by the light of the moon was a marshy quagmire. The wet quicksand sucked me down and I was almost to my waist before I squirmed loose. Exhausted and trembling I crawled onto solid ground. As I rested I felt the gloom of night settle on the river. The dark presence of the river was like a shroud, enveloping me, calling to me. The drone of the grillos and the sigh of the wind in the trees whispered the call of the soul of the river.

Then I heard an owl cry its welcome to the night, and I was reminded again of my purpose. The owl's cry reawakened Tenorio's threat …

(p. 243–44)

Free of the call of la llorona, of the “dark presence of the river” which called to him, Antonio runs “with new resolution.” He runs “to save Ultima” and “to preserve those moments when beauty mingled with sadness and flowed through [his] soul like the stream of time.” Antonio leaves the river and runs across the llano feeling a new lightness, “like the wind” as his strides “carried [him] homeward.” (p. 244) No longer does he feel the pain in his side, the thorns of the cactus or the needles of yucca that pierced his legs and feet. Yet Antonio knows his childhood is over as the report of Tenorio's rifle shatters it “into a thousand fragments.” (p. 245)

Antonio has come home to himself. He has eluded the death call of la llorona, and as he buries the owl, Ultima's spirit, he takes on the responsibility of the future in which he knows he must “build [his] own dream out of those things which were so much a part of [his] childhood.” (p. 248) Antonio has avoided annihilation on the sheer cliffs of the Wandering Rocks—the fate of his brothers—and he has moved through the narrow strait and evaded the menace of Scylla and Charybdis as he comes to face the reality of his manhood.

Notes

1. Rudolfo A. Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima (Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol, 1972), p. 23. All quotations from Bless Me, Ultima are from this edition; page numbers will henceforth be cited in parentheses within the text.

2. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, notes the association between the water image in mythology and “goddesses, mermaids, witches, and sirens,” who may represent either the “life-threatening” or “life-furthering” aspect of the water. The use of water imagery to represent the theme of rebirth, Campbell says, is a “mythological universal” imprinted at the moment of birth when “the congestion of blood and sense, of suffocation experienced by the infant before its lungs commence to operate give rise to a brief seizure of terror, the physical effects of which … tend to occur, more or less strongly, whenever there is an abrupt moment of fright. … The birth trauma, as an archetype of transformation, floods with considerable emotional effect the brief moment of loss of security and threat of death that accompanies any crisis of radical change. In the imagery of mythology and religion this birth (or more often rebirth) theme is extremely prominent; in fact every threshold passage—not only this from the darkness of the womb to the light of the sun, but also those from childhood to adult life and from the light of the world to whatever mystery of darkness may lie beyond the portal of death—is comparable to a birth and has been ritually represented, practically everywhere, through an imagery of re-entry into the womb.” (New York: Viking Press, 1959), pp. 61–62.

3. See Harold Bloom's commentary on “The Book of Thel” in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 807–08.