Tortuga

by Rudolfo Anaya

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  Praise for the Writing of Rudolfo Anaya

  “An extraordinary storyteller.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “One of the nation’s foremost Chicano literary artists.” —The Denver Post

  “[Anaya’s work] is better called not the new multicultural writing, but the new American writing.” —Newsweek

  “One of the best writers in the country.” —El Paso Times

  “The godfather and guru of Chicano literature.” —Tony Hillerman, author of The Blessing Way

  “Poet of the barrio … the most widely read Mexican-American.” —Newsweek

  Alburquerque

  Winner of PEN Center West Award for Fiction

  “Alburquerque is a rich and tempestuous book, full of love and compassion, the complex and exciting skullduggery of politics, and the age-old quest for roots, identity, family … There is a marvelous tapestry of interwoven myth and magic that guides Anaya’s characters’ sensibilities, and is equally important in defining their feel of place. Above all, in this novel is a deep caring for land culture and for the spiritual well-being of people, environment, landscape.” —John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War: A Novel

  “Alburquerque portrays a quest for knowledge.… [It] is a novel about many cultures intersecting at an urban, power- and politics-filled crossroads, represented by a powerful white businessman, whose mother just happens to be a Jew who has hidden her Jewishness … and a boy from the barrio who fathers a child raised in the barrio but who eventually goes on to a triumphant assertion of his cross-cultural self.” —World Literature Today

  “Alburquerque fulfills two important functions: it restores the missing R to the name of the city, and it shows off Anaya’s powers as a novelist.” —National Public Radio

  “Anaya is at his visionary best in creating magical realist moments that connect people with one another and the earth.” —The Review of Contemporary Fiction

  “Anaya’s prowess shows through on every page.… Thumbs up.” —ABQ Arts

  Tortuga

  Winner of the American Book Award

  “A compelling story of a young man who suffers and learns to make peace with who he is, Tortuga has that touch of magic, of fantastical characters, of dreams as real as sunlight, associated with the best of Chicano literature.” —Roundup Magazine

  “Tortuga is one those rare works that speaks to the human condition across time and space, and it well-deserves to find a new generation of readers.” —Southwest BookViews

  “A highly emotional tale of a young soul who turned from a turtle into a human all in the span of 200 pages.” —Reviewers of Young Adult Literature

  My Land Sings

  Winner of the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award

  “Rich in traditional Mexican and native American folklore. Every story spins its magic effectively.” —Booklist

  “Haunting. Compelling twists will keep the pages turning.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Anaya champions the reading of a good book or listening to a folktale as an opportunity to insert one’s own experiences into the story and, hence, to nurture the imagination. This appealing volume will add diversity to folklore collections.” —Booklist

  “The wide variety of stories demonstrate a mature understanding of life’s trappings and dangers, but retain a healthy sense of humor about the human predicament.” —Kirkus Reviews

  Serafina’s Stories

  “[Serafina’s] stories are simple but vivid.… There is magic and mystery too.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Anaya’s prose offers … purity. [Serafina’s Stories] will restore to all but the most jaded reader a necessary sense of wonder.” —National Public Radio

  “Like Serafina, Anaya is a powerful storyteller whose cuentos and other writings are a balm for the soul.” —New Mexico Magazine

  “It is not hard to predict that Serafina’s story will be hypnotic and entertain.… With Serafina’s Stories Anaya again reminds us of the importance of maintaining an oral tradition.” —San Antonio Express-News

  “Rudolfo Anaya is both a wise man and a gifted storyteller. Serafina’s Stories [is] a series of engaging tales.” —Santa Fe New Mexican

  “Anaya’s new book is a spellbinding account of a Native American woman who spins tales to enlighten the Spanish governor into setting her people free. Clearly conceived, Serafina’s Stories contains 12 folk tales that are as absorbing as the main plot.” —El Paso Times

  Heart of Aztlan

  “In Heart of Aztlan, a prose writer with the soul of poet, and a dedication to his calling that only the greatest artists ever sustain, is on an important track, the right one, the only one.” —La Confluencia

  “[Heart of Aztlan gives] a vivid sense of Chicano life since World War II.” —World Literature Today

  “Mixed with the Native American legends and Hispanic traditions of this wonderful book are the basic human motivations that touch all cultures. It is a rip-roaring good read.” —Cibola Beacon

  Jalamanta

  “A parable for our time … We are in deep need of simple truths, of rediscovering our ancient teachings, and Jalamanta may provide that opportunity.” —The Washington Post Book World

  Zia Summer

  “A compelling thriller … Though satisfying purely as a mystery, the novel sacrifices none of Anaya’s trademark spirituality—a connectedness to the earth and a deep-seated respect for the traditions of a people and a culture.… Read this multicultural novel for its rich language and full-bodied characters. Anaya is one of our greatest storytellers, and Zia Summer is muy caliente!” —Booklist

  “[Anaya] continues to shine brightest with his trademark alchemy: blending Spanish, Mexican, and Indian cultures to evoke the distinctively fecund spiritual terrain of his part of the Southwest.” —Publishers Weekly

