Meet Me under the Ceiba (review)

Silvio Sirias's Meet Me under the Ceiba is a story of love, obsession, violence, and homophobia in the small town of La Curva, Nicaragua, a community brought to life with sensory details that reveal beauty and horror living side by side. In his postscript to the novel, Sirias informs us that the story is based on the murder of Aura Rosa Pavón, a case which Sirias followed in the Nicaraguan newspapers and which he felt "illustrated the homophobia that is rampant not only in Nicaragua, but in all of Latin America" (239). In the novel, more than one character agrees with the fictional police commissioner: "Religions tend to endorse prejudices [against homosexuals]; at least I know Catholicism does" (135).

In Meet Me under the Ceiba, the homophobia that contributed to the murder of Adela Rugama, a lesbian in love with the town's most beautiful woman, is apparent, but there is much more to the case than the disdain for homosexuals. The novel's objective narrator, a Nicaraguan-American professor on sabbatical who becomes fascinated by Adela and her tragic end, is determined to know the secret details that surround the murder and to solve the mysterious circumstances of Adela's final moments. Don Quixote had his horse, Rocinante, and Ceiba's narrator has Si Dios Quiere (God Willing), a thirty-year-old borrowed Subaru as he sets off on his quest for the truth.

On this quest, the narrator speaks with a number of locals. Sirias's use of interviews is skillful; with each character's revelations, new facets and layers are added, and the story grows in richness and depth. If the interviews add complexity, sensory details bring both the setting and characters to life. Even minor characters are memorable: for example, Lizbeth, the beautiful "descendant of a fiery eighteenth-century affair between an English buccaneer and a freed African slave" (16); the local homophobic priest, Padre Uriel, with whom Lizbeth has a "comfortable relationship," meeting him in his rectory twice a week (19); and Commissioner Gilberto Wong, a one-time Jesuit priest who burns incense to the gods of a number of religions. Throughout the interviewer's journey to truth, the ceiba of the title, a majestic tree measuring 130 feet in height, with a canopy that expands for almost an eighth of an acre, is a "spiritual force" that reaches up "from the earth's throbbing depths and extends itself toward the heavens" (86).

Meet Me under the Ceiba is Silvio Sirias's second novel and the winner of the University of California, Irvine's Chicano/Latino Literary Prize.