Resoluciones de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos

Oaxaca, cronicas sonambulas stems, in part, from a brief journey made by Solana Olivares to the place o f his early childhood, made specifically to find material to write a travel- chronicle for the C N C A s e r i e s . 5 During this trip Solana Olivares kept a journal o f his

experiences and impressions:

Es una especie de escritura automatica, muy impresionista que llevo yo haciendo conforme y durante toda esta semana que estoy en la ciudad. Y estoy en la ciudad vagando, yendo a sitios que conocfa, a sitios que no conocia, recordando momentos y escribiendo anotaciones. (Interview)

Y et for the reader o f the Cronicas sonambulas there is precious little evidence o f this personal ‘cuademo de notas’. Certainly the text is about Oaxaca, but what the reader is actually reading is an historical novel set in the town, starting in 1928 and concerning the lives o f a Spaniard, Hermogenes Suarez, proprietor o f a clothes-shop called El Nuevo Mundo, and his life-tim e companions: Catalina Ochoterena M ori, his w ife, and ‘el licenciado’ Zarate, a local lawyer. The narrator takes no part in the action of the novel, and the characters of the novel undertake no journeys in a literal interpretation of the word - the furthest away that Hermogenes and Catalina manage to get from Oaxaca is to Santa Marfa El Tule, about five m iles outside of town.6

A s Solana Olivares recognised in interview, the space o f a week - all the time he had to spare for travelling at the tim e o f the com m ission - was too short a time to create a substantial work o f literature on Oaxaca out o f his personal experiences. Thus he took the work home with him: ‘La escritura lo hago desde aca [la Ciudad de M éxico]; no es una cronica en el sitio, por eso la necesidad de escribir una obra de ficcion ’ (interview). With respect to the travel-chronicle form, he decided to ‘no meter[se] en el género com o tal’ : for travel-writing to have literary value, he feels that a certain distance is necessary, in time, in space, and in terms o f the narrator’s role. Solana Olivares specifically mentioned the works o f Ryszard Kapuscinski as good exam ples o f contemporary travel-writing: Kapuscinski stays long enough in the field to be able to retain something o f a travel- chronicle structure, but he also gives a literary gloss to the works once back at home. In the event Solana Olivares uses characters and a story line which he had already been working on in ‘Lluvia en Monte Alban’ as levers to open up facets o f Oaxacan history and culture, as intermediaries between the historiography he resurrects and his personal impressions. Indeed, there is much o f Solana Olivares’s fam ily history distilled in these

5 Solana Olivares’s father came from a Spanish-orientated family in Oaxaca, his mother from M exico City. He was bom in Mexico City, but the family returned almost immediately to Oaxaca where he lived until age five. After his father’s death, when he was nine, Solana Olivares ceased visiting Oaxaca for many years (interview).

6 The state o f Oaxaca is thus only accessible by other, less literal, means of conveyance. It is arguable, however, that Solana Olivares does attempt to encompass the ‘magic’ of the state o f Oaxaca, rather than Just the town, within the parameters o f his narrative.

characters and their story. On a purely historical level, two members o f the Solana family are mentioned in the book by hearsay. Mateo Solana Lopez, Solana Olivares’s grandfather and a hard-nosed Spanish mill-owner, is worked into the dramatic web o f the first chapter o f the book as a contemporary of Hermogenes. Secondly, mention is made o f Viqui Solana, one of Solana Olivares’s great-aunts who committed suicide in the late 1920s follow ing the execution o f Manuel Garcia V igil with whom she had been having an illicit affair. The local legend o f Viqui Solana’s reappearance as a ghost in El Llano, one o f the parks in Oaxaca, shortly after her death is transmuted in the text into the fictional Catalina’s vision of her contemporary in the same place over thirty years later.

However, Hermogenes, with his involvement in textiles, his Spanish background and his grudging yet gradual adaptation to Oaxacan life, is clearly a mirror-image o f three generations o f Solana Olivares’s fam ily, their fortunes and their attitudes. In the final chapter o f the book Solana Olivares offers the reader excerpts from Herm ogenes’s diary taken from the days shortly before his death, where he sets out to record his impressions of the city for the benefit o f his dead wife. Here, his voice blends directly with that o f Solana Olivares himself; indeed, these are virtually unadulterated excerpts from the journal Solana Olivares kept during his week in the town.7

The journal is also a vehicle used to justify the actual shape of this ‘travel-chronicle’. Some o f Solana Olivares’s qualms about the writing of the text are transposed to a metafictional debate about the relative merits o f fact and fiction:

<^Qué haré para escribir este rompecabezas? Ficcionar, inventar, fantasear, y entrar a saco a lo que ya fue escrito. ^Donde esté registrado el pulse de esta ciudad? <;,C6mo verla? Como algo ajeno, como algo prôximo, com o algo visto por primera vez, com o algo visto una y otra vez. (p. 152)

Se me ocurre que estar aqui no es tanto para acumular datos, impresiones, historias, aunque estos paseos dedicados también sean para eso. Pero quiza el sentido de este cuademo tiene que ver con mi conciencia profunda, con percepciones mâs alia de la razon. (pp. 159-60)

Although this discourse seems a little out o f place at the end o f a narrative which had, until that point, eschew ed metafiction, it is one way in which Solana Olivares contrives to acknowledge the disparity between his text and the text he was commissioned to write.

7 Hermôgenes’s last days which, from the data given in the course of the narrative, must have taken place in the early 1960s obviously do not coincide perfectly with the data given in Solana Olivares’s diary of his visit in 1994. Nevertheless, the spirit of fusion of voices is perhaps what counts here, not factual accuracy.

In fact, Hermogenes is a fictional version of a real friend of Solana Olivares’s grandfather, also called Hermogenes. Catalina and Zârate are more fully fictional characters: Catalina, for instance, stems from Italo Calvino’s description of the lives of Colonial nuns in the Oaxacan Convento de Santa Catalina (in ‘Under the Jaguar Sun’, Under the Jaguar Sun, trans. by William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 3-29).