Mirrors, Dreams, and Memory in Gringo viejo

Mirrors, Dreams, and Memory in Gringo viejo J. Douglas Canfield L· Regents ' Professor of English and Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Arizona. His degrees are from Notre Dame, Yak, Johns Hopkins , and the University of Florida. He has publhhed on early English literature, especially of the Restoration period; on European baroque literature; and on literature of the Americas. His newest book, from which thL· essay on Gringo Viejo is drawn, is Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film. Los hombres y mujeres de la tropa de Arroyo se miraban a sÃ- mismos. Paralizados por sus propias imágenes, por el reflejo corpóreo de su ser, por la integridad de sus cuerpos. Giraron lentamente, como para cerciorarse de que ésta no era una ilusión más. Fueron capturados por el laberinto de espejos. [...] Uno de los soldados de Arroyo adelantó un brazo hacia el espejo. —Mira, eres tú. Y el compañero señaló hacia el reflejo del otro. —Soy yo. —Somos nosotros. (Fuentes, Gringo viejo 44-45) The men and women of Arroyos troops were looking at themselves. Paralyzed by their own images , by the full-length [corporeal] reflection of their being, by the wholeness of their bodies. They turned slowly, as if to make sure this was not just another illusion. They were caught in the labyrinth of mirrors . [...] One of Arroyo's soldiers held an arm toward the mirror. 'Look, it's you.' And his companion pointed toward the reflection in the othet mitror. 'It's me.' 'It's us.' (The Old Gringo 39-40)1 Cat los Fuentes's Gringo viejo is a house of minors in which characters not only see themselves but blend in with others. It is a house where mirrors blend with dreams, into which others enter almost at will. It is a house constructed by memory of such existential crossings—a memory that preserves die times, the fragArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2000 176 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies mented consciousnesses of othets, in a negotiation of borders between and within selves and between and within countries, namely the United States and Mexico. One ofthe most striking images at the beginning of the novel, as we witness a patrol of villistas exhuming the body of the Old Gringo, is of this border as "la herida que al norte se abrÃ-a como el rÃ-o mismo desde los cañones despeñados" (16—"the wound that to the north opened like the Rio Grande itself tushing down from steep canyons" [8]). The novel tells of an old gringo and a young gringa who cross that wound into Mexico and of the Revolutionary general they encounter, who invades and changes theit lives even as they do his. Each has his or her own wound of divided consciousness . In a delightful spoof, unfortunately omitted from the translation, Fuentes turns the traditional "Nota del Autor" at the end into a note not on himself but on the Old Gringo, historically authenticating, as it were, the basis of his character at last. Fuentes informs us that the North American wrirer Ambrose Bierce—"misántropo, periodista [journalist] [...] y autor" (189)— not wanting to die of old age or some debilitating disease, said good-bye to friends and crossed the border into Mexico to provoke his own death, preferably "ante un paredón mexicano"(that is, before the wall used for execution by firing squad). Fuentes quotes Bierce as inscribing a postcard, "Ah [...] ser un gringo en México; eso es eutanasia" ("Ah [...] to be a gringo in Mexico: that is eudianasia"). Bierce entered Mexico in November of 1913 and never returned.2 "EI resto es ficción," Fuentes's fiction, this novel, narrated ostensibly by an omniscient third person but perhaps really by a voice within the consciousness, the memory of the aging gringa, Harriet Winslow, who sits alone in het Washington, D.C, apartment and remembers her momentous crossing. The Old Gringo has come to die, yet strangely he has a rebirth of sorts, culminating at the moment of death in a unity of his heretofore divided consciousness. That the Old...