  Rio Grande Fall

  “This is a completely entertaining mystery novel, but Anaya offers two parallel lands of enchantment. One is temporal New Mexico; the other is Nuevo Mexicano, a land of santos, milagros, spirits, visions, and even brujas (witches).” —Booklist

  Shaman Winter

  “Be aware that if you only skate on the surface, you will miss the depth of the story. You have to dive head-first, literally, into the waves of poetic prose to catch a glimpse of the forces that keep our universe together.” —La Voz

  “The fast-paced story line of Shaman Winter is fascinating and absolutely eerie as the master paints a vivid picture of the spirituality of another culture.” —Thrilling Detective

  Jemez Spring

  “Jemez Spring is meant to appeal to readers of conventional mystery novels, but there is nothing conventional about it.… It taps into primal and universal fears and longings but plays them out in a uniquely New Mexican setting. And the master tells his tales with worlds and images so rich and strange that it is almost as if he had invented a language of his own.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Jemez Spring again blends the Spanish, Mexican, and Indian cultures that made the three earlier works in the series such good reads. Anaya is at his best when writing about the people of New Mexico, their traditions and their lives and how they clash with the influx of Anglos.” —San Antonio Express-News

  “Anaya takes the reader beyond detective fiction.… His mysteries fall into the criminal and the spiritual, which makes them both inspiring and electrifying.” —St. Petersburg Times

  “Unique and exciting … Readers thirsty for philosophy and the supernatural will devour this book.” —Daily Camera (Boulder)

  “Anaya,
godfather and guru of Chicano literature, proves he’s just as good in the murder mystery field.” —Tony Hillerman, author of The Blessing Way

  Tortuga

  A Novel

  Rudolfo Anaya

  Dedicated with love to my wife, Patricia.

  She walks the path of the sun.

  She sings the songs of the moon.

  1

  I awoke from a restless sleep. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was, then I heard Filomón and Clepo talking up front and I felt the wind sway the old ambulance. I tried to turn my body, but it was impossible. Upon waking it was always the same; I tried to move but the paralysis held me firmly in its grip.

  I could turn my head and look out the small window. The cold winter rain was still falling. It had been only a gray drizzle when we left the hospital, but the farther south we went into the desert the sheets of icy rain became more intense. For a great part of the trip we had been surrounded by darkness. Only the flashes of lightning which tore through the sky illuminated the desolate landscape.

  I had slept most of the way; the rain drumming against the ambulance and the rumble of the distant thunder lulled me to sleep. Now I blinked my eyes and remembered that we had left at daybreak, and Filomón had said that it would be mid-afternoon before we arrived at the new hospital.

  Your new home, he had said.

  Home. Up north, at home, it would be snowing, but here it was only the dark, dismal rain which swept across the wide desert and covered us with its darkness. I tried to turn again, but the paralysis compounded by the bone-chilling cold held me. I cursed silently.

  “It’s never been this dark before,” I heard Clepo whisper.

  “Don’t worry,” Filomón answered, “it’ll get better before it gets worse. You have to know the desert to know rain don’t last. It can be raining one minute and blowing dust devils the next. But the clouds are beginning to break, see, to the west.”

  I turned my head and looked out the window. In the distance I could see the bare outline of a mountain range. Around us the desert was alkaline and white. Only the most tenacious shrubs and brittle grasses seemed to grow, clinging to the harsh land like tufts of mouldy hair. Overhead, the sun struggled to break through the clouds. To the east, a diffused, distorted rainbow stretched across the vast, gray sky.

  I remembered the rainbows of my childhood, beautifully sculptured arches reaching from north to south, shafts of light so pure their harmony seemed to wed the sky and earth. My mother had taught me to look at rainbows, the mantle of the Blessed Virgin Mary she called them. When a summer thunderstorm passed she would take me out and we would stand in the thin drops which followed the storm. We would turn our faces up to the sky, and the large, glistening drops of rain would pelt our faces. She would open her mouth and hold out her tongue to receive the large, golden drops. She would stir the muddy ponds and pick up the little frogs which came with the rain. “They are like you,” she told me, “blessed by the rain, children of the water.” When I was hurt she would take me in her arms and sing.…

  Sana, sana

  colita de rana

  Si no sanas hoy

  sanarás mañana …

  And her touch could drive away the worst of pains. But then the paralysis had come, and suddenly her prayers and her touch were not enough. Her face grew pale and thin, her eyes grew dark. “It is God’s will,” she had said.

  “It’s clearing now,” Filomón said, “see, the sun is beginning to break through!”

  “Yes, the sun!” Clepo shouted. He was Filomón’s assistant, a small impish man with hunched shoulders. I noticed he limped when they loaded me on the ambulance.

  “I think I see the top of the mountain!” Filomón cried cheerfully.

  I was fully awake. The last images of the dreams faded as the darkness of the rain moved over us and eastward. Only occasional peals of thunder rumbled across the sky. Beneath us the ambulance rocked like a ship. Memories of my life moved in and out of my troubled consciousness. My mother’s face appeared again and again. She had cried when they loaded me on the ambulance, but she knew it was necessary. The doctors there had helped as much as they could. Now, they insisted, they had to move me to this new hospital in the south where they specialized in taking care of crippled children. If there was any hope of regaining the use of my stiff limbs, it was there. So early in the morning they wheeled me on a gurney to the outpatient area, loaded me onto Filomón’s ambulance and the journey began.

