30 New Mexico – Chicano Writing – Rudolfo Anaya “Tortuga” – December 2015 (Score 7.25)

This is a story of sadness and joy, pain and recovery, crying and laughter with, perhaps, just a touch of the famous Spanish American Magic Realism.

There is, unfortunately, some poor editing with unusual word divisions at the end of lines. For example “as-leep”, the “as being as the end of a line and the “leep” at the beginning of the next. These problems seem to be caused by the unfortunate decision to use start and end line justification of the text. From a university press this is inexcusable.

The story opens with a teenage boy being taken by ambulance from one hospital to another where he is expected to receive better treatment. The boy is telling the story. They are in pouring rain in a desert. A member of the ambulance staff says that he can see Tortuga (Turtle) Mountain which sits above the hospital.

The boy has been paralysed in a dreadful accident, so Filomeno unstraps him and lifts him so that he can see the mountain, while Clepo, his assistant, looks on. Tortuga is a volcano, isolated in the desert. The hospital is on the bank of a river, in Agua Bondita, a spa town in the desert. The waters from the underground streams running from inside the mountain are believed to have healing properties.

Filomeno is a caring person; Clepo is brusque and seems uncaring. It is a private ambulance, a converted hearse owned by Filomeno. He picked up Clepo, lost in the desert, and employs him. Clepo was a patient in the hospital.

The doctor orders a body cast from the boy’s navel to the top of his head, with holes for his face, eyes and ears. He will start work on the legs. He tells the boy that his hands and arms are strong. When the boy is left alone in the room, a patient called Danny comes in and taunts and torments him. He call the boy Tortuga, so that becomes his nickname.

Throughout Tortuga’s first day in the hospital he meets many other people. I recommend that you keep a note of the names so that you can keep track of their interaction with Tortuga.

When he falls asleep he has a very vivid dream. In fact it is so vivid that it could be a vision.

On the morning after the dream Tortuga achieves some movement in his toes, at the same time suffering from a high fever. Danny pays Tortuga another visit. He seems destined to be Tortuga’s nemesis, except that his treatment of Tortuga is not just.

Eventually Tortuga is ready for Physical Therapy. At about the same time on of the patients leaves the hospital at night, through a window, after having told others he wants to go home. When he is discovered to be missing the head surgeon, Dr Steel, leads a search party in the snow and up the mountain. When the rest of the party give up, Steel keeps going and eventually finds the boy frozen to death. He carries the boy down on his back for a funeral.

There is a great celebration when Tortuga has finally improved enough to get a wheelchair, even though he is still in his body cast. Permission is given to take the older patients, including Tortuga, into the town, in snowy icy weather, for a visit to the cinema. “Frankenstein” is showing, with all its obvious connections with their lives and broken bodies being made whole. They love it.

After the film a bunch of college American football players and their girl cheer-leaders start mocking and jeering at the boys from the hospital. A fight started, one-sided because the patients could control their wheelchairs and crutches much better than the bullies could control their feet on the ice. The description was incredible. The patients thumped the bullies. Did I cheer! Unfortunately some of the patients were injured.

I’ll stop describing the action at that point since I don’t want to give away too much.

What I will say is that this is the best Latin American (despite being set in New Mexico) book which I have read during our travels. I scored it at 9/10.