San Miguel Jardín

by Philip Gambone

How much fun to come across a novel with this opening sentence: "All the benches in the Jardín facing the pink spikes and spires of the Parroquia are already taken by lovers of the morning sun, but you find one set back under the meticulously trimmed and shaped trees you are told are Indian laurels, where you can sit making your way at leisure through Spanish-language newspapers you have bought from the vendor who spreads out a variety of them on the low wall that surrounds the Jardín."

With this opening gambit, veteran writer Anita Desai, who celebrated her 88th birthday this year, introduces us to the second-person narrator of Rosarita. The brief, 96-page book, Desai's twelfth novel, takes up many of the themes she has been exploring throughout her long, distinguished literary career. According to the Indian critic Rajendra Prasad, Desai is a novelist of "the wounded self … dramatized largely in terms of a woman's world." Her female characters are "women who are burdened with the problems they confront in negotiating with a network of familial relations." Although Prasad wrote those words before Rosarita was published, his assessment certainly applies to Desai's latest foray into the world of wounded women.

Anita Desai
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Anita Desai was born in India in 1937 to a German mother and Bengali father. She grew up speaking Hindi, German, Bengali, Urdu and English. At age twenty, she earned a B.A. in English literature from the University of Delhi. A few years later, she made her literary debut with the novel Cry, the Peacock. A host of novels, novellas, short stories and children's books followed. In the 1980s, Desai moved to the U.S., eventually becoming a creative writing teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is now professor emerita. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.

It was during her years in Massachusetts that Desai first went to Mexico. "To escape from a very bitter North American winter," she once told an interviewer. "But the minute I stepped off the plane in a strange country, I felt entirely at home. I thought I had returned to India; the resemblance between the two countries struck me immediately, and I kept returning to Mexico." That love of Mexico is palpable throughout Rosarita.

Flamboyant Mexican style
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In the opening pages, we meet Bonita, an Indian woman who has come to San Miguel to study Spanish and to explore a town so foreign that it "promised to be free of any ties to your past and your origins." As she sits in the Jardín, Bonita notices a woman "dressed in the flamboyant Mexican style that few Mexican women assume at any other than festive occasions," her eyes "theatrically outlined," paying Bonita "ferocious attention." Suddenly, the woman approaches: "Of course you are, you must be, my adored Rosarita's little girl. You are the image of her when she first came to us, an Oriental bird!"

The strange woman says she knew Bonita's mother many years ago when Rosarita came to San Miguel to paint. Fearful and suspicious, Bonita insists her mother was never in Mexico and was not a painter. But the disquieting story unlocks the memory of a sketch—"in wishy-washy pale pastels"—of a woman seated on a park bench that used to hang on the wall of Bonita's bedroom back in India. Yes, Bonita thinks, that painting could have been done in San Miguel.

Rosarita
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Other repressed memories begin to surface: of a time when her mother was mysteriously absent and she was taken to live with her grandparents; of a dominant and domineering father; of the possibility of a mismatch in her parents' marriage. The Stranger in the Jardín has awakened questions that begin to rattle the safe, insulated world Bonita has built for herself.

She imagines a scene in which, many years earlier, her mother attended a lecture on art at the Mexican embassy in New Delhi. Two art critics, one Mexican, one Indian, show slides of artwork inspired by historical events—the Mexican Revolution and the Indian equivalent, the bloody partition of the country at the end of the British Raj. She imagines her mother's shocked confrontation with scene after scene of carnage: "Wounds, mutilations thrust in the faces of those who survive to declare: this is Man, intrinsically, this is his history: look!"

Indian refugees during the Partition
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Further conjectures begin to trouble her: perhaps a gruesome history that her family kept secret, their flight from Pakistan to India. "Why had it never been permitted to mention her family, its history?" Could it be that her mother did decide to travel to Mexico to study Mexican art as a way to confront, in a kind of solidarity with the Mexicans, her own horrific past? Bonita becomes "on fire … to uncover the truth."

The Stranger tells Bonita that her mother studied with a maestro. "Sometimes a studio in Bellas Artes, sometimes one in the Instituto Allende. Here, there, and then she left" to help found an artists' commune somewhere out in the campo. Is this a cockamamie fabrication or evidence that her mother actually succeeded for a while in breaking away from the repressive, well-regulated life of household management and obligatory parties that was an upper-class woman's lot in India?

Painting class Instituto Allende
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In the second half of the novel, Bonita travels with the Stranger to other locales where her mother supposedly studied and painted. The journey becomes a quest for a "revelation": who exactly was her mother? Who was this family Bonita has never fully known? And why does the Stranger, whom she increasingly thinks of as the Trickster, evade her probing questions?

They fly to Colima, to the Trickster's family home, where Bonita's mother purportedly spent time. How, Bonita wonders, could her mother not have left any clue that she was ever here? After a night of ghoulish unrest during which the Trickster is visited by fantasmas and espectros (Desai having some fun, I think, with the tropes of the Gothic novel), Bonita leaves the haunted palazzo, wondering again if there isn't a "fragment of truth" in all this mystery and madness.

La Manzanilla
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She moves on to La Manzanilla—a town "free of ghosts, of phantoms"—on the Pacific Ocean, where she meets a group of artists, people who have "turned their backs on the worlds of their past." Intrigued at first, Bonita drifts away from them as their talk turns increasingly to nothing but superficial chatter about expensive weekends and luxury cruise ships.

For me, the final pages of Rosarita are the least successful part of this otherwise fine novel. It feels as if Desai is merely treading water here, not moving the plot beyond the initial "cat's cradle of improbable connection." Bonita remains stuck with the same questions: Who was this mother whose funeral cremation back in India she never attended; why did mother and daughter "shed" each other? The final sentence—"You have come as far as you can, you tell yourself: you can go no further"—feels more like Desai's announcement that she has lost her way than Bonita's stumbling upon some sort of tame, inconclusive epiphany.

Ice cream vendor
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Nevertheless, there is much to admire in Rosarita. Desai's expertise at sketching a picture with an economy of words shines throughout. San Miguel's Parroquia is an "imperturbable silhouette." The town's "ice-cream barrows … offer flavours you had not known existed—chili, tequila, tamarindo, elote." And then there's the "dazzle of morning light reflected in the water splashed across the pink paving stones by industrious maids up and down the streets and still smelling freshly of soapsuds." I know that smell!

Like the painting that Bonita remembers from her childhood, Rosarita is a delicate, muted pastel of a novel. Maybe not Desai's greatest triumph, but an engaging piece of fiction. After reading it, you may never again be able to sit in the Jardín and not wonder who may be watching you with ferocious attention, eager to exclaim, "Of course you are, you must be!"

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. For over a decade, his book reviews appeared regularly in The New York Times. Phil is the author of seven books. His memoir, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, was published last year by Rattling Good Yarns Press. His books are available through Amazon and at "Tesoros," the bookshop at the Biblioteca.

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