  “There!” Filomón shouted again, “There’s the mountain!”

  I tried to turn my head to see, but I couldn’t. “What mountain?” I asked.

  “Tortuga Mountain,” he said and looked back, “it’s right by the hospital. Don’t worry, I’ll stop so you can see it.” He sounded happy, revived, after the long, monotonous drive across the desert. I felt a sense of urgency as he pulled the ambulance onto the shoulder of the road. We bounced along until he found the right spot, then he stopped the ambulance and turned off the motor. He climbed over the seat to where I lay strapped on the small cot.

  “Ah, Filo,” Clepo grumbled, “you’ve stopped here every time we bring a new kid. Don’t you ever get tired of showing them that damned mountain?”

  “It’s always a new kid,” Filomón smiled as he loosened the straps that held me, “and each kid deserves to see the mountain from here. I want the boy to see it.”

  Filomón was an old man with a deep wrinkled face and rough, calloused hands, but he moved like a younger man as he lifted me tenderly so I could look out the window and see the mountain.

  “There it is,” he nodded, “that’s Tortuga.” His eyes sparkled as he looked at the volcanic mountain that loomed over the otherwise empty desert. It rose so magically into the gray sky that it seemed to hold the heavens and the earth together. It lay just east of the river valley, and the afternoon sun shining on it after the rain covered it with a sheen of silver.

  “It’s a magic mountain,” Filomón whispered, and I felt his heart beating against me as he held me. “See!” he whispered, “See!” I tried to see beyond the volcanic slabs and granite boulders which formed the outline of a turtle, I tried to sense the steady rhythm of his pulse which seemed to be draining into the giant mountain, but I couldn’t. I was too tired, and my faith in magic had drained out the night the paralysis came and in the ensuing nights and days which I spent without movement on the hospital bed.

  I shook my head.

  “That’s okay,” he smiled, “it comes slowly sometimes. But now at least you know it’s there—” He seemed very tired. It had been a long trip for him too. He had had to keep the ambulance on course through one of the worst storms I could remember. But now we were almost there.

  “Where’s the hospital?” I asked.

  “It’s on this side of the river, you can’t see it from here. See the smoke rising in the valley? That’s Agua Bendita. It’s a small town, but people come from all over to bathe in the mineral waters from the springs which drain from the mountain—”

  “It’s a town full of old arthritics,” Clepo giggled, “old people who think they can escape the pains of old age by dipping themselves in the mountain’s water, but they can’t run fast enough from death!” He slapped his thigh and laughed.

  Filomón didn’t answer. He sat beside the cot and looked out the window into the desert. “Even as terrible as the storm was for us, it will be good for the plants in the spring. After a good, wet winter the desert blooms like a garden,” he nodded and rolled a cigarette. There was something about the way he spoke, the strength of his face, that reminded me of someone I had known—my grandfather perhaps, but I hadn’t thought of him in years.

  “These old villages cling to the river like the beads of a rosary,” he continued, thinking aloud.

  “Whoever crosses this desert has a lot of praying to do,” Clepo agreed, “it’s a journey of death.”

  “No, a journey of life. Our forefathers have wandered up and down this river val
ley for a long, long time. First the Indians roamed up and down this river, then others came, but they all stopped here at this same place: the springs of Tortuga, the place of the healing water—”

  He talked and smoked. The dull sun shone through the window and played on the swirling smoke. I was fully awake now, but I felt feverish, and I couldn’t help wondering what a strange day it had been to ride all this way with the old man and his assistant. I shivered, but not from the cold. The inside of the ambulance was now stifling. It glowed with white smoke and golden light which poured through the window. Filomón’s eyes shone.

  “How long have you been bringing kids to the hospital?” I asked.

  “As long as I can remember,” Filomón answered. “I bought this old hearse in a junk yard and I fixed it up like an ambulance. I’ve been transporting kids ever since.”

  “We get thirty dollars a kid, dead or alive,” Clepo laughed. “And we get to hear a lot of interesting stories. We’ve taken every kind of diseased body there is to the hospital. Why, Filo and I could become doctors if we wanted to, couldn’t we Filo? But we don’t know anything about you. You slept most of the way.” He leaned over the seat and peered at me.

  “He’s tired,” Filomón said.

  “Yeah, but he’s awake now,” Clepo grinned. “So how did he get crippled? I know it ain’t polio, I know polio. And how come his left hand is bandaged, huh? There’s quite a story there, but he hasn’t said a word!”

  He seemed put out that I had slept most of the way and had not told the story of my past. But since the paralysis the past didn’t matter. It was as if everything had died, except the dreams and the memories which kept haunting me. And even those were useless against the terrible weight which had fallen over me and which I cursed until I could curse no more.

  “Do you take the kids back?” I asked.

  “No, we don’t!” Clepo said, “That’s against the rules!”

  “I picked you up,” Filomón reminded him.