I discovered Nellie Campobello as one of las siete cabritas in Elena Poniatowska’s book Las Siete Cabritas, which honestly I am still reading. While I have pretty good reading comprehension in Spanish, it is still hard for me to read books in Spanish. I usually read at night, but I think when reading in another language I need to read in the morning, when I’m more aware and it doesn’t feel so exhausting.
Because of this, I decided to read Campobello’s novel Cartucho in English. I finished reading it the day after Gov. Cuomo announced PAUSE, NY’s version of shelter-in-place, and a day before it actually started: all non-essential business stopped in NY.
In my journal on Saturday, March 21, 2020, I wrote:
Oh my God, what if this goes on for a year?
So much uncertainty.
So much sadness.
So much poverty — already and to come.
It’s funny when I reread it today I thought it said ‘poetry’ but it says poverty. I wrote this before the 808,702 cases and 44,120 deaths in the United States (stats as of 4/21/20 via Wikipedia). We're now on PAUSE until May 15, 2020.
Anyway, I was clearly anxious and reading Campobello’s prose before PAUSE started. I was waking up to the BBC on NPR announcing the latest COVID-19 news in China, Italy, and Spain. Reading Cartucho was a strange but comforting way to prime my brain for the constant stream of dire news that is still going on today. I no longer wake up to the news, I now wait until 10am to let that come into my brain, but the news is never far from my mind.
The three sections of Cartucho are:
I. Men of the North
II. The Executed
III. Under Fire
Not exactly a beach read. The titles in her novel My Mother’s Hands, which were also in the e-book version I read, include:
She Was…
The Men Left Their Mutilated Bodies Awaiting the Succor of These Simple Flowers
She and Her Machine
Again, not light stuff. But, somehow, it was helpful to read Campobello’s somber words on the days leading up to the days we have now. The days when I was reading the news late into the night on my phone in my bed and panicking on the phone to my mom, who somehow has kept very calm throughout all this even though she knows me and my sister (one of three of my sisters) are in the middle of the current hot spot, NYC.
I miss seeing my mom and my nana. FaceTime and Zoom video calls aren’t enough. I miss hugging my nana and then sniffing around the kitchen to see what she has made. I miss her enchiladas, which I can’t even make because I can’t find Las Palmas anywhere (I heard they sell it at Target, but I’m not going to go there now). And maybe that’s why this book was comforting—for a small period of time I got to be a part of Campobello’s family sphere.
Something I learned in the Introduction of the book, by Elena Poniatowska, is that Nellie and her sister Gloria traveled throughout Mexico learning and practicing “indigenous rhythms” — dance steps, but also the way people walk in different places.
Poniatowska writes “The native of Mexico State,” they (Campobello’s sisters), “walks with the body weight over his heels, like the people form the Yucatán except that unlike them, he doesn’t stretch his body up nor tilt backward, rather he leans forward, although not so much as the Michoacán Indian . . . With his eyes always fixed on the ground and with his arms tucked tight against his body, he gives the impression that as he walks he is embracing himself.”
Photo via Referente
Nellie Campobello was a dancer, choreographer, and a writer. This practice of observation is evident in Cartucho and her history is inspiring to me as a writer, a dancer (not professional, but I grew up dancing and still do it as a hobby), an artist, and as a Mexican-American/Chicana/person of Mexican decent. I did not learn about Campobello in school, but I am glad I am learning about her now.
Cartucho was published in 1931. It includes over 50 vignettes describing soldiers and family acquaintances from her perspective — as a young girl surrounded by the war, death, and the chaos of the Mexican Revolution. “Children’s lives, if no one imprisons them, are an uninterrupted film” Campobello writes in My Mother’s Hands, and Cartucho reads almost like a screen play. There are short scenes with subtle enhancements that give you just enough to imagine the rest.
When describing a man in front of their house in the Chapter The Dead Man, Campobello writes:
“Look how yellow he is,” said my sister with a squeal that made me remember Felipe
Reyes.
“He’s really white from the fear of dying,” I said, convinced of my knowledge in the
matters of death.”
One of my favorite sentences is about José Díaz, a neighborhood heart throb who, according to Campobello, is a future love interest of her doll:
“He got bullet wounds so he wouldn’t hate the sun”
On the cotidiana (the everyday):
“No, I never drink water. My whole life, coffee, only coffee. Water tastes bad to me,” he said, learning his throat. … the man who drank coffee all his life.
On fascination with death:
“Guts! How nice! Whose are they?” We said, our curiosity showing in our eyes. “They belong to General Sobarzo,” said the same soldier.
“…blood pouring out of him through many holes”
“That dead man seemed mine.
“That night I went to sleep dreaming they would shoot someone else and hoping it would be next to my house”
On the beauty of death:
“I think his arms fell asleep alongside his rifle after a song of bullets.”
“The cigarette kept on burning between his fingers drained of life.”
“…at least they’ll know that I ended up among the mounds of dirt in this cemetery”
On the realities of war:
Pablito López had ordered some Americans shot one day. “Don’t shoot them,” some
men told him. “Can’t you see they’re Americans?”
The young general, laughing to himself like a boy they were trying to scare, said to
them, “Well, until we know if they’re apples or pears, charge them up to me.”
And then and there the Americans were shot.
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I also found these passages interesting, which are from My Mother’s Hands:
“She was alone; her companion live in her memory”
“Sequins and ears of corn are different. If rain falls from the sky onto sequins, they disintegrate. Grains of corn swell up and offer themselves to empty stomachs…
“They were happy little rags, made with the songs she sent out into he night in memory of her companion!
“For us she ransomed the happiness we owe her today”
“She, the flower to which we clung like bees; we, the ones who drank everything from her and left her nothing.”
“Were the laws of men trying to spoil our world?”
“Men’s law is good as long as the weak have their place within it.”
“She formed us that way. No one who does not give us love can ever give us anything. We shall always be the masters of our footsteps.”
“These people thought with their hearts, judge them accordingly.”
“Life was like that: a bit of information and a man spurring his horse.”
“…not being when you should have been is not to be when there is no need to be.”
“You must do things quickly. That way you don’t feel frightened”
"Poor little machine (referring to the sewing machine) that gave us hems while the cannon gave us dead bodies, lots of dead bodies!”
“…gentle hair on your adorable head. By the clouds that dance under the motion of the sun.”
Poniatowska, in the Introduction of Cartucho, gives us a helpful list of Campobello’s contemporaries of María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Lenora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Lupe Marín, Nahui Olía, María Asúnsolo, and Dolores del Rio — “extraordinary women” from a “Mexico in the process of discovering itself and fascinated by itself and a fascinating other seers”. I’m excited to dig into this list — more thoughts to come!