Raised in the magic-touched village of Agustini by her mother and grandmother, where there was often not enough affection but more than enough stories to go around, Delmira Ulloa comes into adulthood with a strong spirit, a wicked humor, and a delightful imagination. Delmira witnesses her mother, a woman given to exhibiting herself indecently from her balcony, engaging in an illicit affair with a priest, and is herself nearly assaulted when two bakers mistake her for her mother, with whom they are presumably intimately ...
Read More
Raised in the magic-touched village of Agustini by her mother and grandmother, where there was often not enough affection but more than enough stories to go around, Delmira Ulloa comes into adulthood with a strong spirit, a wicked humor, and a delightful imagination. Delmira witnesses her mother, a woman given to exhibiting herself indecently from her balcony, engaging in an illicit affair with a priest, and is herself nearly assaulted when two bakers mistake her for her mother, with whom they are presumably intimately acquainted. She listens to her grandmother's stories every night, of the rebels invading her family farm when she was a young girl and threatening to burn her sister's clothing; of the time when the Indians brought the alushes, statues which guarded the doors of their homes, to life, and the mischief they caused; of her sister's husband, the provincial governor, confiscates all the family farms and moves to New Orleans on his ill-gotten gains; of a time when stones turned into water and water into stone, so a fountain became a shower of pebbles landing on a base that had become a puddle. She wonders why she has never met her father and why he is such a secret, and meets a scarf vendor in the market who gives her a foreign telephone number that promises to belong to her father. She marvels at a natural world which is full of apparently supernatural events-electrical storms in which a cow can be burnt to a crisp, her grandmother floating above the bed when she sleeps at night, torrential rains generated by a machine at a traveling fair, an elderly serving woman who develops stigmata, then disappears completely. And as she grows into a woman, Delmira learns to defy the grandmother who attempts to rule her life and determine her allegiances, becoming a miniskirted rebel who refuses to share her grandmother's anti-Indian racism, recognizing her mother's questionable morals, and finally, fatally, casting her own lot on the side of political activism, a decision which costs her her home and sends her into exile.
Read Less
